I get the sense Walmart's internal heirarchy has the same problem as GM's.

I.e. that they've both been around long enough that their management is staffed with people who owe their live to the company, and therefore have a very different perspective on it than anyone outside the company.

Feed enough corporate rah rah and keep knowledge workers from seeing any of their low level employees, and I imagine it would start to look pretty good.

Walmart and WalmartLabs are two different entites. One is headquartered in Bentonville (AR) and the other is headquartered in San Bruno (CA). The Labs is the technology entity that is funded very generously by Walmart. I work for Walmart and I find the environment very fast paced, colleagues are very skilled and the pay is at par with Google and Amazon.

My current and previous jobs were with well funded non-IT companies that have an IT arm with their own executive structure. Unfortunately, the company is still shackled by shareholders who have their own ideas and do not understand on one hand, you have a massive company with huge profits. On the other hand you have another area, more nimble that is trying to innovate. Things eventually bleed (or, are bleeding over).

I wish you the best of luck. Not just for your job, but for Walmart. The world needs competition.

Last I checked the pay at Walmart Labs was quite a ways away from Google according to Glassdoor.