General Motors

• Great benefits
• Often fairly relaxed
• Most coworkers are fairly nice
• Looks great on your resume

GM has a culture of mediocrity that seeps through in everything it does. I've met a few sharp colleagues here, but I've met just as many who are barely capable of using a computer, much less performing their job.

The people in tech leadership positions often tend to be more incompetent than the grunts, and this can lead to drama and politics.

The business is Waterfall, and the Agile practices followed by developers are purely ceremonial.

No amount of extra effort will ever get you recognized. If anything, it will get you in trouble. It doesn't matter that you've worked far more hours and far more efficiently than many of your coworkers; you look the same to the company as the guy who works 6 hours a day, overestimates his tasks, and lies on his timesheets.

Overperforming makes you a threat and will be met with retribution. Do not depend on the "no-retaliation" policy.

If you don't lie on metrics, you will be crushed by those that do.

• Outdated tech stack.
• Incompetent, infuriating UX teams.
• Incompetent, infuriating business.
• Incompetent facilities.
• Incompetent, political management.
• Uncompetitive base pay.
• Teams are completely, irrevocably siloed.
• Awareline is a joke.
• Incompetent leaders are transferred instead of fired.
• If you're a senior developer, you'll probably be the first to go when there's a layoff.

Things happen at a glacial pace. This is just the nature of a large company like GM.

The company is all talk and no action.

Nothing I say will ever make a difference.

(GM is a massive bureaucracy several times the size of several countries' entire populations. This is a job you take if you want to be a faceless drone working for the Man, writing mediocre code in outdated technologies that's just good-enough to not attract attention.)

(It's also a job you take if you're fresh out of college and want to get some experience in the real world.)

(It's not a job you take if you want to be challenged, or if you do your best at everything you do.)