General Motors

The people are by far the best part about GM. Everyone on the team I was put on was super welcoming and happy to help when I needed assistance. I was assigned a mentor who was pivotal in helping me learn the systems and get work done.

The benefits in general are pretty good, although with the financial benefits like the 401k match, HSA, and relocation benefits, all have a long vesting period before you get to keep the extra money.

Lots of days off. With GM being a company that has worked with unions, there are nice extra days off you get that you would not get at most companies, like the two days off around Easter and a couple of weeks of lighter work in the summer when the plants go down.

GM is willing to help people learn. They offer lots of free resources for you to explore what you would like, and they offer a subsidy for any advanced education you attend while working at GM.

Work-life balance was very good. I never had to work more than 40 hours, although I did have to work at some odd times sometimes, but it was not a big deal.

The overall company is going in the right direction. They have fully embraced the EV future and are very passionate about it.

• The misuse of the Software Developer title. When hired for the job, they gave me very little information about what I would be doing. They gave me the name of the team I would be joining, but nothing more about the general tasks of the job. I assumed it would be software development given the title, but it was not. The team I was assigned to was focused on IT work and admin work. While at GM, I barely touched any code as a software developer, whether it be developing or testing. I feel like this really left a sour taste in my mouth, as I felt I was misled the whole time I was there. There is nothing wrong with IT work; however, there is a clear difference between IT work and software development, and it was not made clear what the position entailed.

• Lots of red tape. It felt like I was spending more of my time getting permissions to do things than actually doing any work. I feel maybe 80% of the time I spent was navigating the system to do something rather than just doing the work easily. I understand that big corporations have policies that they need to follow, but it is easy to see why startup EV companies like Tesla move much faster and are able to gain a competitive advantage because of this.

• Too many meetings. Many times, there were meetings set up that could have easily been an email, but a 30-minute meeting had to be set up instead. This led to many team members having their full day just packed with meetings, many of which are general team meetings. For example, the daily standup, which usually takes 5 minutes at other companies, took us 30 minutes every day. For this project, there were too many people in the standup and too much talking about what people's problems were during the meeting, leading to more time wasted if the problem wasn't relevant to you.

• Too many systems to learn. There are so many systems at GM to learn, an uncountable number of them to me. It seems like every week there was a new fire to put out from something I had never heard of. In addition to this, there is no documentation on what system is used for what and how to use the system, leading to more meetings needing to be set up and more time wasted of those who have to explain what a system does and what it is used for.

• Pay is low. I get the feeling GM was able to use the pandemic to hire a lot of students at a salary that they could not otherwise because the job market was so tight in the first couple of months of the pandemic. I certainly fell into this, as I accepted this position at a salary I probably would not have taken if I had other options. Although I can't fault GM for this, they were still hiring while other companies were scared to.

Be very clear about the job responsibilities for people before they take the job.

Also, try to cut down on the red tape and the number of meetings. So much time is wasted that could be spent doing real work.