Thread regarding Ford layoffs

WFH is great. I never want to return to the office. Many were misty eyed on collect and clear day. Not me I boxed up the desk and then tossed the boxes in a dumpster. Took a selfie of my last ever day working in a Ford office. Took some of the Ford Truths and Culture posters off the cubes for kindling.

Personally my life has been amazing since the full time WFH began. Do not miss all the toxic office nonsense from the terrible people that populate many corners of Ford. These toxic people are now trapped in their homes with nobody to mistreat or destroy but their own lives. That is now what you are seeing. Well deserved in my opinion.

Yup definitely seeing relationship issues in our group.

One separation, wife moved out couldn’t deal with husband being home all day (he is a major league jerk in the office, so probably a jerk at home also)

One guy has moved into his basement and his wife has the first floor of the house.

A lot of people are stressed now. Really stressed! A pandemic, economic hardship, locked in the house, home schooling, bored kids, social and political turmoil (doesn’t matter what your beliefs are, it’s stressful), loss of social life, worrying about the future... Even the most solid people and relationships are strained. If you’re locked in the house with a partner that you didn’t like during the good old days you are going to be miserable.

Is anyone else noticing people having relationship issues with all this WFH togetherness?
My manager is one of those guys who is always saying "happy wife happy life" and he used to travel all the time (liked being away from her). Now he is having "stomach problems" and it sure seems that it is from being at home with a shrew all day and night.

I have worked in many areas within Ford and encountered hard working productive people. I encountered just as many who were professional slackers who were very good at doing little while taking credit for the work of others. During my first week as a Ford employee a more senior GSR told me I could have a good career there while doing very little. Look busy, don’t volunteer for anything, don’t cause trouble, do something every now and then and make sure your boss knows when you’ve done something. He said it wasn’t about what you accomplish but about how you market yourself because the managers are too busy with their special assignments to know who is doing what. I viewed that as very bad advice but that guy is still there and does very little. He’s now a manager so maybe it wasn’t such bad advice.

@5ifo from personal experience I would say the dead weight issue is wide spread. I have yet to work in a group that was not predominately dead weight. I spent two stints at Ford Credit IT, two in ITO, one in database, one in security, one in GAO, one in GDIA. Same group dynamics in all the teams. One or two people doing all the work, the rest loafing or clawing their way upwards on the backs of the few people actually doing work. The worst teams in my experience were mainframe ITO and GDIA. Your mileage may vary.

Typical of Ford...use the pandemic to invent reasons for Zoom meetings that don’t need to be held and which could have been replaced by sending an email to the group perhaps along with a short ppt deck ( a lost art at Ford) asking for feedback if needed. Bill Ford is just so lost he has no idea how dysfunctional the day to day operation of the company is

Just because you work in a group with a lot of dead weight, doesn’t mean that is the norm for the company. If you ever work as a D&R or as manufacturing engineer before a launch, working long days and weekends is standard.

We had two LL6 who each wanted to convert a contractor to employee. These contractors did not have a degree so HR said no you cannot convert. At the same time HR mentioned that they had many contractors who had a degree, so convert those instead. Those contractors were people who the LL6 did not want as Ford employees for good reasons. So what did these brainchild LL6 do? They converted all the undesirable contractors to employees, and then went back to HR asking to convert the two contractors without a degree. Again HR said no.
Here we sit years later with a bunch of employees that have undesirable behaviors ( including loafing ) that we cannot get rid of. The two non-degreed contractors are still contractors.
The two LL6 who created the mess have retired.

HR most likely has all those rules and checkboxes as they are dealing with stacks and stacks of lawsuits from all of the forced-layoffs and SRD reductions. All the money they thought they saved getting rid of 25+ year employees is going to cost them millions in settlements.

I have a guy who has done MAYBE 40 hours of work in the last year and a half. And guess what..... I cant get rid of him. HR has so many rules that have to be followed and boxes that need to be checked that it makes it almost impossible to fire someone.

My team has a couple of people who spend more time avoiding work than it would take to actually do the work. They use excuses such as “I don’t know how to do that” or “so and so knows more about that than I do”. If they couldn’t get out of the assignment they had a go to person who would walk them through the assignment. Their go to person was working 50 or more hours per week with her own responsibilities. Their go to person was SRDd and they’re still here making excuses. I suppose that tells us what management values.

Echo the free loaders comment.
We have a guy who spent six months doing a four hour task (incidentally his only assignment).
Finally I just did the task one evening as the customers were getting upset. The supervisor and manager keep raving about the free loaders accomplishments and abilities. From my viewpoint the guy hasn’t accomplished anything in the past two years. To top it off he was promoted up a band.

He is not the only free loader in our group. He is just the worst of the bunch.

Agree with freeloaders and management allowing it. The group I'm in allowed this guy to go 2 weeks without getting his computer hooked up to the internet and the manager to constantly make excuses for this guy at every milestone

In poorly managed companies like Ford, there are a lot of free loaders. The folks posting here who are working 10-15 hrs a day, I think you are doing your job alongwith somebody else's and this will be for perpetuity. Its upto you to start saying No and pushing back so that everyone on the "team" does their part.

Plant IT and the apps that support the plant will work the weekends or off hours when there is an incident and that can take hours. Do people schedule meetings? Not in Manufacturing IT. well I am salary and right now I am in a position where if I go beyond 40 hours for meetings or incident calls I am getting overtime. Right now they are not approving overtime unless absolutely necessary. I

There may well be people not working hard, but almost everyone in our group is working 10 to 15 hrs a day during the week and some on weekends.

It is Saturday morning and I'm putting together a presentation for a Monday morning. My manager sent out the meeting notice last night (Friday) at 9pm.
Maybe we should both quit and come back as a contractors! :)

@1tch why would people work hard when their supervisors aren’t and their coworkers who did work hard were the ones who got SRDed? My coworkers who followed along with the group dynamic of barely working are still here, so I know which behavior is rewarded by my manager. Save the chastisement for the managers and directors who set the tone and select for sloth.

My work days have slowed down to 8-9 hours per day. Last year I was doing 60 a week for most of the year because of PDO/AGILE/Rally implementations + regular maintenance and support. To those folks who claim they only do 2,3 hours of work a day: go out and find something to do instead of reveling in efing off and backing into your paycheck! You are part of the problem!

Anyone ask Bill if the monthly stipend I'm getting is covered?

@khb+16ktSCMw it sounds like the MainFrame Infrastructure support team is being described by more than one poster. Apply there for the country club gig

I work that many hours and know many others that also do.

I don't know what teams some of these commenters belong to but 10 hour days are the norm for myself and many others I know (somedays are longer). It has been even worse since the COVID-19 work from home situation. All considered casual overtime and unpaid. Where do I sign up for one of these country club gigs?

I don't know what teams some of these commenters belong to but 10 hour days are the norm for myself and many others I know (somedays are longer). All considered casual overtime and unpaid. Where do I sign up for one of these country club gigs?

@ Jim Pratt had same experience with MF support at FMCC.
Started with coffee break, then 7 am hour morning meeting, followed by socializing, a bit of work then 10 am coffee break and stroll, then 11-1 lunch and euchre, followed by a bit of work, followed by 2pm coffee break and stroll, then out the door at 3 pm. It was standard operating procedure for the whole team including the supervisor.

@xwr If you bothered to read the article before commenting, it was Bill Ford that said we were doing Zoom meetings....

Zoom meetings right? Not sure if the commenter really works at Ford.

I worked at FMCC doing MF support for almost 10 years as a contractor and never worked more than 15-20 hours a week between the morning coffee break, the 10am coffee break, lunch from 11-1pm, and then the 2pm coffee break. Then we all left at 3pm. This group involved all the seniors in the group along with the team lead.

Ah good times.

Hogwash
The staff under my manager 25% working 40-50 hours a week. The rest average of 25 hours a week. We have staff who have already used all their “sick” time and vacation time for the year and now accumulate fake comp time. The manager is fully aware of the waste. We have staff paging/calling each other off hours to “solve” problems. Each page/call they accumulate 4 hours of comp time. We have staff purposely causing pages that they can ignore but accumulate 4 hours of comp time.
Enormous waste and still manager claims she needs more staff.

The level of b—s— that keeps flowing out of WHQ is astonishing...