American Express

Overall, a very good company. It places a lot of importance on customers and customer service, and is not predatory like many other financial companies. The top leadership does a very good job and has a sound vision on how to grow the business.

Very flexible across the board. Some departments allow remote work, with plenty of vacation days and flex days.

Good benefits include a performance bonus and profit sharing. Average health benefits are compensated with contributions to HSA accounts.

Although the CEO and his executive team have good vision and are great leaders, under them there are layers and layers of managers which create a complex spider web of politics. It's a mission to get anything done, one more time did I mention politics? Middle management is the problem in this company.

In technologies specifically, this is even worse. The knowledge has been outsourced through the years to offshore companies in India. Most of the actual employees are not technical and spend their time playing the performance review marketing game; most of them don't do any real work. In "lean" principles, everything that is done should somehow benefit the customer, but not in American Express. Making presentations and sounding smart will take you far, even if what you are saying is total BS. This is a place for posers and brown-nosers, not for real engineers.

As of the last couple of years, the company has acknowledged they have to transform, but this has been a total failure. The titles have changed, but the problems remain the same: red tape, politics, superficiality. If you are an engineer, you will come here and you will lose all your skills as you will spend most of your time dealing with idiots and wannabes. There is no real collaboration; everyone is after each other's lunch. If you are willing to play the game, you might end up in a management position relatively easily. Oh, by the way, they say they are agile because they think that making people sit in the same room is enough. My advice is to go somewhere else where developers and technical skills are valued.

Flatten the organization, respect and empower engineers, cut the BS, and create a system that fosters collaboration by rethinking the performance management process.