General Motors

Extensive training for new college hires through their Career Start Academy.

Decent starting pay for entry-level, with a great 10% (target / variable) end-of-year bonus and a solid 401k match.

The new college hire program seems to offer a faster-than-average pay increase year-over-year with a grade increase at the end of the program, incentivizing new hires to stay on board.

The new college hire program is a bit of a mess.

I applied and interviewed for an "Entry Level Software Developer" role and got stuck doing IT operations.

The interview and several conversations with my hiring manager seemed to obfuscate the fact that I was not being placed on a development team until my first day on the job.

While GM does offer free resources for self-learning, I fear skill drain in this current position.

Many other new college hires I have spoken with also feel they were "bait and switched".

People that actually landed development roles from this opening seem to be an exception rather than the rule, which makes this whole situation seem intentional.

This is a bit of a slap in the face to people with CS and CE degrees that hoped to apply the skills they just learned in school, but instead get stuck doing sysadmin work that anyone with a solid tech background could be trained to do.

GM appears to be investing heavily in early-career talent. I was hired as part of their new college hire program, an initiative that saw the influx of several hundred other early-career hires at the same time as me. I applied for a role titled "Entry Level Software Developer" and was interviewed for the role as if it were a development position. When I was given my job offer, I was told I was in GM IT, but my role was still "Entry Level Software Developer." I was a bit confused by this, so I asked my soon-to-be boss what the job entailed and received a very vague answer, but was still under the impression I would be doing software work.

So my first day rolls around, and it becomes apparent I am on a DevOps team. While this is fine with me for the time being, as a new hire I am sure to be the one taking up a lot of the operations side of the job. I feel like I have been duped. My job definitely isn't as a software dev, and with a Computer Engineering degree, I feel like I wasted years and time on a degree that is completely unnecessary for this job. While I am grateful to have a decent-paying job right out of college in the current global climate, I feel I am being underutilized, and I feel like I was lied to.