General Motors

-IT Innovations centers: you are likely to work under several teams and orgs if you stay over a year.

-Raises are great for salaried New College Hires (4.4%), although it's less for other salaried employees.

-HDHP Insurance (which is great if you never use it or if you go way beyond the deductible).

-Dental & HSA (1.5k contribution) are amazing.

-401k is amazing (if you complete the vesting period).

-Lots of PTO (can't save unused PTO though) and company-wide holidays/days off (especially December).

-Majority of coworkers are very approachable and genuinely want to help.

-Cute titles such as Release Engineer, Messaging Engineer, Operations Engineer, etc.

-Company makes an effort to improve employee discontent (e.g., GM Recognition program).

-Less outsourcing and many successful in-house IT projects (some outsourcing still exists though).

-Innovation centers are located in suburbs with plenty of housing options (although this can be a con if you want to live near the downtown area).

-Job can be greatly beneficial to grow your knowledge and skills (depends heavily on your org and manager).

Long detailed list, bare with me please:

• The true reason that you will work under several teams/orgs is that you will get pulled into a job somebody quit or nobody wants. Management will not care if that change reflects your expertise/career goals, and there will be a lot of deflection as to who even initiated this change (your direct manager, HR, or a Director). On the other hand, if you attempt to make a lateral movement to another position available, good luck. Logically, the "good" jobs/roles rarely open up because people fight to stay in those teams.

• The true "Innovation" apps at GM are Outlook and Skype (Excel is third). They are management's best friends. GM uses boring old vendor software but creates even more boring in-house software (yikes). Over 50% of GM software is legacy software written by people no longer there with non-existent/poor documentation. Legacy apps break ALL. THE. TIME. Many times it's because it's inexplicably linked to another app/server because "it sounded like a good idea" a long time ago.

• Bureaucracy is the boogey-man word, and Director-level management refuses to accept there exists so much of it. Bureaucracy to install software. Bureaucracy for servers to apps you own. Bureaucracy for production deployments. You will have meetings with people who will stonewall and will bring two other people into the call to act as witnesses for their justification. Being proactive will only get you assigned more work and will cause you to become the SME of three MORE legacy apps in addition to the five you already own. Because of this, teams will actually allow software to break/deadlines to be unmet (with the "secret" blessing of managers). Deadlines are constantly made/promised by people who have never been software developers/engineers.

• Out of the four IT "Innovation" Centers, Austin and Warren are substantially better, especially for your career growth. They get more "visibility" and have better projects (again, depends on team). GM focuses too much on Galileo, myGM Rewards, AVT, and MAVEN while disregarding the apps that provide POSITIVE net cash inflows. It seems like other teams exist only to not disturb upper-management by preventing P1/P2s. The message is "Helping the client/customer is great, but preferably focus on preventing P1/P2s." Now, if your team did meet that metric of "No P1/P2s for the Mid-year Performance Review," you still won't get recognized. There exists considerable outsourcing for apps that GM itself doesn't believe its employees are qualified to do (e.g., AVT). GM avoids open-source software, and it has become detrimental to its goal of "innovation." Lots of soul-draining repetitive tasks, and most of it involves Outlook (aka management's BF). Before you realize it, you will have lost knowledge/skills you had in the past.

• Beware of the IT organizations that have the word "Global" in their name. They contain ALL the negatives listed above (such as legacy software) on a larger scale. No exception. The Directors in "Global" orgs are also uninspiring, feign transparency, and lack direction (can't have direction when your org consists of projects that aren't innovating/provide little to the customer). No surprise I saw more turnover in these orgs than other orgs.

• Most of the discontent is towards Randy Mott's network he brought from Dell and HP (CIOs and especially Directors). Perhaps some of them have quit/were laid off, but for years they ushered in bad practices, bad vendors, and fostered nepotism. If you want to "move up" at GM, learn to take data of all the cost-savings you provided into Excel format. Only then can you communicate in a language they comprehend.

• Not as important as the statements listed above, but GM has lots of synonym and acronym entities/programs/software that sound alike but are ACTUALLY different things (e.g., GM Loyalty/GM Rewards/GM Recognition, Chevy Volt/Bolt, ITOC SE/ITOC SD).

Management's insecurities are so obvious. Exhibit A: Lots of talk of "innovation," but what they really mean is "compensation." As in, GM is compensating for the things it lacks.

Exhibit B: Management constantly uses the word "transparency" in their emails and town halls. In reality, you will learn more about GM's future by reading the NYT, WSJ, or WaPo than from management.

Here's how the spin cycle works: Executives give middle/lower management words to use repetitively, and within months, everyone is also using said words, as if that resolved the problem. Be on the lookout for these phrases too:

• "lots of opportunity for growth"
• "We are like a startup company"
• "leadership driven initiatives"
• "GM loyalty"

Truth is, some employees allow software to break because that is the only way to get executive attention to a bureaucratic-systemic problem.

Prioritize promoting employees internally! But if you have to hire externally, stop bringing management from Oracle, HP, or Dell as opposed to Google, Facebook, or Apple, or even actual successful startups (MongoDB, Uber, etc.).

You can't expect employees to be more loyal than the company itself. The layoffs were the biggest demoralizing factor, but even before that, there was not a sense of community at the company. The company events are poorly promoted, and GM even got rid of the cafeteria, thereby encouraging people to eat at home or elsewhere.