Capital One reviews

Redeployed after 18 years and was not given a single opportunity to interview for another position within the company, even at a lower level.

- Capital One's founder previously worked as a consultant and many of those methods are in place at Capital One. As mentioned above, teams and leaders are re-organized so often that it is hard to produce excellence in anything. Even though the tech is very modern, most things are duck taped together because of the pressure to produce "results" quickly. Products don't have roadmaps, code isn't documented etc... This takes too long and isn't required to say you have delivered "results." As a result, rotating teams is difficult because you have to start from scratch before you can be effective. Those who thrive in this area don't care much about quality. As a result, the lack off it doesn't bother them. - Capital One force ranks all employees with 15% in the managed-out group. It doesn't matter how well you do. If there are 35 people at your level and title, and all are amazing, they will still take 5, give them a low rating, tell them they are trailing their peers, and start the manage-out process. People are given a chance to continue working and demonstrate that they have out-paced their peers, but it is not commonly successful. One thing to note, the ranking isn't against your manager's goals for you. You could have exceeded all their goals. The rating is against your peers on other teams with other resources and circumstances. If a determination is made that they are better than you, you will get a lower ranking than they will. I think the goal is to be fair and reward talent but the impact is that you see all your co-workers as competitors who may push you out of the company. No performance management system is perfect and this one has its benefits. Namely, there are always spots above you to get promoted in because 15% of the people are removed every 6 to 12 months. Also, the workforce is very young with modern tech skills. The downside is that if you have survived for 5+ years and successfully passed 10 reviews, you are good. So Capital One loses a lot of very good people. There aren't a lot of people with 10 years of experience at Capital One due to this system. This creates significant life disruptions. I recommend treating Capital One like a consultancy where you expect to get cut eventually. As a result, you live well-below your means to save up for time looking for a job when it comes. The trade-off is that you get lots of experience and technology on your resume. - Capital One's core skill is marketing, and using data in rule's based systems to automate decisions. Don't be fooled by the marketing. The key skill most successful people have is the Business Analysis (BA) skillset of gathering data, doing multi-variate analysis and making decisions. Math and engineering majors predominate in leadership level. If you don't have this math background, know it will be considered a deficit. - Because of the consulting focus on "quick wins" and showing "results" people leadership, mentorship, and real management is not common. The reason is that these are not rewarded in performance reviews. Recently an SVP told a room full of people leaders that their job wasn't people leadership. People leadership was only part of their job. Producing "results" was the job. As a result, a sink-or-swim mentality exists on most teams. If you have a problem, you will need to figure it out. Few leaders will take the time to teach and coach you. After a while, this becomes a self-fulfilling prolificacy. Because some people survived and became senior without any coaching or mentoring, they assume nobody needs it and don't set up systems to reward it. Eventually it becomes the norm. Maybe this is true at most companies today. I don't know. But it isn't logical that people would be ready for the next step in their career about focused development. - Capital One limits what you can work on by office. Auto Loans are in Plano TX. If you want to work in Retail Bank, you have to move to Virginia or New York. This limits career progression unless you live near the headquarters in Virginia. - Capital One leadership in Plano TX expects PdMs to be tech leads and know the details of extremely complex backend systems. There is confusing because the tech leads often do not know. But when there is a problem, the PM gets blamed, not the tech lead.