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General Motors (GM)

Engaged Employer

General Motors (GM) reviews

3.5

59% would recommend to a friend

(11,652 total reviews)
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Mary Barra

50% approve of CEO

45% positive business outlook

General Motors (GM) has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 11,652 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The General Motors (GM) employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufactura industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

12K reviews
1.0
Apr 30, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

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

Cons

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.

2.0
Jul 2, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Generous benefits (401k, holidays, PTO) Depending upon your boss you might have the option of flex schedule For college hires the raises every 6 months and final promotion after 3 years leaves you close enough to market rate salary wise. The company bonus in previous years was overly generous. Now that sales are declining people have become used to unrealistic > 100% multipliers. I started as a college hire in 2013 and stayed with the company for over 5 years working in different capacities. If you want to move around and try different roles that is possible now (was not so easy when I started).

Cons

At this point the red tape is out of control. Whole teams exists for quality assurance, and no I am not talking about testers. I am talking about people who don't code or know how to code, reviewing your changes with a checklist and creating more and more hoops to jump through to do your job. Do you want a database refresh? Ok fill out this Sharepoint excel request, then copy all the data from that excel file into a special format Excel. Take the special format excel and copy its structure into an email and reference the line number. Email that to the DBA (not-even-kidding). The company has built such a wall around deploying stuff it consumes 50+% of your development cycle. The company was hesitant to deal with low performers for years and now they are paying the price. Generous benefits and an environment where free-riding was pretty easy has resulted in lower than expected attrition. Now that auto sales are declining and we are entering into a crunch cycle, HR and management is trying to clean house. Under performers are being put on performance improvement plans (a nice way of saying 'go away') and those who don't leave once on these plans are typically fired within 6 months. Hiring, except for college hires, has been curtailed. Unfortunately the above does not bode well. Already many teams are overworked carrying the burden of the non-workers. Now that many under performers are being sent packing, their partial workload falls on the rest of the team. This is causing the already overworked high performers who are fed up with the red tape to leave. What is left is mediocrity at this point.

2.0
Feb 29, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Teammates nice, fairly laid-back atmosphere. Good vacation days and lots of holidays (eg closed entire week of Christmas). Work mobile phone provided. Decent 401k match (but see Con below).

Cons

Spreadsheet-happy culture. So many spreadsheets. And Word docs. Everything here is Microsoft--every tool (Sharepoint, TFS, Visual Studio), every document (PPT, Word, Excel everywhere), every computer (no Macs in sight), every mindset. Every decision or thing is documented in a spreadsheet or a cumbersome ticketing system. This is typical of big companies, but is the worst I've seen here. One week to get svn access granted, etc. No git, no github, no developer VMs, no ssh access to outside world (so you can't even clone git open source repos) etc. No equity compensation of any form (no RSU, no ESPP even). Low salary for experienced devs. Lengthy 401k match vesting (3 yrs). If you drive a non-GM car, you are relegated to pariah-parking--all the close-in parking is GM-car only. No typical "tech company" niceties--no free snacks at all, no free sodas, no free coffee, no free tea, no free plasticware (seriously, you are supposed to buy plastic spoons if you need, from the cafeteria), no paper plates, no cups, no toasters in office anywhere, no game room etc (one ping-pong table for entire 4-story building in a corner of one floor). Giant breakroom/kitchen area filled with empty cabinets and empty drawers.

Viewing 19 - 21 of 11,652 Reviews

Glassdoor has 16,480 General Motors (GM) reviews submitted anonymously by General Motors (GM) employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if General Motors (GM) is right for you.