General Motors

Good work-life balance, amazing vacation days, and amazing benefits. The college hire program maintains 4.4% raises every 6 months, with your last raise being 10% (sometimes more if your manager fights for you, but this will rarely happen).

Great work-life balance; think less than 35-hour work weeks because most people won't notice who you are or how long you've been in the office. I've had a coworker who routinely took 4-hour lunches and slept in his chair. It took him 1 year to get "let go" (he moved to another company after being pushed out), so it's very hard to get fired unless they are having routine layoffs like a few years ago.

Laid-back environment. Deadlines don't realistically matter; everything gets pushed back, so there's very little stress.

They're trying to be better and work with newer coding languages, which is nice. They've heavily invested in CI/CD and cloud software for easy deployments.

After graduating the new college hire program, opportunities for advancement require 5+ additional years of experience. Each year only gives inflation raises until you've proven your worth and "loyalty." This leaves the majority of people to leave after 3-4 years because the time spent versus the promotion advances are not worth it. Likewise, this means almost all your fellow employees are newly hired workers, with little to none senior devs to be found. If the senior devs are good, they are overworked.

Management is non-existent. I would say the majority (unless you're lucky with a good manager) don't care about your career or how you progress, only butts in seats. You are basically treated like a number in a spreadsheet. This is probably because of the age of the company – a lot of old souls who don't like change.

Four out of the six managers I've had in three years (a lot, right?) have all left the company.

It's also a roll of the dice if you get on a good team or not. The politics in the company is a big reason why management ends up leaving.

You have to play the politics game to get promoted. But none of these cons are limited to General Motors; they're just typical big company pains.

Invest more in the college hires you have: promote earlier, lock in on talent, and offer competitive compensation to keep them. Hire more senior developers as well for mentoring. A rising tide lifts all ships.