Capital One was one of the best non tech companies in terms of pay and wlb ratio and decent tech talent culture too, seen as a safe harbor in recession with economy but I keep hearing about aggressive pip ura and layoffs. I know they always did fixed stack ranking like Amazon but was URA always a thing at the company or is it new? Banks are usually pretty good about budget and headcounts so wondering if this is to take advantage of market conditions or overhiring... TC 200K
“but was URA always a thing at the company or is it new?” They have always had a quota for the bottom bucket in their stack ranking
But did the bottom get fired like amazon?
the bottom is not automatically fired at amazon. I went through focus after getting an LE at amazon, cleared it, and was promoted one year later. I’d actually be happy to return and work for the same manager.
Capital one is a bank ?
best answer, tbh
😃… their banking halls are coffee shops too and are called “Capital One Cafés” 🤣
What’s their tc? 400k above?
Not even close bro, more like 150-170k base+bonus and no stock (LTI) below Director level
LTI is part of TC below Dir in SWE
RTO/ COVID completely fucked our leadership. Terrible messaging that lost a lot of goodwill with the employees. The good tech leaders left for better jobs or for more sanity. Your skills will stagnante due to all the internally built tooling you'll need to interact with and the only thing that really matters for performance is if your manager likes you.
Your app is still one of the best in all banks. Hope your leadership wakes up.
So much like Amazon manager.
@Apple what’s good about it? I used capital one for a bit but now mostly use chase.
Chase app is way better
C1 app is constantly pushing more and more upselling stuff and it's getting annoying.
Lots of people are worried because of the pip that happened during mid year. For some context, we used to send the bottom 8% of the people to coaching plan before putting them on pip. Now we are putting the bottom 20% directly to pip if not layoff
Pretty huge percentage - and sort of BS considering you end up in the bottom 20% by not having enough “impact” whatever BS that is
And on top of that, we were forced to put one person from each team on pip during mid year cycle
what is URA?
Unregretted attrition. People that exit and you think it's a positive to the company that they leave. Amazon term
It’s been a slow gradual decline since I joined in 2020. Honestly, you can really feel it in the air now. What we lacked in pay was made up for in life/work/balance - but now we have neither. I can sort of point to where things when wrong. Around 2021-2022 a lot of hiring was being done. My team grew by at least 4 or 5 heads, and that was just my team. Other teams grew similarly. Most of these hires were pretty good, but once everyone was settled in/fully onboarded - we quickly ended up with too many cooks in the kitchen. Then they fired all of the agile personnel, who made my job a bit easier as they helped a lot with our various ceremonies and also backlog growth/refinement. The growth of our backlog was not commensurate with the growth in headcount, so once we sort of exhausted all of the important things that had to be done, it’s started to feel like a constant scramble to come up with stuff to do. Even in talks with my manager, it’s like my job description has now been modified to entail coming up with new work/new features - which, as an engineer, I feel like should not be such a large aspect of my work. Product should define the vision, and certainly we as engineers can contribute meaningful ideas and concrete paths toward product’s goals - but to essentially help product define what comes next is not really within my ability (or paygrade). I was for quite some time a top performer, these days I’m stressed constantly about performance management and try only to pick up work that can be twisted into having some sort of “impact” because that’s all they care about when it comes to performance. If you spend all year fixing vulnerabilities or simply keeping the lights on - guess what, that’s BAU work - everyone’s expected to do that and so it’s not a differentiator - and since you’re ranked against your peers accomplishments, that means you’ll end up at the bottom no matter how your manager feels about you or the quality of your work. It’s extremely stressful, and I certainly don’t get paid enough to have to deal with that. The broader market also doesn’t seem much better. I’ve done one external interview so far and it was a boring company and I didn’t knock it out of the park on the leetcode interview. Hard to find the motivation to even study, since I’m usually pretty drained after the mind numbingly dull work (which used to be interesting). As of now I keep wavering between being pretty mentally checked out, and then trying to put my best foot forward and somehow get back to being a top performer. In the past it was effortless because the work was enjoyable and there was plenty of it to go around. Now not so much. People are also generally less friendly and seem more stressed. Honestly can’t blame them since the same goes for me. TC 150-170 depending on bonus No stock/incentives
This is the right answer. I could have written all this, word for word. Which is crazy considering the size of the company and the amount of work there is to be done.
This is exactly it, went through the same thing and still got CP/PIP and I'm not even in Tech.
A lot of our new leaders since 2022 came from Amazon.
I blame this on rich, he's huge on stack ranking and it is not gonna change until he retires
If retirement was likely it’s come and gone. He’s not going to retire until he dies. I do look forward to the 4 day company wide funeral procession on zoom.
Same I thought they were pretty good at least back in 2015 maybe they changed in the last 5 years?
No, I think they were fine till mid 2022. I think URA is new
it’s definitely not new. it was there back in 2018.