Capital One

• Benefits are excellent.
• Pay is some of the best.
• Very modern tech stack.
• High caliber of talent.
• Terrific work-life balance.

• Being a pay-for-performance company where everyone is bonus eligible sounds nice, but there are fixed distribution percentages that are directly tied to your bonus. Those that ever actually get the full amount are extremely few. In 5 years, I've had 7 managers, and 0 worked with me to set goals that tie back to performance.

• Performance management twice per year is terrible (managing a significant percentage out of the company annually). Biased senior leaders inappropriately influence for their teams. They tell you it's not about distributions and you have to own the ratings, but you get backlash if you disagree with leadership.

• Lots of expectation to do more beyond your job (volunteer, mentor, blog) just to get a satisfactory PM rating.

• Massive reorganizations in some areas (7x in 5 years).

• Career growth really depends on the people leader you get, which changes frequently.

Find a better incentive to leverage bonuses, like profit margin. Quit forcing your people leaders to tell very good engineers that they aren't good enough as a way to make room for absolute top talent. Don't allow leaders to bias a room into decisions and outcomes they target for downrating people.