General Motors

The supervisors and middle management in Dublin and Limerick seemed well-intentioned. They gave us a good introduction to Scrum practices for those who had no previous experience of it. The company also offered to partly fund a few colleagues to do a postgraduate certificate in machine vision while continuing to work full time.

Regarding the CEO, environmental aims rightly featured in her speeches. However, I was not in a position to judge whether that translated into any actual action.

The training consisted of a solid two months of watching videos without a chance to consolidate learning by putting it into practice. The work itself was very uninspiring and of limited relevance to future projects. Only one or two colleagues ended up working on ML or other interesting technologies mentioned in the recruiting materials.

While there was a good mix of people from different backgrounds, the proportion of women was low and there were reports of feeling sidelined by male colleagues. Hours were slightly above the odds, pay slightly below.