software engineer

senior software engineer

controls engineer

assembler

production operator

General Motors

What is the best part of working at the company?
The best part of working at the company is how the safety of the employees is always the first priority and always has been the same ever since I started working at the firm.
They always provide materials for the employees to be trained with and to work with always and to make sure each worker gets the best possible experience in their own way and to ensure they have all their skills to make the most efficient work available for the employees in their organization.
The company has its strengths in terms of quality management and they are very competitive in their market segment.
I love working with the company because there’s something unique about the company so am always happy when going to work. There’s always work and happiness in my heart and mind and it’s always been the same ever since I started working for the company.  
Thanks to the company management team for helping us get the best out of the work we have been doing always.
Thank you.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The most stressful part is when we plan on going to work and we don’t have the necessary materials to work within our schedule and later being asked to timed out in the middle of our shift. It’s the only thing that makes us feel stressed and we don’t want to have the same schedule anymore. We want to work to the fullest possible hours and even extra hours as we call it overtime because we love to work.
Thank you 

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
The work environment is the best place I have ever worked in my life and for the culture like at the company level is we all work together to create the best workplace for everyone and for the company. 
Thank you 

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
I love working for the company so I enjoy every single day I am at work.

typical day - non stop fast paced washing dishes, and silverware/cookwear in a hot, loud and smokey kitchen.

What I have learned - I have learned that you have to work for your money, a job must be well done if you want to get paid, how to wash dishes, and carry many at once,as well as how to correctly and efficiently multi-task in a fast paced environment.

Management - I dislike management due to the fact that they over hired for a seasonal job, which gives everybody very few shifts and even they help set the negative attitude in the workplace.

My co-workers - I get along with my co-workers,we work together in perfect harmony. It's a team effort to ensure we keep ahead and don't fall behind with the dishes. but some times my co-workers mainly the cooks, are trying to work too hard which involves accidents. I have almost been hit with a pizza pan straight out of the oven numerous times.

Hardest part of the job - Hardest part of the job is being safe. I'm not worried about me hurting myself, yet I am worried about co-workers being careless with hot/sharp objects hurting me by accident, or opening doors really fast and hitting me while I am carrying dishes

Most enjoyable part of the job - 3 things actually. 1. Is when the dishes stop piling up for like 5 minutes and you get a moments rest. 2. The free beverages, so i can constantly stay hydrated. And 3. When the kitchen shutsdown and I can go home!

For me personally it was a great experience as a mechanical engineering intern. Typical day of work for the majority of my term was, check emails, start work that I had scheduled out for myself (ex. complete mesh fixes for hood (different programs), get certain part of project done, go to meeting, lunch, finish work I had planned, write down what needs to be done for tomorrow (personal thing I had started doing as a reminder) and then time to go home. Work life balance that was outlined by my manager was great, allowed us to manage our own time and trusted us to complete our work.  The environment was constructed to allow individuals to grow in terms of technical ability and also showcase the different achievements or findings they came across to the local team.  My coworkers were always helpful and mindful that I was still developing as a junior CAE, they literally never turned down my need of assistance whether it was for software or a structural assessment for a specific component or work order.  Allowed us to see the physical side of the job (the actual plant where some of the parts were being made was across the street from us), we were shown this on the tour for interns.  Overall the job encouraged growth, doing work you thought would benefit the company and the customer.  Thought it was an amazing intern job. Also a bunch of extra curricular activities like team lunches/team building exercises, as well as larger scale activities like a summer barbecue for the centre or a basketball/foosball tournament.

My typical day started with supervising all aspects of the customer/dealer payment procedures. From opening the mail, identifying cheques/cash payments and processing company deposits.

Afternoons were spent compiling reports for Head Office and upper management, processing invvoices for vendor payments, signing cheques, bank reconciliations, report approvals for the bookkeepers/data entry clerks. Any time an employee was unable to attend to their duties, the supervisors were either responsible for the reallocation of said duty or were expected to step in and provide the necessary coverage.

I worked in an office that grew to a size of 120 employees. For the most part of 24 years all was enjoyable. The majority of the staff were enthusiastic about their jobs and excited when they met or exceeded goals set out for them.

The hardest part of my job was completing and delivering negative employee reviews especially when said employee had a longer tenure with General Motors.

The most enjoyable aspect of my time with the Corporation was gaining the knowledge and expertise in other departments which provided me the ability to step in and assist in special assignments and backlog support. I enjoy a variety of duties and learning/teaching new skills.

That place ran on having band-aids put on everything. Machinery would fall apart every shift and management was never concerned about fixing it properly. The whole mantra was just to keep the line running, and quality suffered because of that. 

It didn't help that management in charge in Assembly was clueless and arrogant. They wouldn't listen to anyone or take any suggestions. They were aggressive and authoritarian, and just demanded that people follow their orders, even when it made no sense to anyone. Everything that happened in there was our fault, no matter what. Machines would break down, parts would come late to the line. Everything was our fault. 

If I could describe this job as one thing, it would as a punching bag. That's all I was. I took the abuse from the people working on line who were frustrated by various things (often things that frustrated me too..) and then I'd take the abuse from my boss who would blame the Group Leader for everything, instead of doing his job and following up on the root cause. 

We NEVER once received a compliment or a remark about how we did something well. Just constant griping about how we could have done better, even after great shifts where we all ran our tails off. 

Work/life balance is non-existent. Be prepared to marry yourself to this job. 6 days/week, and often asking to come in for overtime, I literally saw these people more than my own family. Pay was good, but it has to be to entice people to work there if they need the money.

1) a corrupted hiring process of the type "a friend brings a friend". The managers know each other for years since the time they worked together for a different company in a different country and push each other up. That results in utter incompetence in all management levels.  They can't make a simple decision but instead waste time on meetings, transfer responsibilities, manipulate with the data to show a fake performance of their teams.

2) a poor software development culture. The code is written such a way that produces bugs in a long term perspective. No one cares that that would fire back in other teams or later in time. No one care to re-write the code again and again for each new car model. 

3) There is no feeling of ownership, a common goal, thinking out-of-box. Developers and leads are mostly concentrated on the performance of their own team and miss the company goal.

4) The employees are distracted from work by spamming emails from the management, useless mandatory courses, celebrations of all imaginable holidays from around the world, endless talking and meetings, changed policies etc. In fact, the company does everything possible for employees to be less efficient and spend less time on the actual work.

5) No innovation. GM is an integrator of the solutions provided by vendors. If you want to develop an exciting technology, you are at the wrong address.  

6) Salary and benefits are huge. But they do not correlate with the competence and performance of an average employee. The company only does it because it can afford due to being a huge automotive corporation with big money.  


I worked at GM for just shy of 10 years and this place is something else. I was a young idealistic kid when I started out there; a real nose-to-the-grindstone type who would work his fingers to the bone if needed. After almost a year of giving this place the most effort any young worker could, a string of horrible Foreman's turned me from a workhorse into a professional obstacle in a war that would only ever finally end when I decided to leave.

If you want to have pretty significant mechanical abilities but then have an ECE with an English major micromanage every second of your day while knowing absolutely nothing about car manufacturing, this is the place for you. 

Want to deal with a barrage of petty tyrants who will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat to protect their own authority? Sign up here. This place is so unbelievably toxic and frankly ridiculous that I'm surprised it wasn't a hit reality series or a sitcom.

The only thing, and I mean *only* thing that makes this place worthwhile will be your future coworkers. Your comisseration will create lasting friendships and the adversity of having an anthropologist try to tell you how to paint fenders properly will bind you in a very special solidarity with one another. I miss some of these people terribly, but that's about it. This is the worst place I have ever worked, and I've picked apples in the fall with frozen fingers in biting wind for minimum wage.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The large number of positions inside the company you are able to train for and obtain. If variety is important, you'll have many opportunities to move around the plant.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Keeping up with production numbers. Fulfilling these quotas implemented by the corporation your first year and also being able to achieve higher amounts 10 years later.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
The work environment at GM is based on production numbers and being able to produce consistently. You will be trained well. Safety is also a very important part of their manufacturing process.
The work culture is full of pride in their excellence they have shown for over 100 years in some of their first divisions that over the years have came together and now has became the giant auto company,  GM.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Trying to find small ways to do your job a little more efficiently and always safely. Seeing newly made friends. Also longtime friendships you have made with workers Trying to achieve similar goals as your own.

Today at the Canadian HQ in Oshawa, I noticed two cupboards in the communal kitchen with misc. kitchen supplies were freshly locked together with a loop of metal security cable + a padlock. I was told it was locked because the cabinet contents were "only meant for executives." I said "even the forks?" and was told, yes, even the forks. GM feels the need to keep those basic flat dull compostable wooden forks locked away from anyone who isn't an executive. This single experience was completely emblematic of the culture at GM. I didn't have a fork to eat my lunch and the person I spoke to acted like I was wrong for taking a fork from this supply cupboard previously. Before COVID, there was an actual cafeteria with a team of people preparing and serving food, a salad bar, tons of cutlery etc. RTO has been a total slap in the face. There aren't enough desks, meeting rooms, or even parking spaces in the Canadian HQ office for people to come in 3x per week. It seems that RTO is just a measure GM took to help nudge people towards retiring or quitting. I feel like the "putting on clown makeup" meme going to the office. And the coffee is offensively bad.

Over 150 of us were strung along as temps for three years before finally being hired full-time, only to be laid off less than a year later, just one month shy of qualifying for benefits. The pay was decent for repetitive, low-skill work, but the instability, poor communication, authoritarian management style, and terrible work-life balance made it hard to feel respected or secure. We were promised stability and Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB), but most were let go just before qualifying. Job postings during this limbo felt like a slap in the face. GM talks a lot about values, but they didn’t show up when it mattered.

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Software engineer 14 salaries reported	$104,643 per year
Senior software engineer 9 salaries reported	$132,000 per year
Controls engineer 3 salaries reported	$101,667 per year
Assembler 6 salaries reported	$28.25 per hour
Production operator 6 salaries reported	$30.28 per hour

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