Enjoyable coworkers, but stress from competitive culture - Design Release Engineer General Motors (GM) Employee Review

Learned a lot and grew my technical acumen that helped boost my career opportunities at the right time Managers were understanding and appreciative

Long standups (1hr+!) which is opposite of what the agile playbook recommends (15mins)

I was able to learn some interesting things in robotics, computer vision, etc. These jobs can be hard to come by, so it was a nice entry point. Plenty of chances to prove your worth, considering the incompetence of some of the managers and leads (but dont expect to be paid for the effort, you gotta show the effort first and you *might* get an early promotion)

Layoffs are frequent and nonsensical. Absolutely no warning that it will happen, you just wake up one day with the meeting on your calendar. Pay is OK. After being laid off late May, I found a job in a month or two that paid more (150k base -> 180k base) The things I learned were almost entirely self taught. Leads and management provided zero structure. They didnt use jira at all. They didnt write up business requirements for projects. Leads didnt create technical requirements. Milestones were vague. Everything was completely unorganized due to the inexperience of upper management and engineering leadership.