General Motors

The company is currently undergoing a 100% EV transformation, which makes it an exciting place to work.

There are good internal opportunities. These offer lateral moves with no pay raise, which is a con, but they are a good opportunity to add new skills to your toolbelt for when you look for external opportunities.

Benefits are good, such as health insurance costs and the vacation/holidays given. There are unlimited sick days, but only if you are sick for less than one week.

The company used to have a no work from home policy. With COVID, the company changed and is now hybrid, requiring employees to come in twice a week for most roles.

The company is pretty stable as long as you meet expectations.

Maternity and paternity leave time is very good.

• Management has everyone chasing a carrot stick for promotions. They will get you to do more than you can and have you competing with each other, but at the same time say it's "one team." They will promote very few (it is usually the manager's favorite).

You are better off putting that effort to study and apply for a higher-paying company than trying to be promoted for a 10% raise.

• Low salary compared to other companies. During your end-of-year review, you will get your review, which states your salary and shows where you compare to the "market rate." That is internal to GM (which is lower) and not the actual market rate.

• There are some hires who know a higher-up inside the company (relative or friend), and they get hired for pay grade roles for which they are not qualified.

• There is currently a lot of hiring. With that, team dynamics are changing fast. Many people on my previous team left, and in a very short time, there were many new hires. If you didn't leave, you got stuck holding up the fort, teaching new hires the ropes, and yes, most likely, they are getting paid more than you.

• You are hired as a "Software Engineer" or a "Software Developer." The role will require you to do more than that; you will be an analyst, tester, operations, etc. I would often find myself swamped with production and non-production support tasks, rather than actual development, getting 3 AM calls and running production deployments past midnight.

• With the company going 100% EV, they adapted SAFe agile. I would spend many hours in scrum ceremony meetings (sprint planning, retrospectives, backlog refining) and not have enough time to do my actual work. Nothing good would come out of some of the meetings; for example, retrospectives would just be scheduled to rant and check the checkbox for following agile.

• Company is hiring a lot of college hires (a pro in my opinion, due to a young workforce), but with that, there are fewer seniors, which means fewer mentors and fewer knowledgeable individuals.

You expect so much from your employees, but your pay is not competitive enough to justify it.