American Express reviews

People really don't want to leave unless their managers make them do so.

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 deadline. 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.