This company is not your family.
Farley does not care about you or me or any of us.
This company doesn’t have a real future
Take every paycheck you can and put in the least amount of effort it takes without making anyone too upset up the chain.
Friend of mine was working 12 hour days somewhere else and used to make fun of me for barely working 2 hours a day here; today he was thrown out like garbage
The Ford politics (culture) exists to cover up incompetence. Instead of doing the work to get better at their job, employees resort to “politics” to get what they want (promotions, bonuses, keeping their cushy job). “Politics” = game of manipulation and manoveuring (blame shifting, credit stealing, whisper campaigns etc.).
You can’t change the Ford culture. Bill Ford himself 20 years ago in a public meeting lamented that no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t change Ford to a meritocracy and eliminate the bad behaviors in management. A few of the behaviors he mentioned were hiding bad news, infighting and squashing new ideas.
@3imm+1uOlqZXx Ford "leadership" cannot be honest. If they are, they would have to admit publicly they have no clue, and stepdown. So, do any of you truly believe that Farley, for instance, would quit and lose $26 million dollars? LOL. Nah! He doesn't care about the company, so he prefers wasting 10s of billions of dollars at FOMOCO, than losing one penny of his salary. TBH, many people in his shoes would do the same. Morality in business went out the window long time ago.
One of the many reasons GSRs don't work hard, is due to the indecisiveness of our "leaders". As an engineer, the first thing I need , in order to solve a problem, to engineer a solution, is to gather the requirements from the business. Nobody would fill the requirements sheet, because they don't know, or the managers are afraid to take a decision that can comeback to haunt them.
Projects get extended for two main reasons: waiting for requirements or directions from above (after all, we are just cogs in the big Ford machinery), or a change of heart (several times) during a project.
We worked HARD on a big project a few years back. I am talking a lot of unpaid OT for a lot of GSRs putting 50,60,70 hours a week. Twice, we had to throw away almost everything and start again from scratch due to the changes management wanted. So we delivered the project at an arbitrary date decided by management. Do you know why I say it was an arbitrary date? Because after we delivered it, nothing was done on it for another 2 months. Time we took to review and double check our work, catching a few, but not all problems.
We learned our lesson. After all, engineers can learn new "tricks", even when Farley doesn't think we can. So now, when there is a project, the best thing to do is to wait, not rush in. So we don't have to redo our work so many times. Besides, do you know what was the "reward" for some of my fellow engineers after so much unpaid OT? The curb, they were kicked to the curb. Yeap! We lost a few of them in layoffs, no matter how well they worked.
We are just a number, an "expense", a "cost" in the spreadsheets upstairs. Businesses cannot prosper if they depend on one single person, so we are all replaceable. That's fine! I can accept that. Since my local supermarket doesn't accept any other form of payment than the hard earned money (cash, debit and credit), I cannot accept giving my "own unpaid" time to a bunch of greedy and clueless management. Paid OT or 40 hours a week. That's my deal (and many of my teammates do the same). Of course, management is "used to" a few people doing the work of many, but when those few cut back their hours, everything gets delayed.
Where do we go from here? The company next step is outsourcing all our jobs. Then bankruptcy or heavy cuts (like Chrysler, just leaving some of the vehicle names standing). Some of us may get to retirement, many won't. Some are riding the gravy train, some are moving to "greener" pastures.
End of rant!
Not the same everywhere 2ybi. Maybe Ford leadership should just be honest about the Ford values and truths and then people wouldn’t feel lied to and complain
For example
Do The Right Thing = Do as little as possible and only what will advance your career
Be Curious = practice group think, your leadership team is infallible, applaud them daily
Create Tomorrow = continue to do the same thing, new ideas and solutions are not welcome
Built Ford Tough = ignore problems, applaud your leadership, help leadership cover up / shift blame
Funny that just in the US there are conservatively 700,000 hours of salaried “time-wasted”. In well run companies called time theft. If we say the cost with benefits and ancillary costs is 100 an hour that is 7 million a year wasted. And that doesn’t even include costs resulting from bad actions/lack of actions such as warrantee costs, wasted hardware and software purchases etc.
It is the same bullsh-t everywhere folks....make it work
They created this culture, let me them deal with the consequences
Wait, nobody in the executive level is ever held accountable
I grew up on a farm. My first jobs were at small companies. I went from a small company culture to the Ford culture. I had to learn the hard way that I was no longer a problem solver but a cog in the Ford machine. I enjoyed being a problem solver and innovator in a small company, but learned to just work 2-3 hours a day at Ford. The only time I do anything extra is when the consequences of it not being done creates more work for me in the future.
I would suggest you work hard only on tasks that build your marketable skills. While at Ford I was on teams where literally only two people were doing all the work while the rest (15-30 depending on the group) took credit. Us two learned and exploited all the new technologies and were the go to people when other teams needed help. Of course the non-productive were promoted and eventually both of us were laid off as we were the technical experts. However, we both quickly found better paying jobs in companies that actually value technical skills and don’t have a toxic work environment. The non-productive all still remain at Ford blaming each other and past employees for everything that goes wrong. It’s hilarious when I hear about the goings on when I run into an ex-coworker still at Ford.
Don’t lower yourself to the Ford work culture. Learn and then leave. You will be surprised about how much stress the toxic Ford work culture was causing you, and you didn’t notice because you thought it was normal.
That's OK. He can take that work ethic somewhere else or start his own business. You, however, will bel able to do neither.