General Motors

They pay very well and have excellent benefits. The downtown location is pretty nice.

If you are a serious software developer, then you steer clear of this place.

You would think that a company trying to get into the Automated Car business would have a top-notch technical environment. You would be mistaken.

The technology they are using was outdated before I began my career. For instance, a Java project I worked on wasn't using a dependency management system; it literally had dependent JAR files checked into SVN.

Another project I worked on kept falling over because it was trying to remove records from a database via JDBC. It was actually going through all the records, reading them into memory, and then going through them one by one to issue a delete – millions of rows.

I watched a very senior-level employee spending hour upon hour trying to troubleshoot this thing.

How would you solve this? Well, you'd just double the CPU and memory, of course (true story).

The consensus among employees is "it pays very good." Now, picture yourself with a bunch of coworkers all with this same mindset. If that seems like a compromise you are willing to take, then go for it. You will get paid very good!

Note for new college grads (I was not one, but I feel I need to put out a PSA): If you are told you will be doing software development, you won't. You'll be writing test scripts, all day, every day. And not using some cool scripting language. Think 3rd-party GUI tools like SOAP UI.