Hundreds of American Express Employees Reached Out to Me This Week. They're All Saying the Same Thing.

I published a YouTube video about my experience as an Engineering Director at American Express. I expected some views. I didn't expect what happened next.

Within days, hundreds of current and former Amex employees started showing up on my LinkedIn profile. Not a trickle. A wave. Every 30 minutes, another unfamiliar name from a department I'd never worked with. Then the DMs started.

"My entire team was dissolved and rebuilt in India."

"I worked with Steve early on and have some interesting stories to tell you."

"I trained my replacement and was told it was a reorganization."

"They brought in H-1B contractors at half my salary to do my job."

The stories are remarkably consistent. Different departments, different years, different managers, same shit every time. I'll be using my rapidly growing platform to share what people are comfortable with me sharing.

Here's How They Do It

Here's how it works, and I'm not speculating. I saw this from the inside, and now hundreds of people are confirming the same pattern from their own vantage points.

Step one: open a massive campus overseas. American Express built the largest office in company history in Gurugram, India. One million square feet. That's not a satellite office. That's a headquarters.

Step two: start shifting headcount. Hire aggressively offshore. Slow domestic hiring to a crawl. When someone in Phoenix or New York leaves, don't backfill the role. Open it in Gurugram instead.

Step three: set domestic teams up to fail. Starve them of resources. Assign them impossible timelines. When they can't deliver at the same pace as a team three times their size overseas, use that as justification to move more work offshore.

Step four: call it innovation. Publish press releases about your "technology campus" and "digital transformation." Frame the offshoring as a strategic investment in the future, not what it actually is: a labor arbitrage play dressed up in corporate language.

I watched this happen in real time. I raised concerns internally. And then I left.

"Thank You for Saying What We Can't"

That's the most common message I've received this week. Verbatim. Dozens of people have written some version of that sentence.

And here's the thing that keeps gnawing at me: they're calling me brave.

I'm not brave. I don't work at American Express anymore. I have a PhD, a decade of engineering leadership experience, and a YouTube channel. I have nothing to lose by telling this story. The word "brave" doesn't apply to someone with no skin in the game.

You know who would actually be brave? A current Amex employee going public with their name attached. But they won't, because they have mortgages, families, health insurance tied to their employment, and a reasonable fear that speaking up means getting pushed out faster. (And in fact two former AMEX employees reached out mentioning that they had spoken out and were swiftly fired for what the company claimed were "unrelated reasons").

That silence is not incidental. It's structural. It's how the anti-American machine works. You can't run a massive labor arbitrage operation if your domestic employees are loudly telling the world what's happening. So you create an environment where speaking up is career suicide, and then you point to the silence as evidence that everything is fine.

Silence and a workforce desperate to leave as soon as the market is good is what you get once you do this long enough.

This Isn't Just Amex

Amex leadership despises the American worker and the H-1B alike thinking both groups to be "below them" and deserving of exploitative treatment.

Every time I talk about this, someone in my comments or DMs says "same thing at my company." JPMorgan Chase. Bank of America. Accenture. Infosys (obviously). Google. Meta. Microsoft.

The playbook is industry-wide. The details vary, the press releases use different buzzwords, but the mechanics are identical. Build overseas. Hollow out domestic. Rebrand it as transformation.

The AI hype cycle is making it worse. Companies are now using "AI investment" as the justification for moving work offshore, as if building a campus in India has anything to do with artificial intelligence. It's the same labor arbitrage play with a new coat of paint. "We're investing in AI" sounds a lot better in an earnings call than "we're replacing American workers with cheaper labor."

Why This Matters Beyond Tech

If you're reading this and you don't work in tech, this still matters to you.

These are $150,000 to $300,000 per year jobs disappearing from the American economy. These are the jobs that were supposed to be safe. The jobs parents told their kids to pursue. Get a computer science degree, get a good job at a big company, build a career.

That contract is being quietly torn up, and the companies doing it are spending millions on PR to make sure you don't notice.

The mid-career engineer with 15 years of institutional knowledge who gets told their role is being "realigned." The senior developer with two kids and a mortgage who gets 60 days to "transition" their work to someone in Gurugram making a fraction of their salary. These aren't hypothetical people. They're in my inbox right now.

What Happens Next

I'm going to keep telling these stories. Not because I have a vendetta against American Express (I don't, I had a good run there and worked with talented people), but because the pattern is too clear and too widespread to ignore.

My DMs are open on LinkedIn. If you've experienced this at Amex or anywhere else, I want to hear from you. Your story matters even if your employer doesn't want it told. I'll protect your identity. I always do. If you're okay with it, I'd like to tell your stories on the channel and in this blog.

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The video that started all of this is on my YouTube channel. Go watch it, and read the comments. The comments section is turning into a support group for displaced tech workers. That tells you everything you need to know.