I live in DC and friends who work for Capitol One call it "the Google of the east" because of putative tech savvy and innovation. Can anyone verify this claim?

They’re a bank that likes to pretend they’re a tech company. In some ways, they’re right: they embrace a lot of “hard tech”, are all-in on things like cloud, and definitely value engineering skills which shows through their well-regarded program for new engineers. However at the end of the day, they’re also still a bank and suffer from the same bureaucracy and politics that every other bank does.

The first sentence made it sound like you were gonna go on a desudesudesu.io rant

Want to explain what that means for the uninitiated?

It's not Google (Google isn't Google anymore), but if you search around for the winners of the intern competitions they hold every year, you'll find a surprising amount of intensely competent people who have done very interesting things in the years since.

I worked there for 1.5 years. There's lots of smart people. There's lots of people hiding in the bureaucracy of a large bank that get away with very little action. I haven't worked at Google so I can't comment on that. Overall it was a good experience but things moved very slow.

Red Ventures also calls itself "the Google of the east".

They do a fair amount of FP/Clojure inside Capital One afaik.

FWIW, the majority of the recently updated repos seem to be Python https://github.com/orgs/capitalone/repositories?type=all

You can also walk into a brand new project there that has business logic crammed into a towering, nested for/if spaghetti monster living forevermore in a spring controller method. True story. It just went into production.

Lots of ex-Amazon directors and VPs, FWIW.

I'd say so.

I can't think of a similarly large company HQed out east with as large a tech presence. Lots of internal tools and projects have been OSSed or productionized like at Google as well

Do your friends spell it like that?

Either way, funny.

Chalk up one more loss for market competition.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39437387

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

I keep thinking this is a sign of a larger failure coming. The consolidation masks a financial problem at one or both of the companies.