Capital One

The company can still get things done when upper management deems it necessary and throws people together to make it happen. When the pandemic started, there were lots of such initiatives to make it easier for customers and employees.

• Good work/life balance
• Great 401k match and benefits
• Great place to learn about AWS tech
• The company really values customer feedback and tries to do right by them.

RSUs are only for master software engineers and above. The CEO likes to include C1 in the ranks of Netflix, Amazon, and other companies that have crossed the digital canyon, but the compensation structure is nowhere near them.

It's extremely tough to get promoted unless you are willing to spend 50% of your time networking with other teams and know all the right people. The bar for promotion keeps raising every cycle, even though managers promise you are next in line.

Recruiters constantly try to down-level qualified candidates and convince them that they should be promoted within six months, which sadly never happens.

The CTO launched the TDP program to get new college grads into C1 and give them the best training among employee groups. TDPs get the plum assignments and get promoted faster than people who came through regular channels. But TDPs use the time to brush up on LeetCode skills and move on to bigger tech companies. As a way to stop such churn, the CTO seems to have asked managers to promote them even faster :eyeroll:

New people managers leave within 6-10 months since they get sick of the games they have to play to get their employees promoted. Old-timers can play the cross-calibration games that are used to stack-rank employees better than newbies.

Even though lots of companies have abandoned stack-ranking, C1 seems intent on making it work. Out of 74 possible candidates for a job category in the last cycle, only 4 got promoted, supposedly due to stack ranking. This leads to a lot of good engineers leaving for better pay. If you are interviewing for a position, ask the recruiter for the list of people promoted in the last cycle. The shortness of the list should help you decide if you want to play the game.

Every team has 30-40% contractors, and their talent level has dropped considerably during the pandemic. Full-time engineers spend a lot of time coaching these contractors in addition to their regular work. Managers seem unwilling to remediate the situation, since it's tough to get any contractors in the first place.

C1 uses data for almost all decisions. So the cons that I have listed above should not be news for management. Managers seem to have decided that getting a constant stream of TDPs and low-cost contractors will be enough to maintain the systems.

But, I would like for them to think about Dec 2021, when the log4j issue forced a VP and several Directors to work in a war room (Zoom session for 2-3 days) to ensure that only four apps get built at a time in the homemade build pipeline, since the containers were crashing otherwise. This was for an issue where the whole world knew the fix. Imagine what happens if a truly complicated issue without known fixes comes along.

Having the best cloud resources amounts to nothing if there aren't long-tenured engineers who are willing to learn about the company's systems and constantly enhance them without getting worried about stack ranking.