A Great Place to Work Except For Cutthroat Performance Management
Pros
Great, friendly coworkers, always eager to help. Nice perks like corporate phones and health clinics near the largest campuses. A non-hierarchical culture with many open exchange of ideas across different levels.
Cons
The performance management process, which relies on a forced distribution and changing expectations from year to year, can be brutal. You basically spend every workday of the year worrying about how your performance may affect your rating. Capital One is now misusing parts of its performance management process, originally intended to dismiss only associates displaying gross incompetence, to instead reduce headcount en masse. This is a morale killer, not only to those associates who lose their jobs, but also the people managers who have to execute this process and the remaining associates wondering if they're next on the chopping block.