American Express

They paid me for the month or so I was employed. Other than that...

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 deadlines.

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.

Implement software development best practices: management tells priorities and engineers tell deadlines.

Adopt Agile.

Delegate work to developers.

Frequent communication (either sync or async, doesn't matter).

Really basic stuff I never thought I'd have to tell someone to do.