Surprising that a bank is going in this direction but not surprising that it was Capital One. They have historically been pretty technology forward in comparison to other US banks. They are one of the only US banks that provide pretty pain-free APIs to the public.
Don’t let the marketing budget fool you. They’re a subprime lender wrapped in the veneer of a fintech while being a closeted sweatshop. A large proportion of their engineering team used to be H1Bs about 5-7 years ago, unsure if that’s still the case with quotas shrinking recently.
I didn't work at Capital One, but this sounds familiar to what I saw working at another big bank that I will not name. An entire division basically got laid off with a select few people being "promoted" to "Principal Engineer" (more work without pay raise) and they replaced everyone else with contractors. It did not go well. Last I remember, the exec they pulled in that spearheaded this reorg left after only being in that position for a year or so.
Sweatshop is right. I remember a dude joking that after project end, one of the new dads would finally be able to meet his kid. Maybe it's the stacked ranking.
All of the FTEs were super bright but realized that if they were going to be worked like dogs, they'd rather be at FAANG making twice as much. Even then, some expats told me their letters were more laid back.
I know a friend who got a job there. Many teams do not do any coding at all. Like most banks they have automated away all the programming and have little need for new tech.
Depending on when your pal worked there, they were in the middle of a huge standardization process. I'm not sure what's going on there anymore, but they made a company wide effort to only use a single infra framework that handles deployments, testing, infra, and all kinds of other stuff. All the fun stuff has been farmed out to a few enterprise teams and everyone else was forced to shut down anything custom.
Friend currently works there and has worked their for a year. A year of no coding sounds rough, but I guess he isn't jumping cause he is worried about the pending recession.
