About my career

From the time I left high school, until I started working at American Express, I did a number of what you might call "odd jobs."  I worked a number of short term contract jobs that were purpose-driven, I interned at IBM in the PC division, I worked at GE in their simulation division, I did graduate research at NASA (and wrote my thesis about payload processing on the space shuttle), I spent the better part of a year working at Disney World, and I did a stint in manufacturing as a plant engineer. 

I had some fun along the way.  I didn't make a ton of money, but I lived my best life.

But when a unique opportunity came my way, I decided to jump on it.  The year was 1994, the company was American Express, and they were looking for someone to come in as a contractor and build something new.

Until a few years before I joined, AmEx had been known as a charge card.  A charge card is essentially designed to lend you money that you have to pay back at the end of the billing cycle.  There was no interest to be accrued, rather if you didn't pay by the due date, you were assessed a late fee.  The company was governed by the FTC and was not considered a bank.

But, in the early 1990s, they launched their first credit card (that could accrue interest) in a product they called Optima.

What AmEx wanted to do, what they brought me on to do, was to figure out how to launch new charge products that could have very specific benefits that more closely resembled credit cards. It was so wildly interesting that I was in.

I was part of a very small team that made that happen. We launched a number of new card products into the marketplace.  Some were successful, and some not so much.  But I was responsible for making it happen.  Me.  The company would not have grown in this space without me.  In all that time, I certainly generated revenue for the company.  Its wild to realize just what I contributed to the bottom line.

And what did I get for my hard work?  A job offer to come on as a full time industrial engineer and continue to build on this process.  And take a pay cut.  I thought long and hard about it, but decided to take the offer.

The next big thing I worked on was a secretive project that looked like a new product launch.  I had to sign a specific NDA for it, and was one of about 10 people in the company who knew anything about this.  And one of about 5 actively working on it.

Enough time has elapsed, and the outcome is widely known, but I still won't give away too much here.  In short, we were working with one of the banks to launch a Visa product that could earn Membership Rewards points.

Two side notes here: Membership Rewards started out was Membership Miles, where purchases you made on you charge card could accrue miles to be used on a partner airline.  It was expanded (on a project I worked on), to not just be used for miles, but for other things, too.  You accumulate "reward points" instead of "miles."

The other thing is something a lot of people don't realize. American Express is a closed network, and acts as the "issuer" and the "acquirer" meaning they own it all and make money on the cards and the merchant network, fees, interest, and so on.  Discover is a similar type of setup.  But Visa and Mastercard are independent organizations that run the network, but they do not issue the cards.  That's done by a legal agreement with member banks.  These banks have an exclusive agreement to only issue Visas and Mastercards.

What we didn't realize when we launched our new product was that this wasn't about getting new customers.  It was really about exploiting a loophole in the bank member agreement which caused Visa to amend their bylaws to prevent what we did from happening.... and ultimately to get the DOJ to open an investigation into Visa's business practices.  And that led to a very large (like $100s of millions large) judgement that Visa had to pay to Amex.

So in summary, my work led to a windfall for AmEx.  My blood, sweat, and tears gave them something.  But netted me literally nothing in return other than an "atta boy."   

Flash forward a bit.  By the turn of the 21set century, I was working in a different area and got tapped to help migrate customer service agents off of the old-style mainframe green screens, and onto something web-based.  In this case, I was a cog in a machine that was making this transition.  There was an outside consulting company that was running the show.  But I was responsible for designing the user interface, and ran between the tech teams and business partners to get it completed.  It's impossible for me to say what my contribution was in terms of a percent or a dollar amount, but I was heavily engaged.  And the amazing thing is that when I left the company nearly 25 years later, that same user interface was still being used by agents taking calls!  The backend may have changed, but what they saw was all me.

Shortly after that, I migrated the help system for the tool from paper to a web-based solution.  At the end of the year, I was told that I  - just me - was responsible for more than $1 million in saves!  That netted me another "atta boy" .... and then ... well .... I got called into a meeting where they told us how they changed the stock award program.  Until that point, they granted stock awards to every 1 in 2 employees.  I had never gotten one, but had been around for nearly a decade so in theory I should have received 5 of them.  It was like rubbing salt into a wound in a way, I got nothing and then was told that I got even less than nothing.

Later, I got put onto a special project to look at internal fraud.  And it turns out there was some.  More than anyone knew.  I couldn't tell anyone about it, not even my boss.  So of course, he was upset that I wasn't working on anything *for* him, and anything I did find would not contribute to his success.  So I took a lot of flack.  I could tell a higher up what I found, but he was uninterested in knowing the reality (shame on him as an officer of the company!) and he just wanted to make sure we wouldn't let it happen again.

I did get a little monetary reward for my work at the end, but it felt weird taking it because I did wind up "turning in" some people I knew pretty well, and they were unceremoniously fired. 

I went on to work in different areas in tech after that. My roles were more generally creative in nature - I developed processes, deployed universal tools, and worked on reporting vulnerabilities (including some cool dashboards). I taught classes for a while after AmEx decided to become a bank. And I got a patent into the system, which if AmEx had decided to build it (rather than squat on it) would have brought me around to Membership Rewards in a way.

By the way, it turns out that the patent was rejected anyway.  The reasons don't really make sense, and I can see the outside attorney retained by AmEx communicated with the office about resolving some issues, but they never reached out to me about it, either to ask questions or to simply tell that it was never completed.  Its just one more thing to throw my hands up in the air about.  

That was my 28ish years.  I was responsible for $100s of millions of money the company would have otherwise had....and yet I got the call one afternoon. Thanks for all your hard work, but don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.  

That's the delightful part about working in corporate america.