General Motors

Decent salary, benefits, PTO, 401k, and bonuses, while they last...

Too many to list them all, but here are a few:

1. No other company will disappoint you faster and harder. You will go from 60 (great company, I’m proud to work here) to 0 (I’m ashamed of working here) faster than a hypercar.

2. No matter how much money you made for the company, or how much experience you bring, or what unique skill set you possess, or how many extra hours you voluntarily worked to make your boss look good, or how many rave reviews you get from the business and your co-workers, if you are not part of the inner circle of your Director, you will never, ever, get a fair year-end review, and you will be eventually let go in the most embarrassing of ways.

3. The cronyism in IT leadership is cynical and disgusting. There is no way you will advance your career or get promoted if you are not one of the good old boys’ club. I saw many people doing absolutely nothing for the company get better reviews than many of us who were really impacting the bottom line with our work.

4. When you are being hired, they sell you the idea that this company is so huge that opportunities will jump out of everywhere and you can move to other areas if you are not happy where you are. This is a lie. They are willing to let you go before they move you.

5. Managers/Directors are the worst I’ve had to work with in my 20+ year long career. Most of them lack basic people skills, not to mention managing skills. There is no transparency at all, and always with hidden agendas.

6. Leadership is concerned about costs and will lay off thousands, but at the same time they are the main waste generators. I saw projects thrown out the door after a year of working on them, with labor and hardware resources already paid for. You can see many managers with one or zero people under them, hundreds of people doing nothing, waiting for projects to be approved, especially when you are a new hire. Months can come and go before you get to work on something.

7. They call themselves “IT Innovators”, but nothing is further than the truth. There is no innovation, only poor attempts at imitation. Don’t fall for the “zero crashes, zero emissions… zero everything” hype. With this IT leadership it simply just won’t happen. How could it, when basic essential processes that could be easily automated are still being managed by pen and paper? Read the news and follow the competition and you will see who really is leading in this area.

8. Worst of all, your career and skill set will come to a screeching halt. They will freeze in time. Due to the red tape, favoritism, or just plain ignorance of the decision makers, you have to work with only the technology approved by them. After leaving, many of us are now facing the reality that all of the latest technology trends that are in demand in the job market are not the ones used here. Getting a job offer will be harder for you if you stay too long in this company, because you will not have the experience with the latest technologies.

Lastly, trust the bad reviews. They are closer to reality than the good ones. I would second-guess the good reviews, especially when most of them were entered between February and April of 2019, the period when most layoffs happened. Many of the good reviews were even entered on the same day. I’d be very suspicious of these. They seem like those reviews people are “asked” to enter when the company wants to improve its image.

It's hard to preach to the deaf and blind, but in the rare event that someone from leadership sees this comment, take a deep, good look at what you are doing to this company and the brand. Your decisions may have made more money for investors now, but public perception is at its worst level right now, and only time will tell the impact it will have in the near future. Just look at the bad comments on social media. They easily overtake the good ones. You have destroyed many dreams and loyalties that will never come back. My family has been a loyal customer of your products for more than 20 years. We have owned a dozen of your cars, but after the way we were treated, we can no longer be ambassadors of the brand and will never buy another vehicle from you.