American Express reviews

If you look at the organizational chart you will see that Indian VPs have Indian employees. You will see that Chinese have Chinese employees. If you are not Indian you may have to ask one of your Indian friends to ask an Indian team to do something. If you ask the team directly they may not reply. Some teams are great; some won't do anything unless you are Indian. It's disheartening, if you were born in the U.S. or came at an early age you won't be prepared for the tribalism. Be leery of the top ten places to work rankings. Notice that it is very often based on diversity. You have race based, gender based, country of origin based organizations in AMEX and even things like women's leadership book clubs. You will receive notifications from VPs saying they want to promote more women. Pay attention to all the comments about re-orgs. At least one a year. At first they got rid of the under-performing employees. Now it is anybody. Some teams have bottom up initiatives. You create your own opportunity. At the end of the year you get evaluated on your work. Others, though, are run by the whims of the leadership. You will chase bad idea after bad idea. Leadership will squash anything that is not originally theirs. You will become inefficient by templates, formats, MIS requirements, changing priorities, and unresponsive capabilities teams. You will spend five minutes of analysis and five days on putting together a presentation. Then months will be spent on low or negative valued alterations Driving implementation is not a priority for these types of teams. No prioritization or consideration of opportunity costs. At the end of the year you get evaluated on how lucky a guess the leadership made. If the job requires a Ph.D. and you get a rigorous technical interview don't assume that the work is engaging. You may very well find that the most engaging thing you do is addition. It can be a real bait and switch.

The job itself can be stressfull, your expected to make an emotional connection, solve the cardmembers problem, give them a "benefit" on every call, and do it in under 300 sec. Plus your phone availability needs to be 90%. So it is work, work, work.