American Airlines Reviews

Pros

Medical benefits, and travel are rather good, only if you can get on board to certain destinations. Discounts to other companies and services are good.

Cons

Service within the company for employee to employee is rather rude. Especially when dealing with talent services abroad (phillipines). Flight attendats are rude to you as well as gate agents when traveling. I could go on and on.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop hiring you're friends and rather focus on the members you allready have that do not posses the adequate leadership skills. Many supervisors are afraid of the union stewards. Fear will not get you anywhere good.

Pros

- Opportunity to work on an internationally-active website
- Met some bright developers that transferred from Sabre with many years of experience
- Developer wiki encourages developers to share their experiences
- QA team is very thorough

Cons

- AA.com recently immersed itself in the Agile development methodology. Senior managers required that all contractors attend a 3-day Agile course without compensation, which was frustrating because the course was not very useful (Agile consultants simply spoke about about common sense time management concepts).
- In comparison to IT departments at other companies that I have worked at, I saw a higher proportion of H-1B visa contractors within AA.com.
- AA.com seniors managers and architects insist that you reuse code, no matter how dysfunctional the code is. This was especially a problem with the date picker code, which I found to be inefficient and sloppy.
- Because of the high developer turnover, I observed a lot of dead source code. The senior managers and architects did not not monitor this problem, which lengthened compile times and caused wild goose chases during debugging.

Advice to Senior Management

Become more aware of staffing at different projects and you will discover that some are overstaffed and some are understaffed. Do not expect 1 month of development output within a 2-week iteration. Finally, because of the negligence in removing dead code or cleaning up spaghetti code, development time is going to take longer than you think.

Pros

Flight benefits on AA and some pretty cool people to work with...

Cons

see above...terrible management, absolutely no support

Advice to Senior Management

get a clue

Pros

Very friendly environment. People are collaborative and open to helping you. Good Benefits, competititve salary compared within the industry. Management has a good attitude towards their employees and show respect. Performance evaluations are fair. It values diversity and respects people's beliefs. It is trully a Global Company and employees are trully global too as you get flight benefits as well! It is quite significant to feel like you have a pair of wings and fly anywhere and anytime you want. I have been with the company for 4 years and quite honostly I enjoy working in here, and proud to carry American Airlines flag.

Cons

First and foremost, airline industry is a tough one! Especially with rising fuel cost, the company is loosing money for quite some time now and makes you concerned about the future of the company as you are investing your career on it. I hope this changes really soon, especially if the oil speculation is prohibited. Promotion to upper levels is challenging and really limited, and I find it as the most discouraging part of working at AA. If I decide to leave the company one day, this will probably be the most significant reason. Politics is always there as it is in any other company, big or small doesn't matter. Other than these downsides, it is a grat company to work for.

Advice to Senior Management

Promote talents to upper levels and give them opportunity to grow. If necessary, change the structure of the organization to make this possible. Otherwise, you will loose talents, which I see happening around me quite frequently.

Pros

Benefits are above average.. but have been decreased lately. This is a great company to get entry level experience and exposure to the travel indsury.

Cons

Senior management is often out of touch with middle manangement and almost always with hourly employees. There is a disconnect between the management and the field operations. Management decsions come too slowly and involve too much contemplation.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't over analyse things so much. Also, listen more to the hourly employees.

Pros

Professional, has been an industry leader...although now is in the middle to lower end of the pack in most measurements.

Cons

The company is not very good at ensuring that middle management such as Station Managers and area directors are good representatives of the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't park incompetent managers in stations because the station has performed well in the past. Take courage and get rid of managers that do not represent the company well. I know that many employees called the 800 number to report misconduct and no one responded...this led to a further deterioration of morale that was unnecessary.

Pros

Benefits, nice co workers, good variety of crew bases

Cons

Standby and reserve months, takes awhile to transfer bases

Pros

flight benefits, but the flights are packed so full now that it makes it difficult to fly non-revenue

Cons

The only way to make decent money is to promote in from a topped out union position or self-demote and promote back up for raises. The management pay policy is not aligned with industry standards. Excessive waste and unproductive workforce

Advice to Senior Management

Stop promoting incompetent upper management personnel who are incapable of making intellectual business decisions.

Pros

The shift was flexible to pick.

Cons

Human punching bag everyday. Doesn't pay worth a squat. Have to wait 11 years to finally make max pay of $20 an hour. Seems like an awful long time, 11 years to wait to make chump change.

Advice to Senior Management

Speak English

Pros

Great benefits, (including travel)
Great health benefits
Respected company
Opportunities to advance within the company
Recognized brands opens up opportunities for networking
Friendly people (most of them)
Friendly environment

Cons

Work-life balance non-existent
No-vacation time during the first year and working over time is expected
Extremely low pay (way below industry average)
Very limited resources (not even to be able to get your wok done)
Outdated technology
Poor middle management (good ideas get suck in the middle)
Bureaucracy and red tapes block make extremely challenging to get things done
"Out of the box" thinking non-existent
Formal dress code every day
Slow processess for everything