General Motors

Lots of vacation given on day 1.

I worked at GMIT for 4 years. I no longer do.

If you were family, I would advise you to avoid GMIT for several reasons:

1. There is no defined technical career plan if you don't want to become a Project Manager. GM likes to pretend (lie) that not having a defined technical career plan speaks to the various career opportunities that you will encounter at GM. In reality, out of my 4 years at GM, I saw a grand total of two people in my org (about 150 people) get promoted. The rest stayed in the same position, switched teams, or left GM altogether. Many of the people in my org who I respected as brilliant engineers inevitably left GM for greener pastures.

2. GM doesn't appreciate IT. They talk a lot about having a vision of GM as a tech company while simultaneously offering none of the perks of tech companies and certainly nowhere close to the salary (especially in Austin, a growing tech hub). You pay for coffee, you pay for food at "lunch & learn" events, etc.

3. Many of your colleagues in GMIT will be low-performers, and you will often have to clean up after them. This is largely due to the complete absence of technical questions during the interview. It's all personality questions. So you end up working with people who are polite and incapable of innovation.

4. Many teams don't follow best practices for software development. Code review, continuous integration, blue-green deploy, unit testing, etc., are completely absent on many teams. Your skills will actually end up deteriorating if you're not careful (even as a college grad with a clean slate of mind). Imagine going to an interview for your next job and saying, "We didn't write unit tests" – who would want to hire that engineer? If you do end up working at GMIT, have side projects that you work on at home so that you can actually solve interesting problems and have something to talk about in interviews.

(1) This may seem brutal, but you need another round of massive layoffs. For the amount of work done, there is no reason GMIT needs to be greater than 1,000 people globally. Get rid of the folks who refuse to grow with the skill set required in today's IT.

(2) Offer competitive salaries if you wish to retain IT talent. Before you do that, recognize that GM is dead without innovative IT, so stop thinking of IT as a cost center and instead as a catalyst that drives innovation in every other part of the business. I was able to leave and get a 50% raise in Austin – you will never retain top talent at this rate.

(3) Offer a "technical track" for IT folks who don't enjoy being in meetings all day and enjoy solving tough technical problems. Again, this will help retain talent.