Ford

Ford offers employees the ability to rotate into other parts of the business, and even requires this for college graduates. They offer tuition assistance, a patent rewards program, and some unique benefits (e.g., use of Ford lawyers for certain personal cases).

Leadership seems to be a huge problem within my organization. Nobody wants to take charge to make a product truly excellent; people just want to coast by without doing any hard work. A week stuck in meetings is a successful week for a lot of these people, even if no quantifiable work gets done after all the meetings.

Ford treats employees like children. Employees have to go to mandatory hour-long "trainings" that basically tell you not to post confidential material on social networks and not to accept bribes from customers. IT sends out emails like "Cyber Steve learns about safe Web browsing" with a picture of a little cartoon IT guy telling you to use a secure password. It's insulting to be a professional engineer and have people treat you like a child.

Another big problem is Ford promotes people based on how long you've been with the company instead of the quality of your work. This leads to, for example, an IT employee being promoted to supervisor of a production software team just because he's been at Ford the longest. These are just two different worlds, and they don't mesh well together, which is why some of these production products are a disaster. People should be promoted based on the quality of their work, not for how many years they can sit behind the same desk.

I have yet to meet someone at Ford who understands the difference between good software and bad software. People seem to think that if "it works," then it's good software and the project is good to ship. No! That is absolutely wrong! Just because the software works in a black-box test environment doesn't mean it's robust, readable, flexible, or maintainable. Some of the software I've seen has been an absolute nightmare, and my superiors refuse to let me make it any better because "it already works." Come back to me in 5 years when you have to make a change that becomes impossible to implement and tell me "it works."

Management needs to start recognizing their exceptional employees and rewarding them for their excellent work. Similarly, management needs to recognize bad work and work with employees to make themselves better. Doing bad work is fine (we've all done it at some point), but continuously doing bad work and never improving yourself is not fine. People who refuse to learn and refuse to improve themselves should be fired because a single such person can destroy a project with their bad code.

Management should also promote based on ability and skill instead of length of tenure. Someone who's been in seat fabric design for 20 years should not be promoted to run a software team – it makes absolutely no sense.