Capital One Oncall
I just interviewed for a full-time TDP role at Capital One. One thing that attracted me was the work-life balance they advertised. From my questions with several interviewers it sounded like oncall is only during business hours for Software Engineers and after business hours they have a separate team that handles issues. Is this accurate or was I misunderstanding/being told the wrong thing? Anyone have experience with on call at C1 or any other comments about the work life balance?
We have pager duty on my team. Technically, you can get called after hours, but over the year we have had it only one person has ever been called after hours (9 pm) which was a false alarm.
Quite a few tdps are looking to move on after just 1 year in the program ; why would you even consider us if you are already at amazon? If you have no other offers , join and continue preparing to move out Don’t believe the smoke screen of “rotation” ; quite a good amount this year of tdp didn’t get any role they wanted and were thrown onto teams randomly
I have a return offer from Amazon but it isn't specific to a location or team. Not a fan of big cities like Seattle where I was for the internship, I like the lower cost of living of Richmond and overall am looking for a change from Amazon's work culture and stress. I have other options I'm pursuing besides C1 but it seems like a good place to be for a year or two and move on.
Rotation are just like college applications; you get first pick if you are top seed. Both TDPs in our team last year got their first choice for 2nd year rotation. I have to say they are very good though, one already got a promotion after 1 year and from what I hear the other one isn’t too far away either
I recommend you take it, less stress as compared to Amazon and you will end up making more than Amazon burnouts who flameout after 6 years
Yeah that's why I'm not taking Amazon's return offer primarily.
It highly depends on the team you're working on. In my first rotation as a tdp, we had week-long on-call schedules and every other week someone got a page in the middle of the night. Both of my teams have had "manual deployments" that must be done after normal business hours --- my first rotation I was doing things at 10pm+ at least once every two weeks; my current team is better but it looks like we have a 9pm+ thing at least once a month. (E.g. I got off a call at 2am last night that started at 8pm, but that was a bit unusual for this team.) On the other hand, some teams have everything fly-by-wire and don't need to wake up in the middle of the night at all. Basically, don't assume that every team here has great work life balance --- some do, some don't. Actually, that's one big thing I wish someone had told me in college --- company culture almost doesn't matter at all, but your team culture is very important. I thought things like work-life balance, dress code, coding standards, etc. were a company-culture thing, but all of that varies on a team to team basis.
To op: The intent of on call here is you build you own. If you are working on a project that delivers a product and if you as a developer wrote code that handles all possible scenarios gracefully as a team, then you do not have to worry about on call as you will not be paged. It’s unreasonable to expect someone outside project to debug code and fix it when there is an issue. It’s a means to ensure code quality. Substance matters 😀. The topic diverges to other areas as I skimmed through the responses. So filter them and take answers for your direct question..
This is spot on.
Nope. No runbooks, incompetent command center triggering false alarms, and shit code written by shit engineers means you will be on call and blown up every other minute
Company has great work life balance. That said teams have on call rotation which extend to evenings but how much you get called really depend on the project you are on. The one I am in, even when on call most weeks you are never called at all. For external facing system there are ops center to provide eye-on-glass support so that will help alleviate the load as well. TDP program is good because you get a rotation and can apply to the project through an internal site for your 2nd year rotation. After that you can choose to stay in same team or change to anything else. Company is growing and we are always hiring so many that you will have no problem for internal movements.
Stop drinking too much coolaid. Why would you recommend capitalone over Amazon??? In short if you are at Amazon continue there, if you have no other offer then yes join us.
What @cbfg says is accurate and aligns with my experience @ c1. Its a great company to work for. Work/Life balance @ c1 is pretty easy to handle there. TDP is a great program. If the offer is good, theres no reason not to take it. As mentioned, under TDP you’ll rotate to different teams and even LOBs to get a taste of everything. Typically you stick on your third rotation. @tec101, how about no bonus, salary cap and no rsu refresher @ amazon not to mention a toxic work culture. Those seem like good reasons to me.