The Cost of Defiance

 

I recently read Defy; The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, by Dr. Sunita Sah and that book reminded me of the personal torment I went through in escaping from the “best job I ever had” (according to my father) and avoiding doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.  In early 2001, I was employed as a Reliability Assurance Engineer supporting Guidant/CRM’s Ventak implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) products.  The very same products that, soon, began Guidant’s rapid decline into a collection of FDA recalls and product failures that caused injury and death to hundreds of patients. About four months before I left the company at the beginning of 2001, I was “offered the opportunity” to disable a product component failure database that I’d assembled to track specific design areas contributing to ICD failures and (sometimes) patient injury and death.  I’d spent hundreds of hours developing both the database and the product testing protocols that determined the failure mechanisms.  When an ICD fails it almost always either causes harm to the patient or puts the patient at extreme risk of injury or death. My supervisor had been told that the database needed to be “scrambled” so that an FDA inspection wouldn’t easily be able to see our products’ design flaws.   I was the only person in the company who knew how the database worked and, short of simply deleting the information, I was the obvious candidate to render it useless.

Sadly, I thought about it for a bit.  There was nobody I could talk to either privately or in the company about that amoral (at best) order and I was incredibly conflicted.  Initially, I got into medical devices because I thought there was an opportunity to do some good, as an engineer.  When I started that career, I’d just left a 15 year career in audio electronics engineering and had decided that occupation was doing nothing more than making bad music louder.  My last employer made professional audio power amplifiers and we were making music really loud.  My father had recently barely survived a series of heart attacks and some of his care in a Wichita, Kansas hospital was moderately competent and some of it was pretty terrible.  After my last employer had turned out to be a scumbag, I thought I’d give another industry a shot, an industry that purports to be one that at least, “does no harm”; medical devices.

My first employer in medical devices was Telectronics Pacing Systems in Englewood, Colorado.  When I started with Telectronics, the company was on its way from being a very conservative, high quality Australian company to becoming a minor subsidiary of a huge, mostly-incompetent British conglomerate: Pacific Dunlop (PD).  PD’s Telectronics mismanagement was a sad combination of British upper-crust fools and the shoe-scrapings exectives from a failed Florida company, Cordis, who the PD silly-walkers had bought in a recall fire-sale and installed as Telectronics’s new management. It took those overpaid, unskilled characters less than 4 years to blow up a $500M/year well-respected company and lose almost 1,000 jobs and harm too many patients to count.  By the end of my Telectronics stint, I was a reliablity engineer for the company’s spun-off recall division, often participating in lead extractions and device replacements in the field.  The upside to that position was that it had left me in place as a resident “expert” on purchased aspects of several of Telectronics’ products and designs, as the company’s design engineers had quickly abandoned ship for better climates and safer career floatation.

That largely unearned status got me several offers from Telectronics’ competitors and put me in the driver’s seat of my own career for a brief rare moment in time.  For a variety of not-necessarily-rational reasons, I found myself the focus of a bidding war for my services and in 1996, I accepted an offer from Guidant as a Technical Services Engineer with a promise that the company would find a field position for me, back in Colorado, within six months.  There was more money in that offer than I’d ever imagined I would see in my lifetime, too.  Guidant lived up to the Colorado promise, but my daughter and new grandson had moved to Minnesota in the meantime and I had to pass on the field position and promotion that came with it.  A year later, I left Technical Services for Reliability Assurance and two promotions later I was heading a small group of data entry people and technicians who were tracking some unsettling failures in our 2^nd generation ICDs.  And that is where my database came into being.   

By the fall of 2000, it was becoming obvious that the Ventak ICDs had a serious manufacturing flaw.  My database had accumulated more than 300 identical failures, based on returned product testing, and at least another 300 devices that had clearly failed in a suspicious manner but weren’t returned to Guidant because the patients had died.  At that point, I hoped that some cardiologist might recognize the connection between a device that had unexpectedly failed and a patient death or injury.  If anyone (physician, nurse, FDA inspector, or sales rep) had asked me, at that time, if I’d seen a failure like the kind I’d been monitoring, I’d have immediately given them all of the information I’d collected for them to draw their own conclusions.  I’d long given up trying to get anyone in Guidant’s mismanagement to act on what was, by then, a Class 1 Recall and a manufacturing process that was out-of-control.  I’ve told a part of this story before (“The Price of Thankfulness”), but one of the straws that broke my mind was when I’d spent a couple of weeks trying to get the billing for a young woman’s failed ICD sorted out so that she wouldn’t be bankrupted by our product failure.  After getting everyone involved to forgive her hospital “debt,” I learned that she had died when her 2^nd device failed a short time after her implant.  Then, my supervisor delivered the final blow by ordering me to disorganize my product failure database. 

Looking back, I suspect there were early warnings that came before my meltdown, but I was “up to my neck in alligators” and didn’t see them.  It seemed to me that it all happened instantly.  First, by January 2001 I had lost the ability to read . . . anything.  I couldn’t even decipher the captions under pictures in the newspaper.  I certainly couldn’t do any programming.  Not long after losing that key ability, I fell into a severe depression; physically and mentally.  Sometime early that spring, I went on medical leave and cycled through the sad sack assortment of characters who passed for “mental health professionals” at my HMO.  In April, I stumbled on to a benefit that allowed me to look for counseling outside of the HMO and I lucked into a brilliant woman who helped me realize that the money I was making in medical devices was ripping out what passed for my soul.  By June, I was being pressed to either resign or come back to work and, lucky for me, a good friend offered me good advice and alternative employment (at a substantial reduction in income).  That began the final phase of my working life and provided me with many of the best moments of my life.

I don’t know the whole story, but my database information did end up in the right hands, undefiled, in early 2002 and that began the fall of Guidant. By 2003, some of my former colleagues at Guidant began calling me at home asking “How did you know this would happen?”  I had often recounted my Telectronics experiences to them, as it became obvious to me that Guidant’s products were heading in the same direction.  I’d sat in the room with two FDA inspectors, answering questions asked by one of the inspectors while the other one twiddled his handcuffs.  It took me two years to recover from the depression, reading disability, and regain some of my confidence and restart my career in my new fields.  A few years later, I learned that my Guidant supervisor had committed suicide a couple of years after I left the company.  I could relate. 

The only people who can flourish in that kind of environment are amoral, greedy, lizard-people like the ones currently populating the Republican Party.  Everyone else will suffer, no matter what the job pays.  Worse, the victims of those people, those companies, often suffer the ultimate price: death.  Defying the monsters who filter to the top/bottom of the corporate toilet bowl is usually painful, dangerous, and too often results in the loss of everything a decent person values.  Living with them usually causes the same kind of destruction.  Now, as a nation that has ignored the vicious, greedy, amoral behavior of those who profit from the mismanagement of our country, we are all being forced to choose between accommodation and participation in the destruction of the tattered remains of “the American Experiment” in democracy . . . or defiance.  A price will be paid, either way.

Normalizing Aberrant Behavior and an Abusive Workplace

 After seeing the outright fascist and perverted behavior of Musk and Trump over the past month, I wondered (again) “what kind of person is still working for Tesla?”  So, I did a Google search on exactly that question and probably the best description appeared in a Reddit comment from 3 years ago in reply to a question, “Current or former Tesla employees.. Is Tesla really that bad for salaried employees?”  Reading the first response to that question, from an ex-Tesla employee who “left in 2019,” reminded me of a 1999 book by Alan Cooper (an ex-Microsoft executive), The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.  The Tesla environment is what you might expect if all of the boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies continued to raise themselves on that island, with the help of a handful of computers and unrestricted access to the most irresponsibly violent video games, and stumbled into a company recently wreaked by a parasitic, spoiled rich Afrikaner who has one of the longest uninterrupted lucky streaks in human history.  Working at Tesla sounds like being in a hellhole of dysfunction surrounded by spoiled boys who’s parents should have practiced corporal punishment; or abortion.

Those of us who have been outside observers of Musk’s lucky path to “the world’s richest man” have, mostly, been treated to all of the evidence necessary that karma is bullshit.  His demonstration of business “leadership” at Twitter/X is right up there with Putin’s Poodle’s casino bankruptcies as an example of “how not to” manage a business.  Tesla has set records for vehicle crashes, repair expenses, unreliability and recalls, and the only Tesla vehicle that Musk had any real hand in developing, the Cybertruck aka Swasticar/Deplorean, is an internet and international joke.   People still imagine that Musk is a genius, especially people foolish enough to gamble on his companies, and that misplaced faith is setting up the United States for the next Great Depression with no fallback plan or responsible adults in charge of any of our institutions. The train wreck that Barak Obama saved us from in 2009 is coming due now and there is no brilliant, responsible, creative “DEI hire” in the wings to stop the crash.

I am in the process of applying to be a volunteer at a local hospital, one that appears to be unintimidated by the MAGA threats regarding DEI policies, and the application process brought home how much this country has benefitted from the years of “diversity (D), equity (E), and inclusion (I).  I went through a 20-minute online training segment just on the value this hospital’s 150 year commitment to diversity has provided Minnesota and the world.  After listening to local and national “news” for the past month, describing the decline and fall of the American Century, this was a breath of clean, fresh air that I really needed.

Here are some highlights of the reddit author’s experience:

·       “Jank [“worthless” or “of poor quality”] rules supreme at Tesla. . . The part of the production line that was featured in tours was the one that Grohmann automation built (who Tesla has since acquired). It looks modern, clean, and futuristic. The other 90% of the factory looks mostly filthy and like a collection of senior projects and robot arms. There are many processes which really should be done in a clean room but are just done in a dirty factory atmosphere next to a few exterior doors that are open to the windy high desert.”

·       Safety?  “Giant forklifts rolling down aisles where you have to squeeze yourself up against a machine cell while the thing rolls past 2 feet in front of you, daily occurrence. Maybe the plexiglass will stop it? People going to the ER because they had a battery module dropped on them? Happened a couple times. If you're in a factory environment you need to watch out for yourself.”

·       “Holidays are all over the place. Engineers worked through thanksgiving, Xmas, and on New Year's Eve. Sometimes you can get out of it, sometimes you can't. If you want to travel to see family just know that your holidays are always subject to change until a day before. Told you you're off but you're actually on? Tough luck. Told you you're on but you're actually off? Too late to buy flights so hope you've got friends in Austin.”

·       “You will watch the value of your stock package swing up and down by tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Usually in response to some Elon tweet. You can really feel the mood change when you walk in one morning and everyone just watched $10k get shaved off their upcoming vest.”

·       “If you're the type of person to pop a monocle because of a lack of professionalism, it may not be for you. I saw more than one production associate (euphemism for factory button-pusher) walking around wearing a graphic tee featuring nude anime girls with huge tits. Nobody seemed to care, and no skin off my back, but if that bothers you.”

·       “If you're the type to have a panic attack and need a mental health day when someone raises their voice at you: it's not the environment for you. Conversely, if you're the type of person that is fucking sick and tired of wishy-washy corpo-happy-speak, you might love it. Anyone who's had a performance review or 1-on-1 who thought ‘Wait, so am I doing well or not’ can relate. . . At Tesla it was very clear: ‘You're fucking up, you did a great job with X but if you don't Y and Z, things will not go well for you.’ Crystal. Also I could get away with telling someone ‘that's a stupid fucking idea, are you serious?" in a meeting, provided that it actually WAS a stupid fucking idea and I could prove it.’”

There is more, a lot more, but coming from 40+ years in manufacturing what I recognized from that last item is that loudmouth, arrogant, extroverted bullies rule at Tesla while thoughtful, analytical, skilled technical people will be buried in a hostile work environment that encourages poor decisions as long as they are made with confidence.  There is, by the way, nothing new about that work environment.  It’s pretty exactly the kind of place that most of US manufacturing was in before the late-1980’s quality movement and that pretty much explains Tesla’s poor product reputation and clockwork recall schedule.   The company’s first level “fix” for customer dissatisfaction is to require an NDA for warranty work authorization.  If you can’t make a decent product, kill the messenger.  That will work, sure. Musk is going to have to buy Consumer Reports, otherwise blowing up NHTSA isn’t going to work.   Like Trump’s MAGA cult, it’s pretty interesting that even with all of the problems, the generally crappy product design, manufacturing, and awful customer service, Tesla owners have been hilariously loyal to the brand until Musk outed himself as an anti-democratic fascist and decent human beings started mocking the Tesla culters.

One comment the reddit author made illustrated the real costs of working for a company as dysfunctional as Tesla, “. . . Tesla is the only place I've ever worked that made me question if I even wanted to be an engineer. I used to do a ton of personal engineering projects, I worked on products I wanted to manufacture and sell, I had a bitchin' EE lab I used all the time, etc. I've done none of that since starting at Tesla and even after leaving, and the lab is still in boxes. It broke something inside me that I'm still trying to fix. . .”  I can relate to that experience.  For some of us, being an engineer is a calling, maybe not at the level of being a medical doctor but at least with the ideal and goal of making the world a better place.  Working at Tesla is all about getting rich quick with stock options, regardless of the damage done to society and consumers.  You can, for a while, delude yourself into thinking you will make up for the damage after you get rich.  The so-called “crypto-capitalists” who massaged their already stunted consciences with pipedreams of spending their fortune “making the world a better place” instead of doing something useful with their lives never seem to get around to doing the useful things.  Musk somehow convinced some seriously gullible folks that he has a goal other than destroying democracy and making himself even more despicably rich in the process.  He might have even convinced himself, but I doubt that.