Pros
Disclaimer - some of my experience may differ significantly for you on a different team/product. Interpret this with a grain of salt knowing it is partially anecdotal. Work Life Balance: Good for the most part. On call rotations and failover exercises are a pain. How much your on call rotation will suck depends on how well/poorly your product is engineered. I know a lot of people that took 4 weeks PTO. Nobody logs it and recruiters openly advertise this fact. PTO is technically accrued but it's treated more like an "unlimited PTO" system. Seems like a slippery slope and always made me uncomfortable. Technology: Entire company is fully in AWS, which is fine. Tech stack will vary by team, I worked mostly with Java/Spring Boot/PostgreSQL/Kinesis. Some lambdas here and there. Coworkers: Very hit or miss. Associates tend to be good but my product in particular was crippled by staggering numbers of contractors. The contractors were noticeably worse in quality than associates - they had a lower standard of work and were more difficult to communicate with. They often held critical knowledge of systems and would then leave. Management consistently said they wanted to replace contractors with associates but struggle to hire - probably empty promises. Remote Work: This perk, as I'm told by former coworkers, is going away. The "hybrid work" three days a week will probably be team norms. Good luck retaining talent C1. I was never in office and this is one reason I left.
Cons
Forced Downtime: There were weeks I struggled to find 20-30 hours of work to do. Leadership from the Director+ level either had no vision for the product or failed to communicate it. Product always seemed lost. We never had a refined backlog. Enterprise teams were major blockers. Developers spend a lot of time just spinning their wheels. Forced downtime is nice occasionally but I was bored out of my mind far too often - I probably could have worked a second job. Enterprise Teams: Enterprise teams are absolutely atrocious. They were the number one blocker to getting anything done. Our CI/CD pipelines were continuously going down. You'd get nonsense errors and build failures for no reason at all. Builds took 30 minutes+ and would fail because some behind the scenes enterprise service was overburdened. It would often take days if not weeks to get a response from enterprise teams to fix critical issues with deployment. Development Process: Again, just like with enterprise teams this one was a headache. Architecture teams are required to sign off on major design decisions and API contracts and would take weeks to respond. On one instance an architect mandated a design pattern that wasn't supported by our enterprise tools and it caused weeks of issues. CI/CD was a constant pain. Getting new applications onboarded was a headache, enterprise portals rarely worked. Salary: If you're a talented engineer, you can do much much better. Leadership attempted to counter as I was on my way out the door until they heard my new offer. C1 has taken insufficient measures to stop the bleeding in the form of tech attrition. The CEO, Rich Fairbank, went on record saying Software Engineers were too expensive. Sorry Rich, I'll go somewhere that pays me what I'm worth - enjoy your contractors. Stacked Ranking: Stacked ranking is horrible. Managers went up to meetings to defend your rating and to get anything above Strong (Average) you basically had to have a ton of extracurriculars. Doing your job and doing it very well isn't good enough at Capital One. They expect you to be earning certifications, volunteering, conducting interviews, joining resource groups, etc. to "differentiate yourself" from your peers. It's all crap and probably a cost saving measure so they don't have to give too many people decent raises every year. Hybrid Work: People want fully remote work. There are antiquated managers who feel like things are "just better" in person but many many engineers want fully remote work or have left to get it. Nobody wants to go from the comfort of their home to having a commute, spending money on gas & vehicle, prep time before and after work, just to sit in a noisy open office environment where things are less productive. Products: A lot of C1 products I dealt with weren't engineered to a very high standard. Our pages are slow to load, don't look great, and are dwarfed by more established competition. I didn't feel proud to work on a product that felt was vastly inferior to the competition. Constant reorgs and lack of vision from leadership was a consistent hurdle.