Main problem that occurred with my boss is over the assignment of work that I like to call "side projects". Side projects basically go nowhere and don't support the contract but someone thinks it's a neat idea. I work mainly on supporting technical documents and also sit of a number of boards concerning discrepancies in support of the satellite. Because of this I try hard to not get entangled in side projects.
2 assignments lead to trouble. First assignment was working on a website. This website would never be useful and was basically started because my non-technical lead thinks websites are neat. I sat on some meeting and didn't want to get involve since it was not going anywhere. The second side project assignment was a V&V effort (verification and validation). The assignment involved claiming all commands and all possible values of parameters were tested. This claim is silly because this claim involves tremendous amounts of time to issues "all possible command and their parameters". Not to mention we have no facility to do this.
Both of these assignments feel onto my lap because in my group, I'm the only one that actually produces work (documents, analysis, reports, etc). My say in this is nonexistent and by my declining to work on his pet projects I upset my lead.
The second assignment sat on the back burner for a couple of months. During this time I kept stating the concept was silly and doesn't do anyone any good and would soak amazing amounts of time trying to type a gigabyte spreadsheet for this. The answer I got back was always "that's what Al Wyatt wants". Al Wyatt is the chief engineer of SBIRS (high as you can go as engineer). This begged the question on why there’s no documentation or email scoping this work. So I requested that we have a meeting with Al to define the scope. After a few weeks with it became clear that absolutely no one in my group ever wants to talk to Al. This brought up the speculation on my part that this was all BS with people saying what Al wants and having never talked to him. So I went to talk to Al solo. Of course he was unaware of the project and thought it was silly and not productive. So basically now I know I get lied to a lot. But I did the stupid thing and reported what I learned from talking with Al to my supervisor (Phillip Topping). To put it mildly, he was LITE. This occurred in my cubicle with my cub mates present. Because he was getting personal I requested multiple time for him to leave. He didn't leave and was verbally abusive. This was all done with my cubicle mates as witnesses. (Christopher Daut)
The next day my functional manager (Jonathan Caldwell) called me in and had a “put you in your place meeting” with me. He made it absolutely clear the fact that I have no say in what constitutes productive or legal work on the program. If I'm told to finger paint and bill to SBIRS (government) that is what I have to do. The determination of what work is done is solely by him. At this point the paperwork was already filed. The next week I was given a WARN notice (a layoff letter) from someone who was a buddy of Caldwell. I received the WARN on June 24. I was given this letter not by my boss. Unknown to me, I was transferred to another department and group with a new functional manager (Gordon Pryor). I don’t believe he was ever my manager, this was just a stunt done w/o HR. This was very petty action that was done to put me in a new job category and thus have no seniority whereas before I had a lot. This makes laying me off acceptable to HR. After a few weeks, I was transferred back to my old group and manager. Again without being notified, except when my original boss gave me a new WARN notice on Sept 8. The writing was clearly on the wall. I went around to people I knew and heard that HR would block any transfer I tried to make and that a transfer within Sunnyvale plant was nil. I did a lot of looking around the day after I got the WARN notice. This resulted in my boss stating I wasn't by my desk enough and filed a complaint that I was mischarging. Of course no charge is provided for looking for new job. Again I felt this was amazingly petty. It became clear I was to stay at my desk for the 60 days till I'm out the door. This was escalated when HR (Lanet Randall) called me into her office (9/16/2009) and stated that I was mischarging and they had installed spyware on my computer to watch what I do and found I was viewing forbidden websites (google.news). They also stated I was doing homework and mischarging. This was a bit odd as this class I was taking was a company sponsored class with company people giving the class, but again the writing was on the wall. HR told me I was going to be blacklisted from ever working at Lockheed-Martin again for these offenses. My work environment needless sucks pretty bad and I saw no point in going to work after the meeting with HR. Unfortunately any absence (vacation/unpaid) has to be approved by your manager) which of course didn't happen. I was not going to get a transfer or even the layoff, but get terminated. This all was very singular and undocumented. All my reviews are good and there is nothing in writing that I'm aware of over the problems with me. It's all very verbal and under the table and I didn't expect this form Lockheed-Martin. I feel this is very much retaliation for questioning my boss's idea of what constitutes legal work on a government contract. Lockheed-Martin has a reputation for age discrimination and I probably made myself a target by seniority as well. I would like to also state I feel with all the useless work going on the SBIRS programs an argument for fraud is possible as there is no way there is something in the contract allowing such work. In fact I had a cubicle mate (Justin Klein) who did web site development as a side business with my lead's (Phillip Topping) approval (this person was connected with upper managers).