Process
I applied for a "Director". This wasn't an organizational leadership role, it's a glorified Tech Lead position wrapped in a shiny corporate bow. They use a standard, AI-generated template to advertise a role managing multiple teams and driving high-level strategy, but once you talk to HR, the bait-and-switch is revealed. In reality, I was told I'll manage directly exactly one team while spending up to 65% of my life staring at Java code, debugging microservices, and playing human safety net. It’s essentially a Tech Lead job for anyone who enjoys the dual pleasure of sitting in useless corporate meetings and hitting frantic daily sprint deadlines. The interview expectations are just as detached from reality. They expect you to walk in prepared for a multi-disciplinary gauntlet covering everything from deep architecture and DevOps (Kafka, Kubernetes) to basic coding fundamentals. The more specific description I got when I kept asking was "it will be a 45 minute round around kafka, kubernetes, system design and coding". I have years of experience in the corporate role so I never thought that anything will shock me anymore... obviously I was wrong. Apart from the fact that just scheduling a first call with HR took 2 weeks. I honestly don't understand how they come up with the roles and the functionalities. Requiring experience for 10+ years of management for what? A tech lead? I obviously dropped out but it was frustrating to hear.
Questions
Have you ever managed distributed teams?
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 3 interview experiences for the Visa Director of Engineering role.
Success Rate
Visa's interview process for their Director of Engineering roles is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Visa's Director of Engineering interview process.
Visa Work Experiences
- 2.0They only pay lip service to innovationDirector of Engineering • Current EmployeeFoster City, California, United StatesJuly 18, 2015Pros: One of the main reasons to work at Visa is that it is a "safe" employer. They never get rid of anyone. Even if you are underperforming as an individual contributor, the bonuses and compensation are not really tied to your performance because everyone basically gets an "average". Also, there are plenty of reasons not to get something done. You can always point at another department and say, "I couldn't finish my thing because I was blocked by someone over in ...". If you keep your head down, don't make any noise but show up for work and meetings, you will continue to draw a paycheck for as long as you want.Cons: But if you want to innovate, don't believe anything they say about it. We've been told for over a year to change our methodology to Agile. The result? The groups who are successful at it (especially in my org under Loyalty) were buried UNDER another team that is waterfall and will remain so, while folks that were taking pot-shots at us got moved up. The majority of our work is done by BPO outsourcing, but none of our vendors are effective. We have roughly a 1:4 ratio of FTE to BPO in my org. It takes one FTE to lead a team of 4 BPO, and the BPO doesn't get the work done. So we are paying 5 people to do the work of 1 FTE. Why do we keep doing it? Because the executives with the biggest budgets get the biggest bonuses. Adopting new technologies is a sure path to corporate death. It is a company full of seagull architects who "swoop down, poop on everything and fly away". The company has armies of architects who aren't responsible for delivering value, but if they approve something, they feel they own it. So they say "no" in an effort to keep the amount of work they have to do at a minimum. This is plainly clear in their last employee survey, which pointed out that their #1 challenge to their employees was getting work done. As soon as that was announced, the security team launched a pilot to remove admin rights from developers' laptops so that they need to ask approval to do things such as look at environment variables, check their system load, or profile their machine's performance. How insane is that?!?!?! I have worked at Visa for 4 years and as of this week finally reached my limit. I am on my way out, and 4 top engineers I work with have already asked me to try to find a place where they can follow.
- 5.0Good company to work withDirector of Engineering • Current EmployeeBengaluru, Karnataka, IndiaFebruary 29, 2024Pros: Good benefits and work-life balance.Cons: Heavy on process and very slow.
- 4.0Visa is a great and stable companyDirector of Engineering • Current EmployeeBengaluru, Karnataka, IndiaOctober 23, 2022Pros: Very good benefits. Good work-life balance.Cons: Process heavy and not using cloud for infra.
Visa Interview Questions
