Capital One

As an early adopter, c1 was all-in on AWS, investing heavily in tech and cloud. It likes to hustle and jumps on tech trends or fads, imagining and claiming itself as a tech company in the bank business. However, it's no exception to Conway's Law. Biz Bozos at all levels are still in control.

There is no genuine tech leadership from the highest levels.

• The whole company took a siloed approach to build redundant systems by copying software from one LOB to another.
• After so many years adopting AWS, the cloud CI/CD pipelines have poor quality. A build or deployment that worked last week might break due to constantly changing CI/CD processes. You'll be lucky if you can release a simple bug fix to production in a few days through CI/CD.
• Poor-quality software has been and continues to be developed across all teams. Under pressure, developers have resorted to cheating code coverage tests—running them against dummy code while skipping real functional code.
• The longer you work at the company, the less marketable your tech skills become. Most of your time will be spent deciphering proprietary processes and rules created by others rather than building relevant technical expertise.
• From all levels of senior tech resources, including senior tech leads and distinguished engineers at the company, their abilities to have a deep understanding of relevant technologies, then create suitable solutions are limited. For example, to enable zero-trust, everyone of the thousands of apps/microservices needs to stash its credentials in Vault and rotate them frequently. What kind of incompetent designed this?!

If C1 wants to be a true tech company, it needs to adopt the culture of real tech companies.

Stop rewarding superficial work and dishonest practices.