Capital One

• Decent set of tooling provided by C1 for engineers.
• Under the right org and manager, good WLB and team culture.

Forced stack ranking and a bottom 8-13% PIP at each level causes people to focus on high-visibility/high-impact work, neglecting or forcing other "less popular" engineers to do the grunt work like updates, maintenance, or on-call rotations to avoid getting PIPed. There's also a strong cultural emphasis on protecting one's own product from outside influence, which causes silos and friction between teams/departments.

Leadership talks out of both sides of their mouths, either because they don't know or don't want you to know what's coming next.

Let go of the idea that the bottom of the stack ranking needs to be let go to increase performance, as it's killing our ability to maintain our existing systems. It's also causing a hire-to-fire culture, which is just dehumanizing.