Capital One

They will pay for your AWS certification.

I had an awful experience at Capital One. Even before I joined the company, it took three months after I heard I passed the interview to get an offer. After that, I was concerned about the leveling on the offer letter being different than what I applied for. The recruiter lied to me and told me that the leveling was the same as what I applied for, all while shaming me for questioning them about it. I later learned after I joined about this discrepancy, and it really put a bad taste in my mouth, making me want to leave.

Onboarding was very lackluster. Only a couple people reached out during my first few weeks to ask if I needed help or to introduce themselves, and I was given no training for new engineers. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if the documentation was good. However, documentation is very bad at the company as a whole. A lot of things that need documentation don't have it already, and the things that do have documentation have really vague or outdated information. To make matters worse, there are a lot of links to where documentation should be, and so many links are broken due to different wikis being changed. This is incredibly frustrating as a new engineer because you need to ask someone for help for pretty much everything. That wouldn't be an issue, except it can be very difficult to get a response from people. If you do get a response, people tend to be rude and will assume you're doing something wrong before actually answering the question you asked.

I also really disliked the work I was doing, which primarily involved fixing some really bad code that previous engineers had written. I have never seen such badly written code in a professional environment, and I was very surprised by the low standards. A lot of time was wasted in awkward meetings where nobody says anything, and one person shares their screen while trying to debug an issue.

If that all isn't bad enough, the forced distribution performance reviews are incredibly stressful, and you have very little control over how you will get rated. Everything is appearance-based, and you have to basically brag about yourself constantly if you want to get better than a "Strong" rating. I found that a lot of things were done just to make my team look better even if they were counterproductive or didn't make sense.

A lot of reviews I read before I joined said that the work-life balance here was good, but that was not true on my team. There were several instances of working multiple 12+ hour days in a week to meet some arbitrary deadline set to make the team (and manager) look better. The forced distribution rating system makes it so it's difficult for an individual to decline working late when all your teammates are acting like they are okay with it because otherwise, you'd just get thrown under the bus during reviews.

Overall, I had a terrible time being employed by Capital One. I started interviewing for other companies before I had even been at the company for a year because I hated it so much.

Please get rid of stack ranking and forced distribution.

It is creating such a toxic culture.