How tough is to crack the coding / tech interview at capital one for Lead Engineer role. Do I have to practice solving 100-150 medium questions in Leetcode before taking the interview or any other strategy to follow?
Wells - I would look at glassdoor. You can get a lot of detail about the process. Overall not super difficult since we are hiring an army of SWE (I think we hired 3,000 last year...) Synopsys - so you can build products that actually get used
Why in God’s name do you need 3000 engineers? The pitch I heard was just around an online banking portal. There are already good solutions to that problem that could be licensed at a cost orders of magnitude smaller than hiring all of those engineers
Management here can sometimes get shiny object syndrome and they like when things are built in house 🙄
Management has no idea how to build software. They rely on engineers that would be considered junior elsewhere to tell them, which results in a lot of effort to build web apps. Coupled with product managers who write individual user stories for the engineers, but have no technical knowledge themselves (most are banking financial analysts). Add SWE working hours of 10am-3pm and little or no motivation and you have yourself 💩 storm. It takes about 4 engineers to do what engineers at a FANG would do.
Banking is super complex given all the types of products, an intensely regulated industry, consumers expectations for real time experiences, and the need to constantly protect against fraudsters who are always targeting banks. Over the last 1.5 years we decided we wanted replatforn our entire infrastructure and move from mainframes to AWS, so we effectively needed to rebuild a top 5 banks Infrastructure from scratch in 5 years
Longer than 1.5 years. Seems to be a very slow effort.
We also have no interest in using 3rd party banking software since it tends to be less flexible and not real time
Where is Capital One hiring? Any engineering office in Seattle?
Seattle, SF, Plano TX, Chicago, NYC, Richmond, DC Suburbs. Possibly expanding in Boston soon.
Seattle and SF seem to be getting cut down pretty often. Those offices seem to be more of a front than anything.
I am thinking of applying to Capitol One too. How is the deployment process over there? Does business work closely with the developers? Do you guys use Agile or Waterfall? What is the ratio of senior to mid to NCH in a team?
In my experience Cap1 has no idea how to implement Agile.
Group depending. Lots of agile, but using the scaled agile framework. Teams are encouraged to work in short iterations. Just remember it’s a large complex organization, which leads to a lot of waterfall feeling.
I believe we are hiring in all of our location (VA, Texas, SF, Chicago, Seattle), but have the most jobs in VA about 10 miles outside of DC. Our SF and Seattle offices are particularly small. We use Agile. I am in the business and work very closely with developers, but some developers are in our groups with less exposure to the business. I'm not sure about the ratio of levels hopefully someone who works in Tech can help
For levels on a team of 8 it’d be like 3 college hires, 2 senior/principal associate (2-5 YOE), 3 manager/senior manager (5+ YOE)
I would use the word "Agile" very loosely when it comes to Cap1.
Look on Glassdoor for the 6 behavioral questions they ask. They’re always the same. You will most likely get a few technical questions in the realm of, “Do you know Jenkins?” and “Do you know AWS?” Expect no whiteboarding questions. Capital One is starting to get really strapped for talent and is hemorrhaging engineers; at least in the Plano office.
Yup the reason why we hire so much is because our attrition rate is insanely high (40% in some LOBs)
60% in Cyber
Just curious - why would you want to go to a bank to work as SWE?