American Airlines Reviews in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX Area

Pros

Challenging work, ability to move around to different jobs, smart colleagues, strong leadership

Cons

tough industry for consistent profits. MBA culture leaves few opportunities for non-MBA.

Pros

The airline gave you flexibility in your work schedule. You could have others work for you if you needed off.

Cons

Alot of the employees always had a chip on their shoulder. This goes way back even 40 years ago.
They hired too many people and didn't not manage personell well. Alot of them only actually worked about 4 hours or less on the job. The dress codes were never enforced much so they looked unprofessional. The unions protected alot of lazy people so the concientious worker had to do more.

Advice to Senior Management

I guess after 9/11 management hasn't figured out how to run an airline. A good run company does not have 9 losing years of profit just by bad luck. The top echlon have to take the blame for not runniing it like a real business, so not everyone gets hurt. Bankruptcy didn't have to happen? It was because of the poorly run management who never enforeced rules at a once great company.

Pros

benifits are the most i can say

Cons

too regimented with work schedules

Advice to Senior Management

consider the human side

Pros

Great team of people to work with.

Cons

Financial trouble results in bad compensation for AA employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Employees in the ITS organization need to be better taken care of financially; they all work very hard.

Pros

Fun to be to in the travel industry

Cons

Low margin business and not very profitable with fierce competition

Advice to Senior Management

Eliminate the old timer groups sponsored by middle management - they will not change or let others take initiative in helping the business. Don't let this aspect put the company behind competition and focus on the core business.

Pros

Work Schedule flexibility is without a doubt the best aspect of working for this employer.
Up until they filed for Chapter 11 - you were able to earn a defined benefit pension.
American has very pro-GLBT employee policies and is to be applauded for their leadership in this area.

Cons

Management expects the employees to "pay for" their strategic mistakes with reduced pay/benefits.
Declining overall standard of living in terms of puchasing power vis-a-vis other employers.
Claustrophobic and very exhausting work environment - almost every flight is "oversold."
Travel benefits (free travel) are touted as a benefit - but with full airplanes all day, every day -
those "free travel benefits" are NOT what they are cracked up to be !
Extremely hostile Management-Labor relations.
Management at American manages through intimidation, not motivation and incentive.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce executive bonuses and pay the 'rank and file' customer service employees more !
In a service orientated business like this one is - employee morale is absolutely critical to the success of the airline - this is something American lost long ago. I believe that in the future (post Bankruptcy) American will have a great deal of difficulty retaining quality employees.

Pros

Flight benefits and health benefits. Flexibility for career advancement .

Cons

Very strict on shift protocol and too many shift bids.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep the lines of communication open at all times.

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

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.