Terrible hire to fire culture - Senior Software Engineer Capital One Employee Review

2.0
Oct 16, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great pay and benefits. It's dumb to force people into the office but they're pretty flexible about it. Seem to slowly be ratcheting up return to office, it was 2 days when I started, then it went to 3 so expect it to keep going up.

Cons

At mid and end year reviews they fire 10-15% off staff going by stacked ranking. This means even if you're good at your job you can get fired if the rest of your team is perceived better in some way. It leads to a culture of favoritism and stifles collaboration because we're all basically competing against each other. You have one on ones with your manager every 2 weeks. After getting nothing but praise at these meetings, suddenly at mid year reviews there was a BIG PROBLEM with how I handled something from 6 months ago. So terrible that they put me on a PIP. Why didn't we talk about this before? There were so many chances to help me fix this alleged problem, but success and results aren't the point, they just needed to sacrifice someone. Saw it happen to others before it happened to me and they tried to work through it and fix the "problem" with their work, only to get fired anyway. They were hard workers who were good at their jobs and did not deserve that humiliation. I just quit rather than go through such a humiliation ritual. A few years ago I was a lot less confident in myself and this would have crushed me, but fortunately I was able to see it for what it was.

Explore other reviews about Capital One

5.0
Jun 28, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great culture, supportive leadership, and meaningful creative work with opportunities to learn and grow.

Cons

There can be a learning curve due to the size of the organization and the number of internal tools and processes.

3.0
Jul 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

WLB varies per team - not really a hustle culture but there are many solid teams where PMs rarely work outside of 9-5 Lots of focus on enabling Product Management across the company, still a long way from FAANG/big tech but leagues above other banks and financial services companies Data and inference/model teams are best in class in fintech

Cons

Performance management sucks. Aside from becoming a PIP factory (although this doesn't impact PMs as much as engineers), the near-constant slog of formal reviews + feedback gathering + calibrations detracts from real work. Capital One does traditional ML at scale quite well but GenAI is lagging behind. You'll find very seasoned professionals parroting "AI wins" and mass-sharing AI slop, coupled with 0 top-down direction on associate adoption or product integration. At this point in time, it serves as another distraction from meaningful discovery and delivery for PMs.

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