Having used to work at Capital One within Shared Tech, I worked with a lot of really brilliant engineers who could easily have been working at FAANG. That being said, they didn't pay as well as FAANG so a lot of us moved on.
I'm not surprised at all by this move, there's a lot of solutions at Capital One that can be monetized. The company is so large that there's redundant solutions concurrently developed by different teams, inevitably someone was going to work the bureaucracy to start selling SaaS
> Having used to work at Capital One within Shared Tech, I worked with a lot of really brilliant engineers who could easily have been working at FAANG.
I don't doubt this - but my guess is that a lot of these top engineers are working at CapitalOne for relatively low salaries compared to FAANG explicitly because they're tethered to the company by an H1B or L1 or similar visa and can't easily jump ship.
The headquarters of Capital One is smack-dab in the middle of the US defense and IC contracting hub in Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia. They're competing for talent now with hundreds (thousands?) of small software contractors and also the big defense players like Northrop, Lockheed, etc. And on top of that, the big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft have expanded heavily in the area and are now gobbling up all the talent as they pay way more than DOD and gov't contract work.
Yet Capital One still doesn't offer competitive salaries that even match the defense contractors, never-mind AWS and Microsoft. I know half a dozen talented engineers who got tired of the $175K defense industry salary "ceiling" and jump ship to Amazon. I know of zero who've moved to Capital One, though they probably employ more engineers in the area than any other company.
And from what I've seen, it's because their engineering departments are 90% Indians on H1B (again - some very talented). Most US citizens won't want to work there.
I'm not surprised at all by this move, there's a lot of solutions at Capital One that can be monetized. The company is so large that there's redundant solutions concurrently developed by different teams, inevitably someone was going to work the bureaucracy to start selling SaaS