American Express

Okay, health benefits, good vacation perks, decent cafeteria. Some people are nice.

Imagine getting up in the morning and getting ready for work, like always. Now imagine not having any control over anything in your house. The only control you have is a form that you fill to get access into your restroom to brush your teeth, for example. Imagine a person opening the door and holding your brush, and they are brushing your teeth with it. You ask for another brush, maybe an electric brush, but they say that they don't have a template for this brush, they haven't heard of this brush, and they don't have any training either. Either way, it's their hand, and they will brush your teeth the way they want to do it.

Similarly, imagine the same process for everything else you do in the morning. Now imagine 1,000 people living in your house. Your house is big enough to accommodate all these people, but it's still their house as well. Their job is to make you get ready every morning and take over everything that you used to do alone. Not that you needed any help – you sure as hell don't want any help – but the help is forced on you.

Now imagine all these people are smug and cocksure of their job security. 99.99% of them are from Indian outsourcing companies – unqualified and not interested in engineering. All of them are given the more challenging work, while you are relegated to be a sitting duck, acutely aware of the frivolity and absurdity of your situation... a target for layoff. Imagine your boss, a robotic product of this environment, just doesn't give a damn about your career. He just wants to impress his manager to get promoted. Agile is a word they use to get promoted and never practice.

Imagine that you have nothing to do all day at work. You are depressed that you now have at least 50 people who do what you were in charge of in your previous job alone. You have to deal with a labyrinth of political mazes, other people's emotions, and, infuriatingly, other people's languages to make any headway here. You ask for more work, but you are given documentation work. You ask for more technically challenging work, and you are told no. The reason is obvious – thou shall not threaten a manager's position. Also, another bugaboo they like to throw around is security. They apparently have all these layers of unnecessary manpower "for security reasons... Amex is a finance company... reputation at stake," blah blah. This is an empty excuse. There is no correlation between restrictive engineering practice and security and privacy.

The end result is total inefficiency. There is a reason why Indian bureaucracy is one of the worst and most inefficient in the world. Well, it's taken over AmEx.

They won't read this, and/or they won't do a thing about it, but here goes.

Stop the "consultant" infiltration. They are totally, irreparably unqualified.

Reduce teams. There is WAY WAY too much redundancy. Stop this CYA mentality, which makes it political and difficult to innovate.

Hire smart, hire less.