Capital One

A lot of non-technical work. Office politics is heavy here, and backstabbing to get ahead is a real thing. If you're a sociopath or a manipulator, you'd do great here.

The bureaucracy and leadership team don't listen to employee feedback. There's tons of hypocrisy around.

Arbitrary OKRs and KPIs are used to make the leadership team look better, with high quotas for PIP/forced arbitration biannually.

There's a lot of hypocrisy in management. As lower-level associates, we're encouraged to "question the norm." But when we question any management decisions, the justification is always, "That's just what leadership wants, and it would be best if we just go along with it."

How can you encourage associates at the bottom rungs of the ladder to question our processes if you don't do it yourself? Management keeps leaving for greener pastures, and we keep backfilling ex-Amazon execs who come in wanting to make a big show. Why doesn't anyone in management question their decision-making?

Has it ever occurred to you that they may be bringing in a culture that promotes "gaming the system" via OKRs and KPIs? Trying to metricize everything that they see, so that it appears that they bring value, even though it wastes our time generating those metrics?

The PIP system is an even bigger mess. Trust me when I say this: there is way more bloat in the leadership team than there are engineers, yet we are firing like crazy down here.

We're forced to reallocate our engineering capacity to generating metrics that leadership defines to make leadership look good, then we cut engineers because we have to meet the quota. Do you see the lack of checks and balances here?