The benefits are no longer worth it - Flight Attendant United Airlines Employee Review

2.0
Dec 12, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Fellow Flight Attendants are generally great people - that's why they were hired.

Cons

Low pay - $26/hr beginning pay, with reserve pay coming in at 83 hours a month which makes your pay approximately $100 a workday (soon to be lower flight hour guarantee, so even less). You can request to be used more often, but keep in mind that those hours don't include your travel to and from airport, layovers, etc. You do receive an "away from base pay" that is about $3 an hr for every hour you aren't in your base city. Unfortunately, the company will do everything in their power to minimize your ability to break guarantee and earn more money - you can't pick up trips after you've hit 65 hours, which means you'll get assigned low flight hour trips that scheduling intentionally gives you in order to prevent overpaying. Such is life in a corporation this large, though. Poor Relationships - Between Crew Scheduling and Flight Attendants, it is absolute war 24.7. Be prepared to treat every conversation as if you were on the stand in the court room - except that if they attempt something that is contractually illegal, you have to catch them, and if you attempt something illegal, you'll be disciplined or possibly let go. Gate agents don't love Flight Attendants and the feeling is returned. No group is ever happy with the other, and that includes dealing with pilots (and I'm sure, they feel dealing with FAs is just as difficult). No one is on the same page. Benefits - Good luck using those suckers! If you can trade your way into weekend days off (not so easy for new hires) or block days together, then yes, you can fly for free. However, take a look next time you get on a plane to somewhere amazing... how many seats are open before the gap in customers, and then what you can assume are standby flyers? Not many, right? The airlines will do anything to put paying customers in those seats, which means more often than not, free-flyers get screwed. If you do get a big trip in, and let's say those flights would have cost you $1500 round trip... you're going to wonder if a normal job with vacation time might have been easier than killing yourself to save a grand.

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Pros

management cares about employees well being.

Cons

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3.0
Apr 22, 2026
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Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

United is genuinely a good place to work in a lot of ways. The dev side has strong leadership, the work is interesting, and there are real engineers doing real things. When I started, I was proud to tell people where I worked.

Cons

The Quality Engineering org has gone downhill fast since the leadership change about two years ago. It's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted. The focus now is almost entirely on offshoring roles to India, and the US team has been quietly squeezed—people being nudged toward retirement, others suddenly finding themselves with negative performance feedback after years of solid work. It doesn't feel issue-driven, it feels like a headcount strategy with a polite cover story. On top of that, we spent most of last year implementing process changes that look impressive in a slide deck but don't actually move the needle. Meanwhile, the QE org has drifted away from what the dev leadership is actually trying to build. We're solving problems no one asked us to solve while the real priorities sit on the side. It's frustrating to watch, especially when you know what this team used to be capable of. The day-to-day environment has gotten noticeably toxic. People are checked out, the good ones are looking, and there's a real sense that institutional knowledge is being treated as disposable.

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