Pros
- Smart people generally - Modern technology stack (this is dependent on team) - Pretty good pay (around 75th percentile of market), good 401k match - Nice campus, they require 50% of time to be spent in office.
Cons
Capital One practices stack ranking. This was somewhat relaxed during the pandemic, but the low performance bucket was as high as 15-20% at 2023 mid year. They seem to have historically used this as a mechanism to lay people off without having the negative press that accompanies it. Read other reviews to get a sense of what kind of behavior this incentivizes and what sort of culture it creates. If you join as a new employee you will be at a disadvantage compared to those who have been there for a while/have connections within their organization. Even if it does not immediately worry you, I have seen driven, talented engineers driven out of the company because eventually someone in their upper management disliked them. There's definitely a fake nice culture, people will be friendly but knives come out behind closed doors during performance calibrations. A big source of the company's revenue (credit card interest) comes from people trapping themselves in debt. It doesn't feel great to contribute to that.