General Motors (GM) reviews

This is a big one. If you do not start your job before April, you are not eligible for a pay raise next year, even if you work your butt off. So if you start at April 2015, you will not get a pay raise until April 2017. HR should be more transparent about this, because that is essentially a pay cut. So if you are considering taking an offer, you need to take this into consideration and/or after your final offer, bring up this topic and ask for an additional several percentage increase. People are not held accountable for their work, and the work ends up going to those who have work ethic and technical knowledge. It's hard to fire people. The burden is on you to document their incompetence. And even when you do that, they would rather move the person to another team than to deal with HR. GM is starting to hire a lot of new college hires. It appears their strategy is to hire a lot of experienced people and throw a lot of money to incentives them to join. It's not easy to insource your entire IT operations so you need to pay people enough to deal with all the BS that comes along with off shored contractors. For example, the off shored contractors are not cooperative when it comes to knowledge transfers. We even have applications that do not have source code and we are forced to decompile the source code! Are the people who ran the projects previously held accountable? Nope, you just deal with it and make it work. Now that a lot of the hard work is done, their are hiring a lot of college new hires. They don't pick from top universities with strong engineering programs. GM seems to value EEO and hire from a lot of HBCU...more than I see from other companies. On a few teams I know of, there is on average a 1:1 ratio of experienced engineers to college hires. Some teams more, some teams less. But you will be spending a lot of time hand holding the new hires. Not only are some of them incompetent, but lack professionalism, such as coming in late, long lunches, missing meetings, sleeping on the job. In my opinion, once IT is full in-sourced, GM will start laying off the experienced engineers in hopes the new college hires who are paid a lot less will be able to take over. So if your are considering an offer, you should ask how many direct college hires are on your team and how many are experienced. Very little small perks. Bring your own coffee or pay $1.50...The company has no license for wireframe tool, so get use to using Microsoft Paint. No Christmas celebration or little perks to boost morale...just come in and work. Poor planning. I work in the Georgia Innovation Center. They've poorly planned the hiring process. People are stacked on top of each other, forced to share desks. We ended up renting a facility 15 minutes north, in Cumming to relieve the situation. Wifi is so slow because of the amount of people and poor infrastructure planning. If you can't plan for things you know will happen, how can you plan for things that you know won't happen? From an informal poll, most people live south of the facility so this is more time the company is taking away from you. Other companies I know are moving in town..GM...15 minutes further north. Myself and who joined before me did not have monitors docking stations for several months because of poor planning. Still currently only have 1 monitor. Even though they call the centers Innovation Centers, your job really is to take over and maintain poor performing, buggy old applications. And don't even bring up rewriting anything, no one wants to bring GM to 2015. The managers are generally non technical. Don't bother asking them what framework their apps use. If you ask them Spring or Struts, they'll think you're talking about the suspension system of a car. Ask them a question on PowerPoint, they can answer that. You have unlimited sick days. What this means is, you only take an entire day off if you are on your death bed. Other wise you work from home. Everything is slow. Need access to something? Fill out a ticket and wait a week. Need a firewall rule open? Fill out a ticket and wait two weeks. Of course, these blockers do not mean that *your* deadline gets pushed back.

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 hyper car. 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. 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 their image.