Engineer claims he has been blacklisted by Chrysler for 17 years | Hacker News Reader

Engineer claims he has been blacklisted by Chrysler for 17 years

blacklistedengineer.blogspot.com

53 pointsno_flags29 comments

Unfortunately I think this person seems mentally ill. I have a friend who in his 30s became a paranoid schizophrenic and although he was very articulate, he had major flaws in his logic and behaved erratically. He also filed many lawsuits and was litigious as well.

It sounds like this person was dismissed from his job (he mentioned it in one of his videos), and he hasn't been able to find employment because of his mental illness.

It's sad that we don't do enough to help those with mental illness. It would go a long way to making their lives better and the rest of our lives safer.

Don't you think there is a good chance his mental illness is actually a result of being consumed by such an awkward situation?

The details he provides about proof of employment and wrong-doing by Chrysler when asked to confirm it are very clear. If those are real, we can't tell - this looks like something a good journalist would be able to uncover, and maybe help achieving some kind of closure.

No I don't think so. It sounds like he was fired for at the very least strange behavior, and all of his potential employers picked up on it. If he were technically good, it wouldn't matter what Chrysler said. But it seems like he's not technically good.

Maybe an awesome engineer in tech can get hired even if his past employers deny employing him. But what about a perfectly average engineer in something more traditional like automobiles? It's my understanding tech is pretty unique in being "less" sensitive about pedigree.

It doesn't matter if his case is real or not. What matters is, for 17 years, a mechanical engineer basically just lived like a bum rather than trying to get any kind of real job, even something as simple as a fry cook, waiter, janitor, anything. He had already been a janitor and maintenance mechanic once, so that should have been easy to get again.

What _is_ clear is he can barely write, he records videos of himself outdoors that are barely audible, and even if he won this strange case, he's clearly not employable now. More than likely his mental illness started after he became an engineer and quickly progressed.

Keeping in mind that we're speculating on a case without any direct access to the subject, it's actually really unlikely that we're looking at a single episode caused by one situation (his employment with Chrysler) that's lasted for thirty years. But it's entirely possible that the situation could have made existing problems significantly worse.

There are certainly aspects of his writing that might be suggestive (the graphorrhea and rambling over minor details, irrational paranoia, etc.) of certain mental illnesses. Since paranoid schizophrenia was mentioned by the parent comment, take that for example: it's not something that comes about because of a single situation later on in life. There are clear, measurable physical symptoms in that instance such as a significant and measurable difference in grey matter. That doesn't happen because of any episode you've experienced.

I think we've all seen a good engineer get fired because he's a pushover.

You know who doesn't get fired?

Story time: We had the most brilliant and insufferable devops engineer I've ever met. I don't mean just your standard grump overworked sys admin. This guy was a treasure. 1) Previously all engineers had 20% time and would work on personal projects. We had a ton of extra servers lying around and it was fairly simple to provision some space to work on an idea. His first week he went to the CTO and had 20% time axed and demanded that all provisioning go directly through him and all physical servers be nuked from orbit. 2) They got him a personal secretary. He routinely had her go 5 blocks to get him gummy bears, buy him a waffle iron and make him waffles in the office, and routinely made sexist comments. 3) Op sec. We would have media come by the office once in a while so this guy instituted a policy of "security through shame" If you didn't have 2factor auth on your email he would send you snide comments. If you didn't use full disk encryption you had to go to a mandatory course on personal security. If you left your laptop unlocked at your desk to go the bathroom it was prank emails and screwing with your settings. On the 3rd time he would confiscate your laptop and lock it in a personal safe he had under his desk for the day. 4) This guy would use our internal channels and slack to shame anyone non-technical. One time the personal assistant to a VP in another department accidentally posted a listing asking if anyone had a bed for sale to the channel for asking about restaurants in the area. 24hours of shame where he got the entire tech team to participate emailing everyone in the company if they had any food shaped furniture for sale. Apparently she broke down crying and had to go home for the day. 5) Despite the fact that we had no QA team this guy refused to deploy hotfixes even for critical launches. You got one day a week to launch code. You got one chance. If there was anything wrong it was, "roll back and try next week." Unless of course the issue was you needed a CDN cache clear or there was something wrong with the build. Then you could email him (directly after the deployment) and have him refuse to respond or believe you for about an hour before he would actually do anything.

These guys get promoted. They run things.

They fire the pushovers.

Out of all of the asinine startup job postings looking for "rock stars", this guy is truly one. Awesome.

They broke the mold when they made him.

Wouldn't have to worry about firing me, I'd quit.

I stuck it out until he confiscated the personal laptop of an engineer who had permission to use it on network.

After that I got permission to work from home for a month and used the opportunity to find a new job.

Do you know if (m)any of your coworkers also quit?

Several asked to be transferred to other departments. That's what prompted his demand to be the sole point of provisioning. He had final say over Finance, Analytics, internal reporting tools, if he didn't like you it didn't get a server.

I had been with the company for four years at that point and I knew a lot of other old timers. Overnight it went from a flat organization with a progressive expectation that "No one is going to tell you what to do. You are here because you kick ass and we expect great things." to a strict hierarchy with several layers of management and influence.

Everyone who had been there as long as I had was equally unhappy with the new direction. This was all done under the guise of, "Getting the budget under control." when we all clearly saw the budget was fatter than ever. Where we had a diversity projects and research going on before, now we had 1 or 2 large money making projects. Where we had an expectation that we needed to be competitive and lean and every aspect mattered before, now they were hiring more and more management instead of workers.

We were doing so well that many former co-workers contacted me and other old timers during this time and we warned them off. Many simply didn't renew their contracts because they saw the writing on the wall.

Only one other person outright quit and that was really heartbreaking to watch. He had just transferred from California and the bullying was so bad he told me he was going home to stay with his sister and start going to therapy. He couldn't stand the idea of working in tech anymore.

I wonder how many good people just had enough of it and left. In environments like these you either go mad or get so detatched from your company, that you don't give a shit about anything anymore... or you just leave...

Very weird; so long and detailed that it would be hard to fake - yet I don't understand why he's still in this position with the proof he claims to have.

I also feel like his case would be strengthened significantly if he simply took the time to write properly - capitalize, good grammar, etc.

Anyway if true, it's an outrage; hope he receives due compensation. If not, I don't know what to say.

I do feel bad for this guy, because I feel that the majority of what he says is true, but it just can't be true that an employer saying he didn't work somewhere that he did is effective "blacklisting". I have worked a few places and received several job offers that I declined, and don't know of one case where my previous employer was contacted. I was told by HR at a fortune 200 company that I worked for as a mechanical engineer that they would not confirm or deny to anyone that I ever even worked there. I think that contacting previous employers doesn't happen much because so many people would lie. If the prospective employee was a charismatic fool, the previous employer could gloss over incompetence. If he was a great worker, but the previous employer was sore about him leaving, they could embellish on any shortcomings. Sir, if you are reading this, let go of the past and look inside for what needs to be fixed.

My experience is not directly related but one of the things I have noticed working as an software engineer in the banking industry is how quickly management closes ranks to protect one of their own. No matter how much a manager fucks up, when your as an engineer tell on him/her, your ass will be handed to you. And the blacklist is real -- informal but real.You can't transfer out as all the managers will give you shitty references. So I can empathize with the plight of the blacklisted engineer. Its scary and it could happen to anyone.

Why didn't he seek a (temporary) job in the service industry? Even flipping burgers would be better than being homeless. His story and writing style makes me believe he's a smart guy but possibly he unintentionally offends everyone he meets and either doesn't realize it or can't understand why.

A lot of service industry jobs won't hire people that are "overqualified" because they know those people likely won't stay long.

It sounds like a sad story of a guy who never learned to communicate properly.

Or he was great at communicating and has just suffered extreme mental trauma from the circumstances he was unfairly placed into.

and a copy of my Chrysler contractor ID badge

How is that not the end of proof needed to a court?

Unless they are claiming he made a counterfeit badge which is silly.

There also have to be tax records on the state and federal side that a court can order them to retrieve?

The saddest part of that whole story is what I recognize as the descent into the mental state of homelessness, because once you are there, it's REALLY hard to dig yourself out to start thinking normally again. He's been at it since 1999, he's not coming back out whole, maybe ever. Story starts to have grammatical errors and paranoia at the end too, not good signs.

It seemed to me that the cases he cites center on the question of why he was not hired, not whether or not he worked at Chrysler. He's saying he didn't get the job due to being 'blacklisted,' the courts are saying he just didn't get the job.

Grammar and sentence structure are bad everywhere. Might even be a form of dyslexia. No wonder nobody believes he can design a valve system.

descent*

I point it out not to be a grammar nazi, but to further a point: we all have different writing ability and/or attention to detail. The man made many more mistakes than you did, certainly, but I don't think it's necessarily a reflection of mental illness.

There's a lot of armchair mental health diagnoses in this thread, and I think they're a bit presumptuous.

> How is that not the end of proof needed to a court?

Because this guy is, in all probability, mentally ill. There's no evidence I can find of Chrysler actually speaking to prospective employers or lying about whatever employment history he has.

Here's (what he calls) the Oakland circuit court case judgement, an appeal of his original case: http://www.michbar.org/file/opinions/appeals/2003/120403/212...

To wit: he claimed that Chrysler lied about his employment history to a perspective employer, but the only perspective employer presented as evidence testified that she hadn't even contacted Chrysler about him.

Lacking literally any evidence of wrongdoing on Chrysler's part, the case was dismissed, and this appeals court upholds that dismissal.

He lists other "case numbers", most of which I can't turn up (no pacer access here), but I suspect it's just a litany of affirmations of the original judgement, or refusals to hear the case, or that they're simply filings of various sorts that never went anywhere. This simply looks like a persecution he is suffering in his mind.

In Utah they found out that just providing the homeless with a place to live was the first step to making a host of changes. You are correct, it is a difficult hole to dig oneself out from.

http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...

Perhaps I am not understanding his situation properly. If Chrysler refuses to acknowledge that he worked there, why couldn't he apply for jobs without mentioning his experience at Chrysler?

The last post was from April of 2015. Can we update the title?

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