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Bureaucracy, Silos, and Red Tape

Software Development Team Lead
Former Employee
Worked at General Motors for 2 years
November 8, 2015
Chandler, Arizona
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Opportunities for leadership. Opportunities for management, if so inclined. Decent salary. Good benefits. Large amount of vacation days, if you are able to take them.

Cons

Company claims to want to innovate, but something as simple as using a new library or software requires multiple months to get approved by both architects and the legal team. There's an insane amount of bureaucracy and red tape.

It's a heavily siloed environment where teams focus on only one small piece of the puzzle and refuse to help with anything outside their area of expertise. Developing any application requires multiple meetings with multiple teams who often block anything that falls outside dictated standards.

Hardware requests can take months and require multiple meetings with architects who push back on every request. There's a reactive mentality to only increase hardware resources when problems occur rather than a proactive mentality to prevent those problems in the first place. Standards are enforced by the letter rather than the spirit.

Advice to Management

Give developers more flexibility to innovate, rather than tying their hands with excessive process and red tape.

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