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General Motors (GM)

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GM - A Career Role Of The Dice - Software Developer General Motors (GM) Employee Review

2.0
Jul 30, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Easy interview Open dress code Work life balance* Good culture* Flexible PTO* * - Depends on team.

Cons

Basically, working at General Motors as a Software Developer as a new college hire is a total roll of the dice. Before you start, you need to be assertive about what you want to be doing. When I started, the company attempted to put me into a position that would have been less than ideal for my career, and didn't align with what I thought and was told I would be working on in general. I wanted to be a full stack developer, they attempted to put me on a mainframe management project. This would have been career suicide. I was told "sometimes at GM, we just get what we get". I had to start a political campaign to get myself out of this situation. Some teams allow abuse and unrealistic project deadlines to propagate down from the business. I have seen devs overwork themselves, pushing in code at 2AM and working 12 hour days. Some managers are ok with this and expect this, and celebrate the "rock stars" who are slinging garbage into Bitbucket to just "get it working". Meanwhile, code reviews aren't really a thing, nor is unit testing or any code standards. The staffing strategy is (and has been) literally this - replace the talent who leaves due to being underpaid by eager-to-please college hires. Lots of tribal knowledge, poor or total lack of standards, and toxic environments are cultivated as a by-product of this. My advice: if you want to be marketable and are coming into this job. Push to work with modern technologies and advocate for yourself and the type position you want. Don't let yourself get steamrolled. There's a lot of garbage in this organization and I have personally witnessed many suffer.

Explore other reviews about General Motors (GM)

5.0
Jul 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

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

Cons

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

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General Motors (GM) Response
3d
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with us. We would like to thank you for your contributions to GM and appreciate the feedback!
2.0
Jul 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

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)

Cons

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.

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