Capital One

• Competitive pay, bonuses, ESPP matching, stock options.
• Great experience working with leading-edge technology.
• Support for upskilling and cross-training.
• Steady supply of swag (I have more T-shirts and tote bags than I could ever use).
• Full benefits, cheap drugs, subsidized medical care on site.
• Free smartphone (though Big Brother is always watching).
• Hybrid work environment.
• Subsidized food in the cafeteria.
• When they lay you off, they treat you well.

Let’s start with the piece that everyone hates -- performance management. Every year, you are stack-ranked against your peers during a series of cage matches called “cross cals.” Your manager represents you at these bloodbaths, which means your fate is entirely in his or her hands. If your manager can’t or won’t defend you, you are screwed.

Managers then put every associate into buckets. The top buckets get promoted; the bottom buckets get pushed out of the company. Absurdly, you can’t count people who left voluntarily in this distribution. Since this forced attrition happens every year, the longer you are in the company, the more the odds will stack against you. One bad year or one bad manager and you are out.

This of course creates a hyper-competitive environment and a strong incentive to bring people into your group as sacrificial lambs, as well as promoting office politics over technical achievement. Also, end-of-year reviews are due in October, and mid-year reviews happen in July, so if there was a problem with your performance in those intervening three months, it’s too late to fix it. But you won’t hear anything about it until January anyway.

EOY reviews are always a late Christmas present. You get three months of annual anxiety to enjoy over the holidays.

If the cross cals don’t get you, there is a good chance layoffs will. C1 is constantly laying people off. This is usually done quietly, though occasional mass layoffs tend to make the news, like when they laid off over a thousand Agile leaders last year. This included recent hires, some of whom had relocated. After building up their Agile program for years, they suddenly killed it with no real explanation.

However, abrupt changes of direction are common here since VPs come and go every six months. The company does pay generous severance, though.

Another issue is diversity. I was in a cross cals meeting where we had to choose between two people to promote. The director left the room and told us he wanted a decision by the time he got back. As he was leaving, he said, “Just pointing out that one of them is a woman.” One of them was indeed female.

A year later, at a hiring meeting, we had to decide between two candidates. One was male and one was female. The director (a different one) said to us, “Remember that Capital One needs to hire more women.”

Me, I love diversity in all forms. Diversity is especially vital in a company, but it needs to be encouraged, not forced. Forcing it leads to self-doubt in the candidate and resentment in everyone else.

A downside for technologists is you must use internal services for security reasons, and there are hundreds of them. They are all homegrown. This means you become an expert in things that no one outside the company has heard of. They are almost always based on open source or third-party technology, so there is that. And you will get a lot of AWS experience.

In summary, it’s a great place to work, but don’t get comfortable. There is a high turnover here, and that is on purpose. You are working for a company that is constantly looking for a reason to get rid of you. Keep your eyes open and your resume warm.

Get rid of stack ranking. It creates a hyper-competitive environment and promotes office politics over technical achievement.