General Motors

Opportunities to drive change.

Large company experience: Learn to navigate the behemoth, as well as dealing with GM IT’s private cloud/data centers, which are unstable.

Can have some good coworkers.

GM IT is out for itself and not GM. GM IT is basically a transplant of management from HP/Dell/Walmart that all move around with each other under Randy Mott like an NFL coaching staff, and bring their players with them — former HP/Dell employees.

There is lots of faking going on. Hiring occurred that left unexperienced, non-technical college hires in technical roles because the interview is only behavioral.

GM IT is in a cost-cutting stage and replacing everything with open-source, but is too nervous to fire/layoff anyone and is just begging people to leave. As a new college hire, you will have to frequently ignore people who have been there a while because their information or approach will just be wrong or not a best practice. You will have to ignore management that simplifies complicated takes and ignores details for “quick wins.” Quantity is more important than quality.

My guess is there will be some colossal failure in the next 3-4 years that ruins the reputation of GM IT because of the lack of approach to detail, not diagnosing the actual cause of technical problems, and rushing stuff to production. Lots of quick, dirty fix solutions.

What it could be is anyone’s guess, but it is most likely coming because of the lack of experience being thrown at complex problems. College hires are cheap, but the ones who have high potential and can solve those problems just leave after getting a fully vested 401k.

Test everything.

Coordinate better across teams.

Know when resources don’t exist to accomplish the goal.

Value quality over quantity.

Listen to the business before assuming your arrogant brain understands the auto industry immediately, because you’re a CIO or in management.

Take time to solve actual use cases instead of standing up random junk to look “innovative” and to justify IT.