Smart people, competitive pay, good upward mobility
Pros
- Consistently worked with smart and capable people. - There's a pretty good amount of openness and transparency in general and leadership tends to include their teams in decisions. - - Offer competitive pay, great benefits (cheap, high quality healthcare, 7.5% 401k match when you put in 6%, 15% discount on stock purchase up to 15% of your salary). - It's great to have a gym ($15/month) and primary care facility (for free) right at the headquarters. - They do a pretty good job promoting from within, especially at the junior and mid-senior levels (good upward mobility) - Really nice facilities in general (bright, open, colorful, fun, good food) - Focus on doing the right thing for customers instead of squeezing every dollar of profit out of the company - Founder-led approach results in a focus on long term investment vs. just trying to hit investor goals
Cons
- Can be political (both corporate politics and insertion of national politics into the workplace). From a corporate politics perspective, advancement can be highly dependent on who you work for and what projects you end up working on. From a national politics perspective, with the HQ being just outside of DC, employees tend to lean pretty far to the left and are not shy about it. Politics are discussed often and it's not uncommon to be asked questions like "who did you vote for?" I've seen this result in favoritism based on whether or not you have the same beliefs. Big no-no. - Promotion of good do-ers into management positions. There are way too many cases of people in management positions because they were good producers. A good analyst rarely translates into a good manager. - Death by meeting - seriously - I would guess that at least 50% of meetings I was invited to were either completely unnecessary or very minimally applicable to me. - Pains from rapid growth still exist. Tons of separate systems. External example: just look at the consumer product logins on the website. It's been 5 years since the ING acquisition was completed and customers with a traditional Capital One checking or savings account still aren't integrated with the Capital One 360 products/services (formerly ING Direct) - Major locations are generally in the suburbs so there aren't a lot of options if you want to walk to grab food, do a happy hour, etc. Most things involve driving. This is mitigated by them providing just about everything you need on campus but it sometimes you just want a change of scenery. - Not many options for work locations unless you want to be in either Richmond, VA or McLean, VA. Richmond is small and isolated and McLean has an insanely high cost of living and terrible traffic. - Hard push for diversity recruitment sometimes results in great candidates being passed up to meet a quota - Performance management system is based much more on time at a certain level than actual performance. For example, you pretty much have to move a mountain to get anything higher than a "strong" rating in the cycle following a promotion. They do performance management on a bell curve, which means that for every person with a high rating there has to be a person with a low rating. Isn't the goal to have every employee perform as highly as possible?