Ford

Hackett.

It is a job with benefits.

It could be a great job.

If you need to stay in Michigan, it is one of the better places to work.

Ford IT wants to believe it has transformed into a tech startup company. Delusional thinking.

Red tape is everywhere. Innovation is more often penalized than rewarded.

Much of IT leadership is too narrow-minded to see innovation potential. Punitive leadership leads to fear-based decision-making.

IT teams hide information from each other and sabotage each other. Management is set in their draconian ways. A large contingent of IT managers should not be allowed to manage people. If these IT managers treated dogs like they do their people, they would constantly be bitten.

It is almost impossible to change jobs. Internal postings are mostly just to check a box and say they advertised the opening, when they already have someone selected. Constant political battles between managers make it very difficult to change to a job.

Your manager will most likely have zero interest in your career. I have yet to have a manager who asked me what my career goals are.

Unfortunately, if you establish yourself as a dedicated, talented employee, you will be stuck doing repetitive work and soon hate your job.

The more established you get, the more time you'll spend in endless meetings, which results in ever poorer work-life balance as you end up doing most of your real work after hours. Since most IT managers are technically incompetent, you'll spend more time explaining and selling your work than doing it.

If you forget to pay homage to the old boys' club, you will never get assigned interesting work or a promotion.

The office space is horrible. FMCC is filthy, dark, and moldy. The renovations to open offices are a waste of money. ITHQ BIC is awful; the new open office plan is atrocious. It is impossible to get work done, even with blinders and earplugs.

The leadership keeps slapping themselves on the back and rolling the horrendous open office plan out to more and more buildings.

The IT infrastructure is nearly always broken, but somehow is reported as 99.9% available. The newer infrastructure is always failing: servers down, databases down, Hadoop unavailable, or the data in a bad state. This makes it difficult to test and deploy code as you must wait for availability.

The reliable IT infrastructure technologies are being abandoned because they are not bright and shiny. A lot of technology for technology's sake. Attempt to move everything to Pivotal Cloud Foundry with little thought of what business value is being provided. Meetings are like a tent revival, where everyone is making the trek down the aisle to be converted to the Cloud. Praise be, we had 30 conversions today.

It is cheaper to rent office space where the IT talent exists than to try to convince talented people Detroit is a good place to live.

If every other successful tech company has figured out that you can attract and retain talent by going to where the talent is, why can’t you see this?

Rent office space in Austin, Portland, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Raleigh, and let IT talent work in any of these locations.

You will be able to attract and retain talent then.

All the Dearborn and Corktown building remodeling in the hopes of attracting people to Detroit is a pipe dream. You will continue to be left with the dregs or people who can’t leave Michigan.