Capital One

Great pay, benefits, and work-life balance.

In the right organizations, there are no shortage of decent to good engineers.

Things are often built "bottom-up" rather than "top-down." This leads to questionable design choices due to a lack of clarity on who the product is catering to, as well as a more "car salesman" approach to finding clients after the fact. This can also result in multiple vision changes throughout a product's lifecycle, with poor handling of transitioning employees to the new vision.

Often, multiple teams (sometimes even in the same organization) are building the same wheel slightly differently. I believe the (naive) idea behind this is letting the best wheel win, but in actuality, it leads to aggressive politicking and oftentimes the best-engineered solution loses to the best-marketed solution.

Results are often prioritized without enough regard to software discipline and addressing of tech debt. Additionally, things are built without thought of who will manage the built things, which results in haphazard support in many areas of the company.

The hardest part of my job is often finding the right documentation and/or people that are in charge of my product's dependencies.

Stack ranking in high-performing teams leads to a miserable time for management and their reports.

It becomes a game of which people leader can aggressively hawk their team/product better than their peers.

In attempting to build a platform company, adopt more senior engineers who have experience:

• Building a platform
• Understanding the problems they are solving for their clients rather than assigning massive design tasks to relatively fresh engineers who, although talented, are lacking in their sight.

Stop building things bottom-up, and stop building the same thing in every organization.

When attempting to consolidate platforms, hire unbiased engineers/product who can objectively work horizontally with enough influence to find the best means of integration.

People will fight tooth and nail for their work, but this is bad for platform consolidation, and someone needs to be able to drop the hammer at the end of the day.