Capital One

Genuinely really great and talented people working here, and the intended work-life balance is pretty good. I say intended for a reason, though.

It's been said a thousand times: the performance review here is terrible. It encourages you to not help your teammates because their success is necessarily your loss, and their loss is your gain. I know people try to ignore that aspect, but when it gets close to that review period, there is a distinct increase in wait time to get PR reviews and a large decrease in help from teammates.

It's a terrible incentive structure and absolutely hurts team morale and cooperation. Plus, it destroys any semblance of the work-life balance Capital One professes to have.

You need to be better. Your managers will tell you to get off at 5, but everyone knows that at the end of the day, you work as much as it takes to do better than your teammates. It's a dog-eat-dog culture, and nobody likes it.

As an aside, don't plan on working your way up here. Getting promotions is a real bear of a task, and your work-life balance is going to get so much worse in order to get there.

Seriously, stop the stacked ranking. Turnover only makes your workforce less efficient. Having experienced programmers is valuable.