Pros
Some work life balance can be expected.
Cons
Not even sure where to begin. As a company American Express is failing miserably to maintain its position in the credit card business of which they once were the leaders. For the past few decades all they have done is launch various fancy looking credit cards but failed to think of ways to revive/innovate the modes of payments. I mean, it took companies like Paypal, Apple, Samsung to come up with innovative ideas to make payments. The top leadership consists of people who graduated from various unrelated streams like English literature, psychology and were probably classmates with Bob Hope and obviously think the best way to cut down on expenses is to lay off people or move departments to India. The people who are laid off are usually the band 35’s and lower. The VPs who generally are band 45s and up remain unaffected. Not to forget, there are several layers of VPs. There are more VPs in a department (band levels ranging from 45 to 65) than the people who are actually hands on and working. Coming to the technologies at Amex, it does not matter if you spent a good part of your life getting education (a BS and an MS in CS), you would be reporting to directors who are not even from the engineering background (being a BS and an MS in Computer Science from an accredited University in USA, I reported to a director who had a Pharmacy background and had nothing to do with computer science/technology). Kudos to the legal team to even justify his H1-B managing engineers. If you want see the H1-B abuse, you should work at Amex. People with textile engineering background are on H1-B and working as Lead architects. You get promoted only if you are the favorite of your VP and you don’t question any of your leader’s authority. I have seen couples working as VPs (both husband and wife are VP) in the same technologies department, reporting to the same Senior VP, not sure how have they been able to fool the system. Don’t even get me started on the contractor culture. They hire contractors from companies you have never ever heard of. For some contractors there are layers of contract companies behind. Most of the contractors cant even speak English properly leave alone writing elegant piece of code. Most of your time on a daily basis is spent typing emails to other teams that you are collaborating with on a platform. No body/team really owns up if something breaks/needs fixes. You will end up spending most of your time trying to explain the flaw and ultimately things get done only if you CC your VP in the email. God forbids if you are trying to get access to a system. It took me over 5 weeks to upload images on an internal image hosting server since I didn’t have access to it. Your access requests need approvals from not only your manager but a couple of VPs. In the name of cultural events they celebrate Indian festivals, perhaps a no brainer since Indians are the majority here. Never could really comprehend, how doing a fashion show in funny looking Indian outfits was celebrating Asian culture. Come on now, there are so many other countries in Asia. Every VP conducts a quarterly town hall. You can imagine the amount of time you waste attending those, given each department has a dozen VPs. And did I mention the presentation is more or less the same. I have been to town halls where they play videos of some south Indian/bollywood actor, now being a non Indian/asian not really sure what am I suppose to do with that or what has that got to do with quarterly town halls? At the technologies they even host some award functions. Somehow for the 3 years I have been there, I see the same handful folks sweep all the awards. The funniest part is, the same guy can win a platinum reward, gold reward and silver as well. Can Hussain bolt win the gold, silver and bronze at once??