General Motors

Salary is competitive.

Start with 15 days of vacation (depending on when you join).

401k matching is a max of 8% (assuming you meet the 3-year vesting period).

HSA incentive of $1500 if you and/or your wife do a physical.

This is a big one. If you do not start your job before April, you are not eligible for a pay raise next year, even if you work your butt off.

So if you start in April 2015, you will not get a pay raise until April 2017.

HR should be more transparent about this because that is essentially a pay cut. So if you are considering taking an offer, you need to take this into consideration and/or after your final offer, bring up this topic and ask for an additional several percentage increase.

People are not held accountable for their work, and the work ends up going to those who have work ethic and technical knowledge.

It's hard to fire people. The burden is on you to document their incompetence. And even when you do that, they would rather move the person to another team than to deal with HR.

GM is starting to hire a lot of new college hires. It appears their strategy is to hire a lot of experienced people and throw a lot of money to incentivize them to join.

It's not easy to insource your entire IT operations, so you need to pay people enough to deal with all the BS that comes along with off-shored contractors.

For example, the off-shored contractors are not cooperative when it comes to knowledge transfers. We even have applications that do not have source code, and we are forced to decompile the source code!

Are the people who ran the projects previously held accountable? Nope, you just deal with it and make it work.

Now that a lot of the hard work is done, they are hiring a lot of college new hires.

They don't pick from top universities with strong engineering programs. GM seems to value EEO and hire from a lot of HBCUs, more than I see from other companies.

On a few teams I know of, there is on average a 1:1 ratio of experienced engineers to college hires. Some teams more, some teams less.

But you will be spending a lot of time hand-holding the new hires. Not only are some of them incompetent, but lack professionalism, such as coming in late, long lunches, missing meetings, sleeping on the job.

In my opinion, once IT is full in-sourced, GM will start laying off the experienced engineers in hopes the new college hires who are paid a lot less will be able to take over.

So if you are considering an offer, you should ask how many direct college hires are on your team and how many are experienced.

Very little small perks. Bring your own coffee or pay $1.50. The company has no license for a wireframe tool, so get used to using Microsoft Paint.

No Christmas celebration or little perks to boost morale; just come in and work.

Poor planning. I work in the Georgia Innovation Center. They've poorly planned the hiring process.

People are stacked on top of each other, forced to share desks. We ended up renting a facility 15 minutes north, in Cumming, to relieve the situation.

WiFi is so slow because of the amount of people and poor infrastructure planning.

If you can't plan for things you know will happen, how can you plan for things that you know won't happen?

From an informal poll, most people live south of the facility, so this is more time the company is taking away from you. Other companies I know are moving in town; GM...15 minutes further north.

Myself and who joined before me did not have monitors or docking stations for several months because of poor planning. Still currently only have 1 monitor.

Even though they call the centers Innovation Centers, your job really is to take over and maintain poor-performing, buggy old applications.

And don't even bring up rewriting anything; no one wants to bring GM to 2015.

The managers are generally non-technical. Don't bother asking them what framework their apps use. If you ask them Spring or Struts, they'll think you're talking about the suspension system of a car.

Ask them a question on PowerPoint, they can answer that.

You have unlimited sick days. What this means is, you only take an entire day off if you are on your deathbed. Otherwise, you work from home.

Everything is slow. Need access to something? Fill out a ticket and wait a week.

Need a firewall rule open? Fill out a ticket and wait two weeks.

Of course, these blockers do not mean that your deadline gets pushed back.

IT works. They can pick and choose where they want to work. Make it a fun and productive environment.