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Toxic Politics, Awful Management

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Capital One for 2 years
September 22, 2025
Richmond, Virginia
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros
  • Good salary for the area, although not good enough for the toxicity.
  • Decent tech/experience.
Cons

Talent is pretty mediocre. Some of the people are awful engineers, not very bright people, but as widely established, performance management is less about how good you are and more about politics.

Performance management is a subjective mess twice a year. You will constantly worry about potentially not having a job in 3-4 months.

You have to go through a 2-4 week review process for any changes you want to make. It’s an engineer’s nightmare come true, even for the most simple changes.

"Eliminate arbitrary uniqueness." So let’s create 20 enterprise platforms that barely work, are non-deterministic, and make it where engineers are bottlenecked by the platform team as opposed to using open-sourced, widely adopted industry tools that people can find support for online. Nice job, tech leadership. What a stupid idea.

Advice to Management
  • Stop the platform madness. Creating undocumented, glorified wrappers that add an additional layer of ambiguity.

  • Stack ranking. Cut it out.

  • Hire and keep better talent.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
2.0
Culture and Values
1.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
1.0
Career Opportunities
2.0
Compensation and Benefits
3.0
Senior Management
1.0

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