Thread regarding Ford layoffs

Well, probably Chris Farley's id--t brother will pull the thumb out of his butt and figure out that if you're going to ride on the F-150 then why bother improving it at all? Just build it outright and cut out all the overhead of staff completely. He-l, they could even let the World HQ turn into another abandoned Detroit relic while the C-suite sits around and reenacts scenes from 'Society' or something.

Seriously Ford, just build the F-150 year after year without any improvements and cull everything else.

@rd You just don't get it. You're young, think of this as a residency program for becoming a REAL engineer and not an enthusiast. This is just part of REAL FORD ENGINEERING 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Even our hiring team itself is competent in engineering! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

@ra WISH I WAS FREE AND DIPPED.

Imagine you’re running a stable system (your "node") you built, but over time, you decide to outsource certain responsibilities. This means you’re no longer directly in control of all aspects of the system, yet you still bear the blame if something goes wrong. It’s like you’ve built a car, and you let someone else drive it, they crash it, and then people blame you for “bad brakes” even though it was their driving that caused the accident. The "key" here is that you knew certain failure modes from external dependencies, such as third-party services or other internal teams, metaphorically weather conditions you cannot control or roads you are forced to travel on. These dependencies were critical to your system’s stability, and you had already accounted for their potential failure. For example, if an authentication service goes down, your system might be unable to authenticate users, but this isn’t your fault. You designed your system with that in mind, expecting and handling these failure modes as part of your initial design so you can easily identify this was not your node. One day, the third-party auth service fails near the end of working day, and engineers are blocked. Instead of waiting passively for the dependency to fix the issue like told by managers, you stay late and quickly build a full end-to-end workaround, enabling developers to keep pushing forward the very next day as if nothing was wrong. This solution saves the team, ensuring progress continues smoothly despite the external failure. However, by executive (function) decision, this fix was never merged into the main codebase, it was carefully tucked “under the hood” and ultimately forgotten. Now, let’s say the manager becomes proactive and decides to distribute what you had designed and built yourself from the ground up. Later, you discover that parts of the system you built are being "refactored" without your knowledge or involvement. The manager delegating these distributed changes intentionally sidelined your input, labeling you as “protective” (in advance, proactively) of your original fully-functional end-to-end implemented and secure system, the same system you designed to be 100% stable and reliable. The manager doesn't code and while the distributed workers he delegated "refactoring" to after having the system be "reviewed" by his "friend" who knows "code" from back in "the day", may think they’re improving things, the "seniors" often don’t fully understand the end-to-end implementations or existing failure modes that you already designed around soundly. Despite you designing comprehensive system architecture documentation, incorporating security considerations into business solutions, and articulating these implementations through clear sequence diagrams and overwhelming technical writing for easy handoff of the code that was written across subsystems using 4-5 different languages in the technical stack for its entire full interoperability. The "distributed work" contributors, unfamiliar with the full end-to-end architecture and the known failure modes you had accounted for, begin making changes and their modifications break things, introducing new instability because they don’t understand how the code interacts with its dependencies or the subtle nuances of the system’s design. When things aren't going on as intended, a new tech anchor appears in the team to take care of things. This new tech anchor is the friend that "reviewed" the code in various languages they never touched, or even could understand. When issues arise, you’re still held responsible because it’s your “car”, your system. Yet you’re dealing with problems caused by hidden changes and a lack of transparency, while your original stable design and stable solutions get overlooked. The tech anchor rallies the juniors around this to delegitimize you and has everyone fooled. Meanwhile, you’re stuck trying to fix messes you didn’t create but are still held responsible because "dude, it's your car". So then you create tooling to highlight your error provocative design to diagnose and breakpoint issues from dependencies or new "distributed work" systematically so they can own this work in a way that helps them visualize flows beyond technical diagrams and they might not understand. Others then interpret this diagnostic tooling as proof that your node (system) was unstable, not that you’re just trying to surface the real issues that are either from existing out-sourced dependencies with failure modes that were already captured in the node before the easy GUI tooling made for 'non-engineer friendliness' or the new distributed work that is done to the node. The tech anchor starts releasing "versions" of your various subsystem in their respective repositories to mark themselves on a contributor for all of them despite contributing zero. The value add for the author who contributed 100% was unprotected disarray through unproductive and forced engagements while being labeled as arrogant and not a team player. Eventually the tooling built for non-technical technical experts to highlight these things decay over time and even the tooling itself becomes "redundant" for the existing team because the entire system for the product has all gone to sh-t anyway due to a held belief that new modifications being made and the pre-existing failure modes in the dependencies that were already originally anticipated to the once stable node are not the problem, the original architect, security researcher, designer, and engineer is. Eventually a cross-functional team that were competent were able to find use of this tooling that was full of working* features you individually came up with and iterated alone thanks to the comprehensiveness of reusability and general usage in mind. Meanwhile, the tech anchor plants a flag on that repo by pointlessly republishing your last version release "redundantly" so they can come up as a contributor to this new end-to-end multi-purpose, standardized, and configurable fp implementation integration and breakpointing authentication software. Ironically, after you’ve been doing systems thinking the whole time, your non-technical manager in your performance review condescendingly tells you to do it more, even though they ignored your solutions and allowed the system to be destabilized by others claiming superiority that dunked on you while forcing you to become their personal locally hosted chatbot while trying to escape from them to perform actual work through bargaining time with them and their gang vs. time alone. You decide to hold a knowledge transfer session spanning across hours due to the complexity and amount of work that was originally put into everything solo in full detail articulately, the session is recorded and now you can refer to sections in the video as a "mitigation strategy", this gives you an opening to being part of a new formed team within your team of 4 new engineers without any exposure to the product. They all have macs while you are the only one with windows, just like when the tech anchor's team originally joined too. Deja vu, but these guys seem calm and their manager that joined in seemed chill too. You now technically have two managers and are dual wielding work. The goal is to convert the entire product, which was currently in its post-MVP stage, and make it cloud-based despite the extremely unique barriers, which also necessitated full featured security implementations I made to my own part of the system originally that was the reason for complexity. Important to mention the original architecture strategy was before I joined, which was still pre-MVP. There was no anticipation or architectural strategy for the system necessitated that I built, must've been a gap... but the estimation to deliver was 3 months using 3 contractors, which I took on solo and delivered appropriately from my past experience (which was dismissed during hiring due to not having an MBA out of undergrad and was denied education opportunities and fcg program benefits to advance or better my situation, contributions did not matter as you will read) from many years before I joined the company as an employee or interned. You leave because you are being lied to by adults with official positions that warranted credibility and realize you're not going to be protected fairly either, but are convinced into staying through tag-team deception. Just long enough until you help prove and deliver a cloud migration strategy for the product cloud-based under unique challenges like a DLL requirement, using systems design and architecture from software you developed and maintained on a daily basis intimately and literally, not figuratively, 15 years ago. You're set to leave the team, sadly holding a bag of promises that were never kept. You end up staying, not by choice, they use your questioning of being misled to retain you for longer and restrict movement under pretenses of you not being a team player. The report they forged had false dates making up lies while making you look like an absolute soulless monster. You're humiliated and isolated among the team you're held hostage in. They give you a new goal. Fix the system they broke that you originally delivered fully working, which months worth of tech debt from a theatre performance of "engineering". You have enough and drop receipts you collected (which started somewhere around the time your manager called you arrogant for delivering him everything and trying to continue just that under unfortunate circumstances that weren't being resolved through "communicated boundaries"). They cover it all up. Your manager, feeling vindicated, messages you after their successful joint department effort in breaking you and isolating any sort of support, despite calling you arrogant more than half a year before for disrespecting someone "senior" to you by questioning the technical anchor's "practices" which was really just a refusal to protect you from credit theft, false promises, product sabotage which led to random character as----------n etc. leading up to this magical buildup of a whimsical question: "Hey does your software (the standalone tool, not the system) support MacOS?" Because a team member does not have an environment, which was also necessary for the product the engineering team owns and works on, like how DLL (third party black boxes) being Windows only to load.

@ra Nice SPIN! Did it get acquired? Some of us were forced into staying after being lied into entering an escape room without an exit while they tried to humiliate you hard enough after you gave them intellectual property and saved them lots of money. Humiliated hard enough for us to never speak about what happened to keep it moving out of disbelief.

I'm not @r9 or @gn BTW

THIS IS SOME QUICK MATH OF MY WORK FROM RIGHT OUT THE GATE, NOT ACCOUNTING FOR THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, OR V2 CLOUD. I didn't include the cost of drama / distractions / sabotage during of PCA

$200/hour per person x 3 people = $600/hour total
520 (3 months) x $600 (hourly) = $312,000

The estimation above is the business’s actual estimate which makes multiple things below objectively and economically true since the work was vital for MVP and unblocking the next phase of work, which involved working with customers for feedback now that it was in their hands. The business would have used 3 people for 3 months and no cheaper alternative had existed.

Now, let’s think about one week with one individual: $312,000 / 40 hours = $7,800/hour effective rate.

Time compression massively increases value per hour.

The 3-month team actually would have happened with comparable or less likelihood of success.

Outcome was expertise + clarity + decisiveness + elimination of waste.

People resist this because it feels “unfair”. This is exactly why winning parties understand that high-impact individuals don’t price like interchangeable slots on a team. If the individual has deep overlap across security engineering, full-stack development, system architecture, working with 4-5 different languages easily, understand the full company ecosystem such as their IAM and following integrations, and networking and infrastructure. 3 people for 3 months is not just economically flawed, but also economically for the problem being solved. Multiple individuals otherwise introduce gaps discovered late, architectural rework, misaligned assumptions, coordination costs, and handoffs. A single expert can front-load correctness, prevent category errors, and eliminate interface risk between disciplines. The key economic point is that this kind of expertise is rare. Coherence with speed, not just speed. Instead of taking wrong paths in implementation, a direct path is taken with security and architecture designed in from day one. A team with partial overlap often ships something sooner but wrong or reaches MVP w/ hidden liabilities that are their fault and not the forced dependencies by the company requirements like their decoupled auth service being down etc. 3 people would pay later in refactors, audits, or incidents and who knows if those further changes end up causing regression and even further problems.

You might expect them to say, “I worked 40 hours, so pay me $8,000” to match the original rate. But that ignores 12 weeks of saved time, 3 people you didn’t have to manage, 12 weeks of earlier revenue or learning, and a dramatically lower failure risk.
The value delivered in this single scenario is not 40 hours. The value delivered was 12 weeks erased.

The outcome was correct, the solution was secure, durable, and the risk profile was legitimately reduced.

Once the outcome exists in week 1 instead of week 13, every week after that creates value, and that’s not in the $7,800. Which is only true if the outcome itself generates independent economic value per week.

If the outcome:

• enables learning
• de-risks future decisions
• accelerates downstream work
  Then there is incremental value beyond $312k.

Let’s conservatively assume the outcome enables ~$20k/week as expected value by unblocking, reaching MVP, learning, and/or avoided loss.

12 weeks x 20k = $240k

So, 312k (credible alternative cost) + 240k (early value) = 552k for a week’s worth of work from that one individual.

If we do the forbidden thing purely for fun and convert it to an hourly number, here’s what it looks like:

552k / 40hr = $13,800/hr

This isn’t economically meaningful though, the 552k number is. The expected 20k value unlocked per week is speculative, it could be more or less, but the $200 per head and 3 months for 3 contractors estimation is not strawman, it was the documented counterfactual from leadership: staffing, duration, and cost were already defined before a different approach of one individual that paid the cost from over a decade and a half expertise intervened.

Not every project justifies this pricing logic. But in these conditions, the reasoning is valid.

@r9 wish you stayed for the severance?

@gn YES!

@es Hopefully that will happen in 2026. 👍👍

To be honest I would be happy if Ford goes bankrupt. This is personal. I would love to see those LL4 , LL3 , LL2 and LL1 out of the door and screaming. And they come to another company X-X if they apply - Big A... F,..ck.

@et Didn't they add production capacity recently? On the chopping block?

I heard MAP was in the chopping block until the elections went the way they went. Even then it may have only delayed the inevitable. Bronco is a niche vehicle and Ranger continues to get crushed by the competition.

Great news. Ford needs to cut 10,000 employees more in order to be profitable.

hopefully you will be

EV mandated cars are not mandatory anymore. Wait about 5-10 years for a resurgence. Run away now! Simply as this. Not ready for prime time with no continuous subsides at this time.

@cc https://www.facebook.com/100064322814358/posts/pfbid0gW9tFivGezKPMp3jzk248JmWQ6uGToSAX5tsknrU8omJpVDaSbQj5CKS5gEiTybhl/

And guess what, that dude sang better than you with all those years you had on him

Now think of what you do to someone who does your field specifically better than you at that age.

You’ll take advantage of them and then lie to everyone using your age and position of being a “grown up”. Exploiting and taking credit like a pathetic piece of sc-m u r

@cc just stop, if you feared what you didn’t understand, I’m sorry, but at least recognize how difficult this has been for other, move past it

@a7

Starting with you, evidenced by the post you made. Clearly a lower brain activity individual that drags your team down. They should quit compensating for your inadequacy. You should leave.

@a7 You forgot. And if you supported the EV mantra and hype, save the company termination paperwork processing costs and RESIGN!

Automotive industry VS % of people who retired successfully ( Before and after 65?) Is this the end of career when you are 50+ or some Indian LL4 with the won green card decides so ?

@OP I just want to know who is getting FIRED for hyping and buying into EV manufacturing while completely ignoring the ICE cash cow guarantee.. Are upper management really that brainless? I'd start firing anyone with over 15 years+ on payroll for not speaking up. Ya know. The ones with the biggest amount of brown on their nose. An there's bunches of the I bet.