Capital One

Great benefits, including 401k unmatched and matched. Lots of holidays, including bank holidays, an annual bonus, vacation buy-in, flexible hours, and good snacks and coffee.

The culture tries to be employee-centered and practice good ethics. Compensation is good but not great.

The San Francisco location is really noisy: high ceilings and wide open spaces make it an echo chamber. There are small rooms along the edge where employees may sequester themselves, but those rooms are always full.

Decentralized management and weak Scrum Masters results in lots of bullying in the scrum.

The company decided all software developers are engineers, so QA engineers are expected to become full-stack developers. But there is no plan or support that allows the transition, other than spending 20 hours/week outside of work to attend community college or take courses through Lynda.com.

Traditional developers are balking at doing real QA, so quality suffers.

Women are encouraged to participate in numerous conferences and conventions for women in tech, while the men stay at the office and work. As a result, the guys gain more experience and deliver more output in the same period.

In the bigger picture, more new hires that are men are moving on to higher paying jobs.

The company's emphasis on diversity is at the expense of productivity.

High achievers are not rewarded in the first few years out of college.

"Diverse" groups with little background in software development receive a small amount of training and are made into Scrum Masters, and many look like deer in the headlights.

Re-think the decree that all developers wear all hats. Have managers create a path for that to happen.