American Express reviews

American Express is this great company with a stellar reputation for treating its customers well, so I thought they would have a strong engineering culture. It was the exact opposite: the house is on fire. Legacy codebase. Everything about how software development is supposed to be done is done the exact opposite at AmEx. Before working here I had only heard about the software Death March, here I saw it for the first time. Mandates coming from the CTO with tight and firm deadline. On the team I was on there were no daily standups or sprint planning. For the most part our team lead did not delegate work, hold meetings or answer messages on Slack; one time the developers were asked if we could commit to a feature delivery in three days without even having been told what feature needed to be done. No ticket grooming, no estimation, nothing! I wrote a long message in response and I think that's what got me fired. The hiring process was long and arduous and they were late with my start date. I had an offer from a startup I was really interested in and chose AmEx instead- a huge mistake I still regret. Avoid the EI team and possibly the entire company at all costs until they fix the process.

Many folks are leaving. Every day I get multiple notification emails that people are moving on. Morale is low. Compensation is really not competitive for today's market, and there were no raise increases for 2021. In the last couple of years it's been very apparent that people are coming here just to get the company name on the resume, take advantage of the long parental leave, and move on. Unless you have a family and a very long commute, where the work-life balance is extremely important, chances are that you will probably not be incentivized to stay for a long time. As others have mentioned, upward mobility is very difficult and pay increases are minimal, even when they are given.