American Airlines Reviews in Fort Worth, TX

Pros

The airline Industry is the most interesting industry that I've seen. The company is also very people oriented.

Cons

Promotion often based on seniority and not on qualifications.

Pros

Flight benefits is the only benefit. Some people work hard and contribute to the success of the organization.

Cons

good ole boy network
lack of support for employee relations
politics dominate all interactions
senior management is antiquated
lots of dead weight managers

Advice to Senior Management

Senior Management needs to read books on leadership in order to manage their employees better. Manage the employee base without intimidation/ punitive actions; learn the meaning of mentoring and developing talent and rewarding high performers.

Pros

flight benefits, wonderful coworkers, pension, it was good money, tuition reimbursement,at one time they were innovative, at one time they were the leader of the pack ,

Cons

bankruptcy, frozen pension, mismanaged by greedy executives, sick leave not paid at 100%, holidays taken away, leadership has turned into copycats of the industry, article 32, horrible management, they care nothing about their employees, management taking bonuses while company losing money

Advice to Senior Management

when you ask employees to give back money, you should not take bonuses when the company is supposedly losing money. you have run the company in the ground while blaming the labor. treat your employees with respect and stop taking benefits from them. the company will improve when the employees are happy. you are now devastating thousands of hardworking employees by your decisions to break the unions, i hope that works for you. after almost 25yrs, i can now say that i am no longer proud to be an employee. we have given our heart & soul to this company, only to be stabbed in the back by your greed. American used to be the best...and to see it turn into the worst breaks my heart. moving your maintenance out of the country will not save money, but only lose jobs. i am sure you will find that out, as others have. i hope that the company can find new leadership with a good plan for growth, as the current one is only interested in that golden parachute. greed is not always good! as much as i do not like us air.....i would rather have them, than the current management now

Pros

I'm a contractor so don't let me comments or ratings throw you off about American. It's a pretty good place to work, and many of the people here have been here a long time. Not a lot of turnover at a senior level. Good people, good projects, good technologies.

Cons

Sometimes hard to get things accomplished. You feel like you're producing work in spite of the company. The pay is only fair for employees -- they really sell the idea of flight benefits after 10 years.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more focused about direction. Select a technology and projects, and work toward them more aggressively.

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

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.

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