Capital One

Treat this place as a university. Learn new technologies to put on your resume and use this place as your stepping stone.

1. Work pressure. No work-life balance.

Managers tell you that you should not work after 5 PM. But on the other hand, you have unrealistic deadlines. Agile is out of the picture. Work is taken in chunks and divided into sprints. The PO says, “We have to deliver this in this many sprints.”

In office hours, we have tons of meetings and no room for actual work. This leaves no choice, and you end up working from home after office hours.

1. Office politics – corruption, bias, favoritism at its peak.

2. Incompetent managers and peers who are waiting for you to finish your work and then steal it and showcase it as their own piece of art. After work is done, the manager will say you didn’t do anything great; you are hired to do this. Everyone else is doing the same. What are you doing extra??

3. No freedom to be yourself – just pretend you like Capital One in front of your manager.

4. Teamwork vs. individual performance management – all year, mobbing is enforced, and people who want to take up something on their own are blamed in retrospectives. At the end of the year, no one knows who did the actual work. Only the manager's favorite guy gets the promotion. The least favorite might even end up losing their job.

5. Idiotic meetings – two hours of useless meetings to come up with some points on blah blah, which is not helpful in any actual work.

Please stop convincing us that this is a tech company. This is not a tech company. When I joined Capital One, I was told this is a tech company. But I see this is a corrupt workplace with corrupt people, and only people who are good at politics are happy.

Others are leaving, or they are here because they don’t have any other option, but they are unhappy and depressed.