American Express

• You get a lot of free time while waiting for approval from higher-ups. It typically takes 4-5 days for a response from a C-Suite or VP.

• You don't need to keep up with the Israel v. Palestine conflict because if anything negative happens to Israel, Mr. Squeri will send out a company-wide email condemning the actions against them, or if like Henry Kissinger or a past AMEX C-Suite dies.

• If you're a Staff Engineer or Director, you can dip for two months and make the lower-level engineers deal with the summer intern.

• Multiple years worked here & he has yet to acknowledge anyone but the C-Suite's hard work.

• Directors & Staff Engineers who have been at the company for 10+ years just coast. They routinely miss meetings and lack the fundamental knowledge about the applications they've been managing.

• Staff Engineers dip during summer for 40+ day vacations, perfectly timed with when summer interns show up so they don't have to deal with them.

• 99% of your interactions as an engineer are with individuals in India who are sleep-deprived from working 7 pm-7 am, as they're 12 hours ahead. And yet, the CEO still pushes for a return to office.

• Red tape around AI is a mess and should be reviewed/updated. It shouldn't take 2 months and 3 separate intake processes to run a single line of code that uses AI/ML.

• Poor documentation on key processes like decommissioning an application or RFCs. There's a 50/50 chance the Slack help chat person gaslights you or tells you you're in the wrong channel.

• Very caste-like in that Staff Engineers consistently hand down their work to lower-level engineers & then take all the credit.

Please show up to our scheduled meetings. Or at least show up more times than you change Slack photos in a year. Bonus points if it's not in a grocery store or at your kid's karate practice.

Everything has red tape around it & requires approval from higher-ups who take weeks to respond. This takes a project that could have been done in a few months to a few years.

Please answer yes or no questions without using the phrase 'it depends' and leaving it at that.