General Motors

Competitive PTO, good bonus, tuition reimbursement.

You are just a cog in the machine. Management doesn't care about you. There is no guidance as a new hire. Work is work, and that is it! The Work from Home policy was very inflexible pre-COVID.

Pay more attention to your entry-level employees.

I rarely would ever talk to my manager. Even though he would set up weekly team meetings (I'm pretty sure this was only because of COVID though), I didn't have a real relationship with him. I would go weeks without hearing from him. Obviously, GM is a big company, so I understand not every manager can sit there and baby or pay attention to their employees. However, if GM wants to call this an "College Graduate IT Program," make sure you put college grads with managers that have the time to actually guide them and help them early on in their career.

Compared to my other entry-level role at another Fortune 500 company and my internships, I often times felt like I had no guidance or anyone to look up to, talk to, or learn from.

If you are looking for a good IT rotational program that starts you off at a higher starting salary, will provide you with more guidance, structure, and mentorship, as well as an actual group or "Class" of new hires you can relate to, I HIGHLY suggest you apply to Ford.

At my time doing development work at GM, I rarely had any senior developers or even mid-level developers to help guide me. I joined the team with no Java/Angular experience and was handed this massive project that was a mess and expected to figure out how to navigate it. Which is fine in normal circumstances, but again, without any help or guidance at ALL (literally, there were NO other developers at certain points, other than another college graduate who knew as much as I did), how am I expected to learn what good development practices in the industry look like? What is the point in calling the program a college graduate program if there is not going to be any guidance within my role either? There's a difference between being thrown in headfirst versus just blindly trying to figure things out. It was SOO stressful at times when technical decisions or technical problems came up, and you only have two new college graduates there to try and figure it out, without any help from anyone with more experience. Three senior developers joined and left the project I was on within a six-month span, and I'm sure it was for a good reason too.

The technology stack was also just not up to industry standard. I'm sure there are parts of GM that are actually working with cutting-edge technology, but clearly not in GM Finance. The project I was put on, that claimed to be "Agile" and had four to five-week sprints. Just having standup meetings twice a day and having backlog planning and retros isn't the only thing that makes something "AGILE," just an FYI.

Lastly, the community aspect of GM is just lacking. Everybody shows up to work to work, and that's it. Personally, I enjoy a work environment with some fun or the chance to get to connect with my coworkers on a better level.

TLDR; if you are looking for a role where you will get the guidance/support a new graduate needs to become a good developer, GM is not the company to work at. Save yourself the trouble and apply to Ford.