American Express reviews

4.1

81% would recommend to a friend

(18,594 total reviews)
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Stephen J Squeri

89% approve of CEO

79% positive business outlook

American Express has an employee rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 18,594 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The American Express employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Finance industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

19K reviews
1.0
Jun 11, 2021

Worst company I’ve ever worked for

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I honestly don’t understand how this place wins best company to work for awards. There are no pros. This has been an awful experience. For starters, there is absolutely ZERO work life balance. I start my day at 7:30am because I’m on calls with the India team and then I’m expected to work until 8pm because I’m so behind on work. Your manager is also in meetings all day long so don’t expect to get to meet with them ever. However they will take time out of their day to ask you to do 2 more things for them.

Cons

They froze merit increases in 2020!!!!!!! We worked our butts off in 2020 and then didnt get a merit increase and our bonuses were slashed too. It may seem fun to move around to a new position every 2 years but when the team is constantly changing and you’re constantly getting a new manager because people are moving in and out of rolls it doesn’t become as fun as it seemed. The hours are long, the work is hard, and the reward is minimal. I wouldn’t recommend this place to anyone.

1.0
May 20, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

* Work/life balance is good and usually don't work after hours unless on call. * Colleagues are friendly albeit don't talk to other ethnic groups much; tend to stick to their own cliques. * Managers are very supportive of their direct reports

Cons

* Massive exodus of senior leaders and top performers last summer. Everything was reorged and the leaders that took their place made increasingly poor management decisions. They did not inspire or establish a vision or goal. Everyone saw through their forced optimism. * Worst silo'd teams I have ever seen in my career. Seriously, this was even worse than a case study I read in business school. Work was often doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in some cases. People sitting 10ft away would never speak about what they were doing design wise and other teams would flat out refuse to collaborate. * Common to have production outages due to the most abysmal IAM I have ever seen. * The most tedious and complicated CM system I have ever seen. Someone's job is literally to fill out CM. No, I am not joking. * This is a MASSIVE H1b shop. That's not a problem, many companies do it and do it well see: Apple, Facebook, or Google. However, this office is probably ~90% H1b's. Just keep in mind the cultural differences may make it difficult to build friendships or report. * Contractors are commonplace here. Management is unable to get FTEs (see below). * Compensation is quite below average for the area. If you are going to be in Palo Alto and not be a sexy startup, you need to pay high salary or bonuses. You are competing with FB, GOOG, NFLX, and AMZN. Talented engineers are turning down positions here due to compensation. This leaves management to hire the bottom performers. I do not believe this org has a "bar" or if they have one it is pretty low. * Managers/Directors would go behind your back to skip levels if you disagreed with their designs or requests. * Managers/Directors only want to prove their worth to their manages/directors. No semblance of a unified vision or direction. Everyone is out for themselves. * Documentation is sparse, incomplete, and out of date. You will be lucky for someone to even leave a comment about a library function. * Rats fall out of the ceiling (actually happened).

3.0
Mar 9, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Work-life-balance is incredible, 6 months maternity leave and 5 months paternity leave, work from home and PTO very flexible.

Cons

Fine place to settle if you don't care about mobility and want to play the game, not the place to be yourself and expect your merit to be rewarded. The most political and beauracratic place I've ever worked in; you're promoted not based on merit, but who you know and sucking up, yet leadership will not hesitate to tell you the many ways you can improve. Too much focus on feedback doesn't leave room to do actual work. Pay isn't even close to competitive. 1% raise year-over-year is not even on par with inflation. Culture is masked niceness with secret back-stabbing and politics constantly. Work can be very duplicative and documentation for the sake of documentation.

Viewing 55 - 57 of 18,594 Reviews

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