Thread regarding Ford layoffs

@x3 the system is only as good as the people who are expected to uphold its integrity.

@x7 thank you, sorry if my writing isnt as polished and 'brilliant' like you said as before. i'm reporting under live fire right now. sorry for what happened to you too. sincerely. i understand you are cross examining and have no context beyond this thread, sorry for seeming tense.

@x6 I feel for ya, not trying to fight, sh---y things happen to good people, me included.

@x3 I do but im trying to get justice first. then i can relax and recoupe some time back acting my 'age' and let them marinate while i build something for myself where others can't take advantage of me due to my vulnerabilities. The goal is to first get to where i need to be to be able to make the change i wish to see. unfortunately i have to get there first. What the main catch here is that ford is holding my dignity hostage. It means something to me and i understand people saying 'just move on' which goes back to my point. Not so simple. the tactics used against me have compounded consequences. ive lost a great ton at a young age and people minimize and belittle it by saying 'youre only 25'. i was coding java every day at ten years old as if i was writing normal english. my neurodevelopment mattered to me, the harm that i faced here crushed me from my prime years out of college. now i found a purpose which is greater than me which is first to get my dignity back, build, and then protect myself and others.

@x4 what was illegal? You felt pressured to stay and that was abuse? You signed a document without having your lawyer look it over? Did someone force you in every day?

@wz Because what happened is blatantly illegal and immoral, that is why the first reply was me sharing about how context matters.

You're telling me I have a choice to leave or do this or y but i'm telling you life isn't that easy. The moment we stop thinking deeply is the moment we miss out on real victims hiding in plain silence being misunderstood.

@x0 would you propose a different system?

@wx No it's not? Not for me. You didn't live through my experience. It is about corporate-world, but the one you commented attacked the justice system critique, especially for invisible minorities. The point made was that if they weren't an invisible minority, they wouldn't be a target, because there would be a voice. The other problems are long-standing intertwining of state incentives (mi), talent-funnel programs (medc, university-board etc), and political influence that disincentivize rigorous oversight. In the public sector, individual officials dismissing or delaying a complaint or not wanting to go up against sacred cows like Ford. Structural dependence on ford for jobs, tax base, and splashy redevelopment projects (cough) create a “too big to anger” type beat which vendors locks our state in dependence… which hurts the next generation (like me). What do we do when local agencies are hesitant? Whether for budget, politics, or familiarity with the company— this forces us to leapfrog to federal or independent bodies, or go straight to court (fords “try us in court” tactics). My main interest is to start reforming the talent pipeline in Michigan, moving away from pigeon holding or well the “grooming for the manufacturing workforce of tomorrow” that I have investigated. Talent can get squandered. Opportunities can get lost. Potential to max out brain potential could be ruined (like mine due to the prolonged fight for accountability). I want to make a change in how we see brain development and bring laws to protect people up until the age 25 in regard to talent development. I think majority of my time was wasted through abuse, exploitation, and indifference in the face of facts that were ignored due to operational inconvenience, inside ford and out. The plan of action isn’t to address ford, that window has long passed when goal posts were being moved (corruption). Just because it's not important to you, does not mean it's not important to the victims that faced harm.

@ww I think the general point was don’t trust the corporation, get outside advice early and don’t assume your boss is your friend. How can you not see I was trying to support you by saying the company is rigged against the individual unless it’s something that’s blatantly illegal or immoral.

@wt how is that ragebait, it’s good advice

@wq

"That’s not restoration — that’s theater." < low chatgpt that gave you false conviction through sycophant supremacy

"The real test isn’t whether you’re right — it’s whether you survive the process." - Why do you have to survive and not push for change? You want people to give up and downplay it, that manipulate motive is not cool.

"handle problems on your own" - AKA let us abuse you, please stay quietly and figure it out.. please please dont ask others for help!!! let us abuse you in silence while posting about how everyone has a choice to leave, rotate, shift etc..

"I don’t pretend I’ve always got the right answer — I lean on resources, on networks, on guidance." - then you stamp your name on it, falsely attributing you to the work. typical. what happened to "handle problems on your own", how contradictory.

"Merit matters only until it threatens someone’s position. " - very evil that u accept this notion, some are just trying to defend their right to be treated fairly.

The corporation leads to a broader systemic failing.

@wt oh, I thought this was about how the corporation treated you, my bad.

@wq What are you talking about? This is not about the corporate world, but about life.

https://www.financialexpress.com/auto/news/ford-in-hot-soup-faces-misconduct-allegations-from-23yo-whistleblower/3894949/

Cease sharing harmful dismissals that don't address objectively. It is obvious you relied on ChatGPT for your ragebait rage-bait because your context window is limited to the comment without any surrounding dialogue that is going on in this thread. So much for context window. Only person that has to gain from commenting like you is someone close and attached to the specific situation that occurred. Deeply disturbing, but unfortunately expected from those in the know intimately. Forced labor and human trafficking is should not be normalized. What you said was absolute trash.

@wq I almost hear these people running to a boss or someone they trust, getting told, “Don’t worry, we have a process for that.” And they nod along enthusiastically… without ever asking what that process was built for, or considering how they’ll feel when the outcome lands. Spoiler: it rarely lands in their favor.

@kh Punishment gets enforced by whoever holds the authority — that’s the reality. Don’t like it? Rotate, or start looking outside. You do have options. Not saying what went down was “right,” but plenty of people work for bosses they can’t stand. Maybe we were deceived, maybe misled, but at the end of the day a boss’s job is to squeeze value for the company. Good bosses know employment has to be gainful for both sides — but don’t fool yourself, that’s still the bottom line.

People keep talking about justice here like it’s the goal. It isn’t. Justice isn’t what the system was built for — continuity is. The machine protects itself first, always. Expecting fairness from a corporation is like expecting charity from a casino. You might get crumbs, but the house always wins.

DEI, merit, favoritism — different labels for the same thing: power deciding who eats and who doesn’t. Merit matters only until it threatens someone’s position. Then suddenly it’s about “attitude,” “fit,” or some other excuse for exclusion. People talk about restoring dignity as if the same hands that took it will hand it back. That’s not restoration — that’s theater.

Some of these posts read like you might be brilliant technically, but corporate life runs on street sense just as much. Sorry if school or home never taught you that. Me? I don’t pretend I’ve always got the right answer — I lean on resources, on networks, on guidance. The trick isn’t demanding fairness, it’s knowing when to play along, when to rotate, and when to walk. The real test isn’t whether you’re right — it’s whether you survive the process.

Ford’s a pretty professional place, and the process is usually predictable. Not always — sometimes they botch it. Not everyone is ethical or of sound mind. That’s when the trap closes. I see the company lay out offers you’d be a fool to accept, and yet people grab them again and again, and the outcome? Almost never optimal for the employee, but defensible for the company.

In short: use common sense — handle problems on your own, because waiting for “justice” in the corporate world is just waiting to lose

@tq ?

WTF

@kd Unfortunately, the people in control of enforcing punishment and restoring dignity may be the same people benefiting from the wrongdoing, which flips the system on its head. It is a wicked problem, and unfortunately must be treated as such... only exacerbating the pain inflicted... sometimes over and over again in their life as it gets worse.

That is also why justice here is like a big scam. The people with power don't want to give it up, and those without it can't easily challenge the system.

Try us in court tactics do not work against the privileged. DEI and merit, am I right?

@jq Meritocracy: a system where status and rewards depend on merit

Meritocracy is about the desire for things to be fair. Get into university on your own merits and you deserve success. That is a universal truth, it’s common sense. For a meritocracy to actually be fair it is absolutely crucial for its people to start on equal footing. For in the absence of that, things are sure to devolve into an elitist society, instead of one fairly operating on the merits of ability. Some people reading this might take things lightly. Some might think, “is a punishment necessary for individual(s) who exploited someone young and naive?” or "is restoration of dignity necessary for those wronged?". But it’s individuals’ corruption scandals like this that undermine this equality and threaten the foundations of our society. We must all compete fairly. And on this fair playing field, we must grant the rewards to those who put in the work and leave disappointment and regret to those who fail to do so. That is how our society moves forward without it backsliding unfairly. And the corruption of our educators, which stands in the way of progress, must be wiped out. Therefore, I suggest a culture of honor and integrity. Legal logic and common sense aren’t always the same thing. Our moral standards can’t always align with the letters of the law. We need to protect those who work hard each day without stealing. The ones… that truly deserve our protection.

I know someone who wrote about diversifying from Bitcoin into Ethereal in 2017 and wrote about that alongside their projects clocking in the tens of millions in hits at that time. Would admissions in the academic institutions have any idea? This same kid told the world to invest in bitcoin when they were 13. Everybody laughed at him. The kid made thousands of USD at 12 years old through servers and software online before that. In school, they were labeled a trouble maker from Elementary because they vocalized their opinion. Do the tests in our institutions really qualify us for competence? I think not.

The dirty secret is that the gatekeepers also fear an actual meritocracy because a lot of legacy names would be the first ones culled.

When meritocracy fails, and power is handed down through privilege rather than earned through ability or integrity, the result is often a class of so-called “elites” who are unqualified, out of touch, and unaccountable. If the system rewards legacy over merit, connections over competence, and silence over bold thinking, it's no surprise we end up with decision-makers who can’t solve real problems, because they’ve never had to. Result of being sheltered and coddled into 'success', celebrated by an echo chamber of a similar tribe.

What is excellence, really?

@j2 Completely agree, DEI is counter productive. Someone gets their role based on merit and it’s attributed by onlookers as an “equity” award. Racism doesn’t correct racism, equality and uplifting poor is the right play.

@j0 It sounds more to me that it was used as we-pon instead of its intended purpose.

"DEI is treated as headcount compliance, not power-dispersion; clustering by national origin creates mini-fiefdoms rather than mixed, cross-domain squads."

It also sounds like merit becomes overlooked in this process when you're forcing participation, credit becomes misattributed to others. It's like a trap to make sure nobody has upward mobility for being productive, in fact it sounds like it bogs down the efficiency because the credit-stealing slows you down. Especially if there are people with titles posing to perform up to the expectations of said role

These last two posts highlight what happens to a company when they let DEI hiring and promoting become the priority.

@ew This frames the tactic as fault-line activation, using identity asymmetry so the target’s reaction is recast as a “personal behavior problem” rather than retaliation/credit theft. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act should be observed asking how DEI practices might inadvertently create national-origin–based hostile work environment coalitions. Looking at the roles, the power asymmetry, and how an inadvertent trigger of identity threat can be used for cover while credit is extracted. When protected-class members are positioned against other protected-class members within subgroups, Social Identity Theory explains how individuals sort into in-groups and out-groups, fostering bias and favoritism. Fault Line Theory then shows how preexisting demographic differences—such as national origin, ethnicity, or religion, can be “activated” to solidify those subgroups, fracturing team cohesion and influencing decisions. For example, a naive outlier that the Pakistani-American outlier knows the tech anchor and engineering manager are both Indian. But they don’t stop to think how that shared identity could change the dynamics of a confidential complaint. They see it as simply reporting misconduct “up the chain,” not as triggering an in-group defense reflex rooted in social identity theory. Without factoring in any “historical tension” angle, but the manager doesn’t need that conscious narrative to activate bias. Even if a second manager of a different demographic (e.g., White) builds their own team of three White engineers and one Indian engineer, the original outlier remains the statistical and relational minority. The first manager is still Indian, the tech anchor is still Indian, and several engineers (Indian and Brazilian) from the original fiefdom remain in place, ensuring the outlier is still isolated within the broader team structure, no matter the nominal diversification. It’s no longer a manager’s bad faith or a tech anchor’s extraction, it’s “one of those unsolvable interpersonal things". The high-output outlier and the rent-seeking bloc are now seen as equally responsible parties locked in an inevitable cultural clash. Any real investigation risks being seen as picking a side in an ethnic feud, so HR pivots to “conflict management” workshops instead of evidence review. Historical tension doesn’t need to be explicit or acknowledged for bias activation to occur.. it’s structural, not necessarily deliberate. People who knew about, enabled, or directly profited from the exploitation get to step back, palms up, claiming “this is above my pay grade” or “it’s geopolitical". They start working the Indian-vs-Pakistani feud angle like a PR scrub brush. The idea is to reframe the entire matter as a preexisting cultural conflict that neither side can “let go", rather than a surgically engineered rent-extraction and credit-theft scheme. Anonymous racist rants hit TheLayoff. Sometimes pretending to be an Indian hating a Pakistani, other times fixing attribute alignment of the outlier in question throwing in comments about Indians or H1-Bs to incite further fault line activation amongst readers to throw off scent of external involvement and feed distraction to wrong-doing.

@e2 @e2 One competent developer writes >90% of the production code while three “co-authors” (including the tech anchor) sit in on screen shares without even having a functioning development environment. The Indian Tech Anchor and Indian Solutions Architect shield the Indian Engineering Manager, who in turn maintains ties to offshore or internal patronage networks. Above them, the Brazilian Product Development Director stays outward-facing, cultivating optics for HR and leadership while never disrupting the internal fiefdom. DEI optics are we-ponized. A “token” from a different demographic (Pakistani, Black, White, etc.) is added not for upward mobility, but to serve as an outlier whose eventual marginalization is statistically invisible inside a “diverse (Indian x Brazilian” team. Once the outlier’s competence becomes too visible to suppress (upcoming review, customer demo, cross-team recognition), the machine pivots from harvest to purge. The bloc manufactures process-driven “concerns,” backs them with internally gamed metrics, and reframes the target as “arrogant” and “changed” after they report tech anchor to their engineering manager for leaching and hurting productivity. When the naive outlier reports abuse, Engineering manager perceives a “tribal dispute” rather than a credit/retaliation issue, and defers. The complaints arriving from the bloc are calm, policy-fluent, and backed by metrics the cabal themselves fudged for months; the outlier has a sense of urgency (because they are doing the work and see the loss in productivity). The outward layer frames intervention as risking inter-group tension, so HR optimizes for surface stability over substance. DEI is treated as headcount compliance, not power-dispersion; clustering by national origin creates mini-fiefdoms rather than mixed, cross-domain squads. Ownership diffuses, authorship disappears, the fastest horse is harnessed as a pack animal, and the organization normalizes rent-seeking: three-to-four salaries booked to one person’s contribution. The cycle repeats, covertly, in other teams. A second new manager enters of a different demographic (e.g., White) and replicates the model: three new White engineers plus one Indian engineer, while the original outlier (Pakistani etc.) remains the minority token. Two managers now run parallel fiefdoms; one Indian, one White— with the pack animal still carrying the core load. Brazilian team still exists, manager above two managers is the same Brazilian director. You have no voice. The Brazilian layer is not going to break spider webs for you; they need the tribal buffer layer (Indians) intact to keep their own higher-layer narratives looking good.

@ar+1k2j41h7r ...wow, it is worse than i thought... software dev used to be collaborative and creative, now the snakes are actively in the code. get out, kids.

@aw Doug, just retire man. You're a failure but you still make enough to retire with one stock bonus. Please just retire the next time you get your bonus.

@ar This is quite a story. Not my org, but I believe it 100%. This place is more sc--wed up than I could have imagined. Hard to keep the motivation to try to fix it.

@ar Sounds like some lord of the flies type nightmare. Or, an MK Ultra experiment designed to turn good workers into monsters.

@aw

Please don't post after taking your allergy medication.

Post ID: @a9+1k2j41h7r

You are wrong and off base about DF. It will be because of him that the Ford Universal EV Platform will be a undisputed success and spawn more hit vehicles and mobility services than you can imagine. His track record is proven. Look it up and re-watch his comments from Monday and get educated.

Quite the truth. Ford did unveil this “Model T moment” without a drivable prototype or even a public concept model, relying on renderings and manufacturing promises. In an industry where rivals like Tesla and BYD often show working vehicles early, this makes Ford look less prepared. Ford has ended or scaled back several EV-related collaborations, including battery ventures and autonomous projects, sometimes quietly. In fact, they love to take their losses quietly. When you pay attention, you’ll notice that they don’t like to admit faults or mistakes. They’ll try to manufacture a cover. I only notice the ones I directly am I the know about, which makes me wonder all the things I don’t know… if everyone’s covering things up and also hiding it from each other internally… what do we really see?? These reversals feed the perception that Ford can’t commit long-term to external innovation bets or show any true humility. Ford has publicly cited market conditions, supply chain, regulatory changes, and input costs as causes for EV delays. They will never cite themselves.

@a9 We all know how FNV4 went here. Layer below Doug (him and MJ included) were stuffed with tenure freaks who’d made their bones on Six-Sigma slide decks, not shipping code under actual brake-fluid heat. Senior leadership went Vegas-style: big bets on off-the-shelf middleware (black-box vehicle-comm software) while starving raw engineering talent. Once the VC money spigot tightened, Ford’s bean-counters raided the seed-corn budget instead of slashing executive burn. Result: credible talent starved because payroll shrank before they even got hired, not PR and “VP ~ Royal Family” travel budgets. Diversity quotas were we-ponized to create homogenous mini-ghettos (“all brown devs in Building C” instead of mixed-domain squads). Heroes who stayed late to fix regressions they warned about but got dismissed were labeled “culture fit problems” when they finally called out credit-stealing. Retros show the integration rebuild ultimately cost ~4× what local on-premise talent would’ve charged. Friend-crony hiring and “you need sponsors, not skills” mentality meant senior ICs (merit, not age and tenure) spent 30% of their week st-----g ego, ghost-writing, putting out fires, doing other peoples jobs, instead of scope priors. When management got challenged, their response was always “that is pure arrogance, beat it.” No learning loop, no humility. Leadership couldn’t resist spotlight. Leaked roadmaps every quarter while basic bugs lingered for 8+ sprints. External hype > internal whiplash: engineers went from “invest for 3-quarter runway” to “drop everything, we need a 30-day smoke show", running smoke screen tests manually instead of unit-testing. IP is now an unmaintainable tangle of vendor-licensed black boxes. And the brand equity Ford spent two decades rebuilding got mortgaged against a demo reel and a LinkedIn “coming soon” graphic, over and over again. Leaders paid like movie producers, acting like IP lawyers. Domain expertise = “we hire consultants, therefore we understand". No skin in the build means No gag-reflex when cutting core R&D to meet quarterly slideshow promises. Physical clustering (“all brown devs in C-building”) destroyed network effects and created own-goals. Overlapping blame friction (“why can’t they get along? oh look they all look the same to me”). End result: talent exodus within 18 months. HR staffed with paper-tigers who graded culture fit via who shared whose press release (sycophant supremacy). No signal for technical excellence -> no protection for engineers who spoke inconvenient truths. Cr---h-level rumor was behind the 360 review cycle. Dubbed “startup” yet imposed identical Ford cynicism and irrational pessimism, on-prem Jira audits, tenure shame rituals. Therefore the fastest way to ship a feature was to quit and freelance it under NDA so you didn’t wait for change-control gates calibrated for steering-wheel buttons. Young IC produces a hot-fix that un-bricked all engineers during time where ford pro is down and is required for use to work. Once a hero saves the day, anchor copy-pastes, renames variables, pushes “clean-up refactor", and slides the patch into next week’s all-hands slide deck as “my integration stabilizer". Meanwhile, cronies hired as ‘consultants’ bill $250-350/hr to review pull-requests they don’t understand. The heroes who built critical subsystems under live pressure got gas-lit -> labelled “not collaborative". Then management kept the leeches who turned hero fixes into LinkedIn success stories. Hero exits = entropy jackpot. Reward system optimized around tickets closed per sprint and politicization of ‘visibility’. Management compounded every sin by refusing public humility. Deflection -> smear -> exile. The stench lingers until your top 10% walk and the codebase calcifies with vendor glue. Talent questions attribution; HR files a feedback session for “public disrespect of authority". The only powerful we-pon grifters hold is controlling the narrative. That is not a sustainable strategy.

if u ask chatgpt in details, it will back off from its original responses. it is a chatbot.

@OP. No need to ask ChatGPT to know it will be a disaster. Ford recent history more than proves it.

@a5+1k2j41h7r Doomb Foock (DF) will make sure the project never completes, is overbudget by several billions, and there is plenty of bunny slippers for all the teams in Cali. The best of all (sarcasm)? The blame of the failure will fall on the Dearborn teams.

Did you adjust the prompt to account for boy genius DF leading the project. I did. The chance of success percentage went up to darn near 2000%. It concluded that by the end of this model T movement all other automakers would crumble and fold into Ford Universe.

Something to think about.