Capital One reviews

3.6

59% would recommend to a friend

(18,900 total reviews)
avatar

Richard D. Fairbank

75% approve of CEO

62% positive business outlook

Capital One has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 18,900 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Capital One employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Financial Services industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

19K reviews
2.0
Feb 28, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Bikes in silly colors, great cafeterias, competitive (not extravagant) pay, as much Kool-Aid as you can possibly chug

Cons

The performance management system is like something out of the Middle Ages, based on a forced distribution at the team level---meaning if you have four people on your team, one of you is going to get a bad rating. This does wonderful things for team cohesion and makes people optimize for very strange things. If you are a software developer, expect to get stuck in an on-call rotation at least once a month and doing a LOT of devops work even if you weren't hired as a devops engineer. Toward the end of my time there, 90% of the work my team did was related to scrambling to comply with some new enterprise-wide mandate (fix X, switch to using Y, etc.). In the end we had almost no time left to build our product. The product owners and tech leads are really out of touch; a lot of them have no technical background. Also, the decision to abolish assigned seating and move to "everyone scramble for a seat every day" (excuse me... "Flex Seating"! Yay!) is a horrible decision. It makes the day so stressful to never have any idea whether you will be able to find a decent seat or not, and yet despite the overcrowding many teams do not allow for regular remote work.

2.0
Aug 29, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The company benefits are competitive. The tech culture needs a lot of work: even though Rich Fairbank spends a great deal of effort in pitching his grand vision, the actual execution falls short in the hands of middle managers, who are way too consumed with their promotions and personal agendas. So while the grand vision CapOne tries to sell is enticing, be VERY CAREFUL with the group that you're joining--because what is a Pro at a high level may just be a mirage.

Cons

All the cons mentioned before this post are true: the year-end review process is painfully frustrating, the middle managers exercise a subtle (some times blatant) form of favoritism, the geographical/office politics amongst Virginia offices against non-Virginia offices is petty to a fault, and Human Resource department pretty much sides with management all the time (in many ways, reminds me of Uber's public relations debacle). Please be very skeptical when interviewing with Capital One and make sure to ask yourself if you're willing to play advanced office politics. Things are particularly bad in Commercial, which is far from Consumer Retail (the poster child of CapOne recruiting).

Viewing 109 - 111 of 18,900 Reviews

Glassdoor has 21,280 Capital One reviews submitted anonymously by Capital One employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Capital One is right for you.