General Motors

Generous benefits (401k, holidays, PTO).

Depending upon your boss, you might have the option of a flex schedule.

For college hires, raises every 6 months and a final promotion after 3 years leave you close enough to market rate salary-wise.

The company bonus in previous years was overly generous. Now that sales are declining, people have become used to unrealistic > 100% multipliers.

I started as a college hire in 2013 and stayed with the company for over 5 years, working in different capacities. If you want to move around and try different roles, that is possible now (it was not so easy when I started).

At this point, the red tape is out of control. Whole teams exist for quality assurance, and no, I am not talking about testers. I am talking about people who don't code or know how to code, reviewing your changes with a checklist and creating more and more hoops to jump through to do your job. Do you want a database refresh? Okay, fill out this Sharepoint Excel request, then copy all the data from that Excel file into a special format Excel. Take the special format Excel and copy its structure into an email and reference the line number. Email that to the DBA (not kidding). The company has built such a wall around deploying stuff that it consumes 50+% of your development cycle.

The company was hesitant to deal with low performers for years, and now they are paying the price. Generous benefits and an environment where free-riding was pretty easy have resulted in lower than expected attrition.

Now that auto sales are declining and we are entering into a crunch cycle, HR and management are trying to clean house. Underperformers are being put on performance improvement plans (a nice way of saying 'go away'), and those who don't leave once on these plans are typically fired within six months. Hiring, except for college hires, has been curtailed.

Unfortunately, the above does not bode well. Already, many teams are overworked, carrying the burden of the non-workers. Now that many underperformers are being sent packing, their partial workload falls on the rest of the team. This is causing the already overworked high performers, who are fed up with the red tape, to leave. What is left is mediocrity at this point.

After this round of firings, please keep the house clean.

If you let underperformers (driftwood) build up over time and address it all at once, it is more detrimental than addressing the problem annually.

Do something about the red tape. Protecting the company's production environment is great, but if you can't maneuver a regular change, it becomes impossible to fix honest mistakes or bugs.

You can't have innovation if you can't make changes.