Capital One

You don’t have to work here.

Decent severance typically.

Not as bad for ICs.

An absolutely toxic performance management process. All engineers are ranked from best to worst, with the bottom 10-20% being given PIPs. This results in all kinds of negative and counterproductive behaviors:

• Employees who create problems and then performatively solve them.
• Engineers who never complete projects because they get "credit" at review time for them and move on to cause more problems.
• Teams that cling to unnecessary functionality to assert their importance.
• Stacks and stacks of "standards" and "audits" created by managers trying to assert their importance.
• Any sufficiently visible project will get dogpiled by people trying their best to feed their family and not get fired.

There is no real leadership in technology because no one is ever accountable for things. Accountability is a negative thing here; if people can think of any mistake during calibration, you're toast.

Managers are being forced to write performance reviews they disagree with, like a PIP for getting your AWS certificate a few weeks after the others at your level, or a PIP because you delivered less results in the quarter that you gave birth to a child.

Stop stack ranking; all the criticisms of it are accurate.

Demonstrate accountability. Don’t use the passive voice about policies and choices; own them. Same with mistakes.

Listen to your line managers; we’re all leaning on the door.

If you want to reduce headcount, simply do layoffs. Stop the psychological torture of perfectly good engineers.

You have thrown away almost 25 years of culture at this company for one quarter of reduced costs…maybe.

We will literally never be an effective engineering company if we’re all focused on not getting fired, rather than being excellent.

Stop hiring incompetent Amazon managers who got PIP’d for executive roles.