Capital One

Incredibly stable place to work; things just hum along. Contribute to your projects and enjoy a good work-life balance when you do so. Good pay for the area. Fairly modern stack, really just leans on AWS for the most part.

We keep trying to internally build tools that AWS offers (or maybe they offer them six months after we start work), which are poorly documented and honestly just don't work as well.

We are a bank, so there are definitely important places to pump the brakes and optimize for security and stability. But sometimes, I think we build stuff in places that aren't in the interest of either of those things.

We keep trying ineffectively to be a software company. I'm sorry, but we aren't going to get there unless we really start incentivizing our top 20% of employees. These are the people that already work longer hours at a higher impact than the rest of us, who will happily leave when Amazon offers them a 40% raise. We can keep telling ourselves that the work-life balance of Amazon will be enough of a deterrent, but in my experience, these people are already putting in a similar amount of work to what they would be at AWS. We don't even have bonus packages that vest. There is nothing motivating people to not leave unless they really love their teams -- which is definitely our saving grace, so good job there.