General Motors

Easy interview. Open dress code. Work-life balance. Good culture. Flexible PTO.

• • Depends on team.

Basically, working at General Motors as a Software Developer as a new college hire is a total roll of the dice. Before you start, you need to be assertive about what you want to be doing.

When I started, the company attempted to put me into a position that would have been less than ideal for my career, and didn't align with what I thought and was told I would be working on in general. I wanted to be a full stack developer; they attempted to put me on a mainframe management project. This would have been career suicide.

I was told, "Sometimes at GM, we just get what we get." I had to start a political campaign to get myself out of this situation.

Some teams allow abuse and unrealistic project deadlines to propagate down from the business. I have seen devs overwork themselves, pushing in code at 2 AM and working 12-hour days. Some managers are okay with this and expect this, and celebrate the "rock stars" who are slinging garbage into Bitbucket to just "get it working." Meanwhile, code reviews aren't really a thing, nor is unit testing or any code standards.

The staffing strategy is, and has been, literally this: replace the talent who leaves due to being underpaid by eager-to-please college hires. Lots of tribal knowledge, poor or total lack of standards, and toxic environments are cultivated as a by-product of this.

My advice: if you want to be marketable and are coming into this job, push to work with modern technologies and advocate for yourself and the type of position you want. Don't let yourself get steamrolled. There's a lot of garbage in this organization, and I have personally witnessed many suffer.

I've worked under great managers here, and some terrible ones. The terrible ones loved playing politics and showing favoritism, and were not receptive of their employees' feedback or concerns. They were usually the "boss" type, and not the "leader" type, and their teams suffered from horrible turnover and lack of standards.

Don't be a boss; be a leader. Listen to your people. Don't get steamrolled.