It feels surreal working (now worked) for a Credit Card company...having come from a background where you were taught to get good grades, go to school and get a job that pays a measly salary to keep you well housed, fed and distracted from other life's pursuits. You were taught debt was bad, and it is to some extent.
Fast forward years having worked for this company, the colleagues who chatter about their weekend getaways and their senseless spending to feed their hedonistic desires - all part of the competitive "keeping up with the Jones" -...expectations that you ought to spend and spend your paycheck on things you will throw out weeks later to rack up those airline points you will only ever get to use once every 2-3 years.
I ponder to myself, why is it that many of our colleagues remain in the same roles for more than 5-10 years at a time? Never ever feeling the pressure off their chest from retiring at a ripe young age of 40. Living pay check to pay check, with a terrible credit score from even using their own Amex Credit Card products, with obnoxious spouses they argue with every day, and paying off a $1.6 million mortgage in a tiny home for 50 years of your life. Is this the life that was meant for me? Probably not.
But working at Amex has made me reflect on who I want to be. But, these are some key life lessons I had learnt:
- Your skills, talent, credentials and merit sometimes don't really get you far in life.
This is true for organizations that are heavily skewed on the "Diversity and Equity" side of things, despite the board being overwhelmingly dominated by a specific certain ethnicity. I won't name what that is because I don't support identity politics. But the truth of the matter is if you're well liked, you will get far. If not, life su-ks for you and you will be churning organizations fast. But I found it ironic that this company sells D&E hard, but, rarely ever if at all, internally practices it at heart at the leadership level apart from the previous African American CEO. This is the power of a company run by marketing professionals. Relations, just like public relations...matter. Tenured colleagues, I feel, are intimidated by an outsider with a different set of views and better skills.
- It's a dog eat dog world. You're either a predator enslaving others financially or a prey being enslaved.
It's funny when your leader encourages company loyalty. Yet, when you ask them whether you would work for Amex if they stopped paying you today...tomorrow...they would be left speechless and glitch up. If everyone stopped getting paid today, 100% of the workers would hand their badge and laptops in and move onto VISA or Mastercard. The truth is, everyone works for money. Even the CEO. An amazing workplace culture just cannot pay the bills. As a financial institution, we exist to provide lines of Credit to customers who do not have ready access to cash. Besides those who pay off their balances every month of course, for the most part, only the super poor or the super wealthy use Credit Cards, but the latter stands to benefit the most thanks to the interest paid by negative net-worth pay checkers.
- Never...ever get into debt. Like ever! Save, invest and retire early. Fight debt slavery!
This hits hard for me. Working for a dead end 9-5 job, being mandated to go to the office to massage my leader's ego, being forced to take on expensive housing and additional debt to survive puts you in negative net-worth territory. Interest, slowly but then quickly and surely, erodes your financial and social net worth as a human being in society. Taking on crippling debt magnifies the torture you already subject yourself to being willingly financially enslaved to the system. What's worse than working for a dead end career with zero promotional opportunities, is working for a job with no disposable income leftover. If you're ever in that situation, I'd rather be sleeping in a car until I have $100,000 in the stock market and $0 debt than rent $6000 a month and have -$100,000 debt.
- Your colleagues are NOT your friends.
This hits hard. Team members you thought you could trust would at the drop of a hat, turn against you to protect their employment and safeguard their ONLY source of income. You don't know which colleague is living on the verge of poverty, which one is on the mental verge of a breakdown, or someone who will throw you under the bus for a quick and easy gain in brownie points (pun not intended). I've seen people who were "friends" with their leaders and colleagues, only for them to outsource the termination process to HR. Just remember, Amex like all other companies, are cold money machines that serve the interests of shareholders. The goal of leadership is simply to work its Human Capital as cost effectively as possible. You do not owe any employer your friendship.
- Tenure =/= Qualified.
Many can agree on this, but should people be promoted on the sole basis of tenure or talent? My former colleagues can agree that we've all dealt with that leader that is questionable at times on how they managed teams of people and projects. Sadly, this is an outdated mindset that Amex continues to run on. We get so many call center staff without a Marketing Degree calling themselves "Marketing Managers". Yet, they don't know what a SWOT Analysis is.
- Never ever respect a company with RTO mandates.
If a company fails to respect you for relocating to a more affordable area of the country and is still checking attendance like school, it's time to question why management thinks it's more important for us to come to the office than it is to make or save money. Given the previous comments on this Amex forum, we all know why they are doing this.
- In this current day and age, if we think about it, we are living on borrowed time.
My final introspection on my former employment at Amex is that...just like how customers borrow money on their Credit Cards, we are living on borrowed time. If a company fails to promote you, respect your choice to relocate to a cheaper part of the country, forces you to spend money on irrelevant things, is actively telling you to know your place, and promotes cronyism; you are simply wasting your borrowed time. This is the most precious commodity you can ever possess. Would you waste it at Amex knowing you could be in a better place? Absolutely NOT.
This isn't a rant about Amex. Overall, the company culture and some of the people there were amazing. But over time, it become evident to me that it slowly became less of the company I first joined. It was eye opening, probably not for the right reasons you'd imagine.