[Narcosis]

From Jalopnik: http://jalopnik.com/ex-gm-engineer-e.../+laceydonohue




I worked for GM for 10 months, from December 3, 2007 to October 10, 2008. I was a "Design Systems Engineer" and I'm still not entirely sure what the hell that actually means, because I was doing component design and systems integration, officially, but mostly I was attending meetings, for the 2nd-gen mild hybrid powertrain system marketed as eAssist.

Prior to my GM stint, I had ~18 years under my belt, at Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and Metaldyne (a Tier 1 supplier). Well on the far side of 10 million vehicles have been produced with parts of my design. Not a one of them has ever been subject to a recall, an owner notification, or even a TSB. Not just because of me, but because of the hundreds of people I worked with who also bought into the "it has to be right" work ethic.

My job at GM largely consisted of attending meetings, as I said. On alternating weeks, I was either in 30 hours of meetings or 32 hours of meetings, spread across 6 buildings on 3 campuses, so add in another 5-6 hours of transit time per week. As you can see with basic math, that didn't leave much time for engineering out of a 40 hour work week.

On any given week, I neither contributed to nor gleaned useful-to-my-job information from 90% of the meetings I attended. So why go? you ask. I asked, because I felt it wasn't a good use of my time. I was admonished that I needed to be in these meetings (for various vehicles in development, such as the Alpha - eventually the Cadillac ATS - which was considering the mild hybrid setup), even if our area of the vehicle wasn't on the agenda that week, because the vehicle team "might do something that would be detrimental to our systems" and thus "we have to have representation there to address that" — even if that week's agenda was a discussion of the front bumper system or the seats, systems that had exactly zero interface with a mild hybrid system.

Most of these meetings were held in rooms crammed past fire code, where the goal was to arrive early enough to get a power outlet for your laptop (and, at that time in most of the Warren Tech Center, access to one of the ethernet hubs as those buildings lacked wifi), which would allow you to try to do the job tasks you would be doing if you weren't "showing your face" (and just occupying ******* in these meetings.

"So, when am I supposed to be engineering? I've got about 3 hours a week not in meetings or transit to/from meetings."
"You should be working however many hours to perform your tasks, even if that means answering emails at 11pm and again at 5am."
"Am I going to get paid for working 70+ hours a week every week?"
"No, you're an exempt employee. Casual overtime is expected."
"Working 45-50 hours a week during those occasional times when we've got something hot and heavy is casual overtime. 70 hour weeks every week as a matter of standard practice isn't casual overtime."
"Well, that's what we expect."

About 3 months in, I was asked by one of the component engineers for advice on a press-in coolant tube on the motor-generator unit. Since I'd been a cooling system engineer for most of my career, this was something I could do while drunk, asleep, blindfolded, and with both hands tied behind my back, so I sketched it out, dimensioned the sketch, and the designer modeled it. Job done, I thought.

The next day, my "supervisor" (dotted line) pulled me into a conference room, closed the door, and proceeded to scream at me at the top of his lungs for about 30 minutes. My crime? I'd made a design decision — in other words, I'd done my job. I was told that my experience (more, I might add, than my "supervisor" had) didn't count at all because it wasn't at GM; that I had no authority to make design decisions, that I had made a "handle" that someone could use to move the engine around when it was on the hoist and damage the tube and was thus dangerous (my response: "So? They can pick up the whole engine off that tube. Won't bother the tube a bit."), and that from there on out, I was only permitted to advance ideas to him, and if they met with his approval, then we could consider them.

Then, by way, I suppose, of trying to knock me down another peg, he asked how many vehicles had been made with press-in coolant tubes I'd designed. I found this an odd metric, particular since I knew his lifetime "production" vehicle count was lower than the annual volume for the lowest-volume program I'd ever worked on (about 12,000 units/year), but I did some math in my head and came up with "As of today, about ten and a half million vehicles, give or take a couple hundred thousand, and anywhere from 1500-2000 new ones rolling off lines every day."

It took him a minute or so to contemplate that number, which killed all his frothy momentum, and he ended the "conference" muttering something about how he would be changing it to what he wanted, but then called up the cooling system engineer to quiz him about my design. Said cooling guy emailed me "WTF?" — the cooling guy fraternity is pretty small, and we all at least knew of each other — while telling my "supervisor" that everything I'd done was standard practice and exactly right. Then cooling guy called me and I gave him the Cliff's Notes version.

When I got home that night, I reactivated my resume on Career Builder and Monster (LinkedIn wasn't at a maturity level that was useful yet). The next day, I managed to squeeze in a few minutes with my Chief Engineer (who was my real manager), who assured me that I was indeed allowed to make decisions and do my job, that my "supervisor" would be counseled about what had happened the day before (our conference room walls were maybe 2" thick. EVERYONE in the office heard him yelling and didn't hear my very quiet responses) but I could read the writing on the wall.

I knew I was going to be cut loose more than a month before they told me I was fired for installing a desktop weather application on my company computer.

That's right: the only justification they could find for firing me was my installation of Intellicast's weather app on my laptop.

200 other engineers were "fired" on the same day, but GM did not call it a layoff. A layoff, you see, would have to be reported as such to the state. The HR guy (oh, my exit interview was rich — I forced it on the HR guy, told him about how hostile the work environment was — he didn't take any notes, which told me everything I needed to know there, got assurances he would investigate it, which was a lie and I told him so: "You didn't take any notes. That tells me how honest you're being") assured me they wouldn't contest my unemployment filing.

They contested my unemployment filing. They lost. They appealed. They lost the appeal. I didn't find out about that until some time after I'd gotten another job and moved to Houston for it. Here's the kicker: you can't sneeze at GM without it costing $10,000 in overhead. Someone there — and I'm sure they contested, lost, appealed, and lost again for every single one of those 200 engineers fired the same day I was, so multiply this times 200 — thought it was a good idea to spend at least $20,000 trying to recover all of $3680 in UIC I received during the 10 weeks I was out of work.

It wasn't long after I'd moved to Houston that GM filed for Chapter 11 in 2009. They gave Rick Wagoner the boot, and shuffled the desks on the executive floor, but the CYA-with-bureaucracy-and-empire-building-above-all-else low- and mid-level managers who are the root cause of GM's troubles, then and now, are all still in their positions, doing them exactly the same way they always have. I know my "supervisor" is still there, as is my manager.

If GM is to change the way it does things, there needs to be a massive forced attitude shift in those low- and mid-levels of management. THAT is where the problems lie. THAT is where the fix needs to happen, not on Mahogany Row. If it means wholesale replacement of hundreds, if not thousands, of people with new managers who actually give a shit about doing things the right way, well, I won't shed a tear if two of them find themselves fighting GM's contesting of their UIC filing.

Postscript: When the Buick Lacrosse eAssist debuted, I made a point of looking under the hood of one. The coolant tube on the MGU was my design.

[pokerface]

Good read. Thanks

[Never Convicted]

It's nice to know that GM treats it's employees as poorly as it treats it's customers. Of course, they're in the process of recalling every car they've ever made, so it looks like maybe their employees had an outlet for their unhappiness.

[Slops]

Wow that's really putting GM into perspective

[GeeRam]

Originally Posted by Slops

Wow that's really putting GM into perspective

As I understand it GM has been like that for over half a century or more.

Seems nothing has changed since John de Lorean wrote his book in the late 60's about GM.

It was why they eventually sunk Saab, the gulf in understanding between out of the box thinking Swedes and the corporate juggernaut that GM is back in Detroit was just too big a bridge to gap and GM just simply never understood the Swedish thinking.

[Nkc]

it really surprises me how GM can stay in business for so many years. Murica!!!

[Crimson92]

Originally Posted by Nkc

it really surprises me how GM can stay in business for so many years. Murica!!!

Because we are paying for their cars one way or another.

[F1Venom]

Should've never been bailed out.

[CirrusSR22]

Originally Posted by GeeRam

It was why they eventually sunk Saab, the gulf in understanding between out of the box thinking Swedes and the corporate juggernaut that GM is back in Detroit was just too big a bridge to gap and GM just simply never understood the Swedish thinking.

Saab sunk themselves. They were already losing hundreds of millions a year and approached GM for an investment. GM just prolonged Saab's death by 20 years.

[WillC310]

A lot of big companies in America (heck, even parts of the government) are run like this. I've worked in global Fortune 50 companies and seen plenty of incompetent people in positions that they should not be in.

[son_of_siggy]

Yeah, as frustrating as it is there is nothing really in that article that isn't seen everyday in thousands of big companies across the US. My job allows me to work with a lot of private and government organizations, trying to fix a lot of these types of issues. There are just a lot of people out there who are bad at their jobs, or bad at leading people who might be good at their jobs.

[fecurtis]

This is largely why I stopped working for very large corporations, this shit is pretty common in places of GM's scale.

[NEFARIOUS]

Hence why my only cars from here on out are Japanese or European. Some cars may have its shortcomings, but many American cars still can't hold a candle to them, especially ones in recent years... My first car was a 91 Buick Century, but despite it being a grandpa's car that my ghetto parents shoved me into, that thing was built like a tank and reliability was hardly an issue. Fast forward to current times when I sat in a Cadillac, which was once the standard of luxury in the 60s and even used as a metaphor for quality (e.g. people used to say "this computer is the Cadillac of all computers!"), but now it's total garbage; it only had 2,000 miles and everything squeaked and the interior was oversimplified and cheap, including the sharp edges inside the cup holder. Now after reading that article, I went from "OK, I'll probably put a Chevy in my garage if it behooves me" to probably never having an American car ever again; my late dad's guzzling Dodge Dakota was the only exception I made, and even then I traded that thing with 13/17MPG with no backing performance in as soon as humanly possible. Everything Ford is stuck in the early 2000s (even my E90 had more advanced features than some things in a Lincoln), and I'm still waiting for Mopar to prove its worth.

[Efthreeoh]

Sounds like a disgruntled employee that can't hold a job as an engineer (if any of it is true that is) and a 6 year old story. BFD.

[majin ssj eric]

Originally Posted by F1Venom

Should've never been bailed out.

Exactly. Allowing them to file bankruptcy would have forced them to reorganize, cut the fat and bureaucracy, get out from under the crippling union contracts they are in, and slim down the size of the company into a leaner and more efficient operation. Instead Bush and Obama simply threw our cash at them and told them it was business as usual. Of course here we are 6 years later and nothing has really changed (well, the cars are a lot better than they used to be at least but still have a ways to go).

[quagmire]

Originally Posted by majin ssj eric

Exactly. Allowing them to file bankruptcy would have forced them to reorganize, cut the fat and bureaucracy, get out from under the crippling union contracts they are in, and slim down the size of the company into a leaner and more efficient operation. Instead Bush and Obama simply threw our cash at them and told them it was business as usual. Of course here we are 6 years later and nothing has really changed (well, the cars are a lot better than they used to be at least but still have a ways to go).

They did file for bankruptcy.

Just unfortunately middle management was ignored in their reorganization.

[fecurtis]

Originally Posted by majin ssj eric

Exactly. Allowing them to file bankruptcy would have forced them to reorganize, cut the fat and bureaucracy, get out from under the crippling union contracts they are in, and slim down the size of the company into a leaner and more efficient operation. Instead Bush and Obama simply threw our cash at them and told them it was business as usual. Of course here we are 6 years later and nothing has really changed (well, the cars are a lot better than they used to be at least but still have a ways to go).

Ummm....they did file for bankruptcy and go through bankruptcy court.....