Thread regarding General Motors layoffs

Yeah, I don’t understand the hiring process at all for NCHs. I know a lot of people who interviewed and were hired for specific roles and teams, and then showed up for orientation and found out they would be doing something completely different. I started in the role I was hired for and was re-orged to something different like 3 weeks in.

Bump

The processes and technology were awful. I used to laugh to myself when we had town halls and executives used to harp on how much ‘innovation’ we were doing, because I was pretty sure GMIT is where innovation went to die. At least for my team, our business partners wanted nothing to do with us or any ideas we may have had. They wanted the same dated solutions they had been using for the past 10+ years. Probably for the best since we didn’t have enough skilled devs on my team to do much anyways...

Similar story from me about management being clueless. I was a NCH with a Master's in CS and was put in a QA role. Took me almost 2 years to switch into a Dev role using sh--ty technology and bad processes. I definitely feel like GM has stunted my growth and I should have left a long time ago. I've got an offer with another company and now I'm just hoping for severance.

I left GM IT last year and had a similar experience as well. First, I was hired as a business major straight out of college with no assurance on what type of role I would even hold inside of GM IT. Upon arrival and orientation, I was informed that I would be joining an application dev team... as a developer. I had absolutely no experience in development and nothing on my resume stated I did either. Nevertheless, learned what I was doing along the way with some help from great senior devs along with the fact that there were others in my same situation to learn with. In my four years here I worked on 3 dev teams and they were all the same, 2-3 senor devs/ dev leads, and 5+ NCH devs, with usually only one or two having CS/ college experience. A lot of the time was spent messing around while two or three team members did all of the work, going to stand up and making up some excuse of what I worked on the day before, and that was that. Good enough to get by. In my experience most dev teams are like this at GM, it’s insane.

Part of the problem is they would hire any joker with a STEM degree to do software development. And even the STEM degree wasn't an absolute requirement.

That led to cases where they'd have a 27 year old with a PhD in physics as a level 7 senior dev, when he'd never written a program in his life.

The rest of the team had to pick up the slack. Which wasn't easy when others on the team were 22 year old graphics designer doing dev, and others with similarly unqualified backgrounds.

A small percentage of the team had to do all the work.

When last year's layoffs came, those of us propping up the team were let go, and the non programmers kept.

Who knows what management is thinking?

I left GMIT on my own last year and had almost the exact same experience. We had one really good Sr. Dev and the rest were dead weight. Directors would set deadlines for projects that were unrealistic for the amount of work that needed to be done. Then add in ‘100% on-time delivery’ as a CAP goal and that was enough to make my life hell.

Most of the mid-level and senior devs had no clue how to do anything, or just didn’t care because they knew they could coast by on minimum effort. They would come in late and leave early everyday and were the first to complain if they had to alter their schedules for a meeting or something. This left me and some other NCHs on my team working frantically through our nights and weekends every week to deliver.

I’ve been gone for almost a year now and I’ve learned more in a few months at my new job, than I did during my 3.5 years at GM.