Everyone’s lost a job before. I’ve lost a few. So why did this time feel like a kick to the bollocks?
Well, the story kinda begins at the end of April 2025 when I was laid off following a reorganization at my then workplace. That sucked, but whatever. This was more of a normal job, where I got actual feedback on my performance, and things that needed improvement were worked on.
I applied to Bombardier via Linkedin. I got a call to set up and interview and I was very, very keen. In recent years I had developed a taste for aviation so I was already pumped for that, but also to find a job in this industry for a Canadian company that’s got huge cultural importance in this country and province… it seemed perfect.
The interview was… short. Very short. I got the impression that the interviewer, who would become my boss, either didn’t really know what he wanted to see in a candidate, or maybe he knew EXACTLY what he was looking for and I had ticked all the right boxes. When I got the offer I decided to believe it was the latter.
Now there was just one thing (there always is). I got offered the job in late July, but could only start on September 22nd, two months away. At that time I didn’t think too much of that, since my daughter was on a visit which was getting extended due to other things coming up, so it worked out for me. Still I asked if maybe it was possible to start earlier, but my now-boss said that I would be working with someone who was on vacation until September 22nd.
In hindsight I should really have seen this as kind of a red flag. This is an aircraft manufacturer. You’d think that it would be possible to train someone to do a vital customer service-related job, that the jobs themselves and the processes involved would be well-documented. You would think that. And if this were to happen now I would have questions, but between my relief at having found a job so quickly, my joy at being able to hang out with my girl — we went swimming every other day pretty much — and my enthusiasm at this new job, I decided to trust the process. When waiting for the first day I get a notification that starting in January we would be required to be at the office for at least 2 days a week. I don’t particularly like this, because it’s a pretty major change from the work conditions I was told about when I was interviewing (as well as another red flag I ignored), but I think “ok, whatever, I can get there by transit” and don’t give it much thought.
Late September comes around and I show up for the first day on the job. This is my first partial on-site job since the pandemic, but again I just accept things as they are. On the first day I just get my gear and am given time to set myself up, and my boss says I can go and asks me to come back to the office the next day. By sheer coincidence this happens to be during the transit strike in Montreal and I end up stuck in St-Laurent for a couple of hours until the Metro starts running again. It’s just bad luck. The next day I return, expecting to meet the guy I’m supposed to work with, but he didn’t show up. In fact I would never actually meet this guy face to face. While every non-manager was technically still working remotely, we were requested to be in the office one day a month (this will be an issue later) and the next office day is the next Monday. I come in on that day… and am the only there from my team, besides the boss.
This is probably where I should have clued in that the company has some serious internal communications issues.
Back on my second day, there was a little information session covering things like the company history, including the recent business focus. To give a very, very brief overview — this is a company that grew and grew until it became unmanageable (some 15 years ago), but has now refocused its operations to concentrate on their core business (high-end business jets) and sold off a lot of its divisions and products, which allowed it to become profitable again. Yay!
When we introduce ourselves to the group one thing stands out to me. Half of us are new employees, but the other half are returning employees. And we’re talking about people who had worked there for 10-15 years. I think this is great, because clearly this is a company that must treat its employees well, otherwise they wouldn’t return, right?
So I am studying the materials that have been shared with me. There’s a call with my boss and the coworker I’m expected to learn my job from, things seem to go well. He says he doesn’t expect me to start taking over the tasks until 2026 which tells me that the expectations are reasonable. However I can’t help but notice that after this initial meeting he’s not really talking to me. If I have questions he answers them, but otherwise there’s no “let me show you the ropes” moment from him. Eventually I bring up getting trained for the job, and he starts telling me. Kind of. I get hooked up with access to a resource I need, start analyzing things contained in said resource (I have to be really vague to respect NDAs), but then the radio silence resumes.
I never got a good idea of exactly why that was happening. If I had a question he would answer it, but there was still a big problem, which obviously only became clear in hindsight. Everyone else who was a full-time employee on the team had worked at Bombardier for 15+ years, and they had all been in their jobs for many years already. And we really did not have the level of internal documentation that should have been a given for a company our size in our industry.
Now, there is a pretty famous standard out there called ISO-9000. This should be the basic standard for publicly-traded companies. The part of ISO that I want to talk about is the need to have specifications and documentations for internal processes and roles. It’s admittedly an annoying process to go through, but it provides the company with a way to be able to answer “what does this person do here”. It’s very useful to have this information when onboarding people. If nothing else you’d have a list of what the new hire will do in terms of tasks, and the resources they need access to in order to start doing the job. In fact, with most of the companies I worked at before, the access issues would have been taken care of even before my first login. For example, if I needed access to a mailing list account, that access would have been granted and the lists would already have been added to my Outlook. There would have been an email sent to me with at least a pointer to existing documentation as it relates to my group/job. That’s how you onboard people quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
However, Bombardier really, REALLY doesn’t know how to onboard people. I mean there’s a cute little corporate write-up, and they would like their employees to set their linkedin profile to have a Bombardier-supplied background, but there isn’t that much else. That means that the knowledge is in people’s heads and has never been meaningfully turned into documentation. But with a workforce with an average tenure of 15 years, that’s a big problem. The processes and jobs are things that were established many years ago and have undergone changes over these years, but no one really remembers how to start as a new employee in the role. Once I know enough to know that there’s something I’m missing, yes, I can ask about that and get an answer. However in the long term I’m constantly begin expected to ask details about what Donald Rumsfeld once called the “unknown unknowns” — stuff I don’t know that I don’t know. Something we could have resolved so quickly had process and role documentation existed, as it should have. But no, I was effectively set up to fail. Two days before my last day I found that I should have been subscribed to an additional mailing list (besides the one I subscribed to), but get this — I found this out double-checking something with an external contractor, who checked the detail and said “I think you’re not on that distribution list”. Seriously, WTF?!?
Frankly I wonder if there was ever another possible outcome to this disaster. Because (again after much reflection) I’m fairly sure it was coworker feedback — which had, again, never been discussed with me — that resulted in my losing the job, but that’s mostly because our manager was not involved with the day-to-day details of my job, and so he depended entirely on said coworker for my assessment. And as I said, the coworker didn’t seem interested in talking to me much. Now I was always under the impression that the team was intended to go forward with the same number of people, and I was replacing someone who had left to go to another team. However, the more I think about it, the more it sounds like my boss told my coworker that he had to train his replacement (me), and that he was clearly not pleased with the idea.
But the onboarding problems exist not only in the job-specific areas, but also at the corporate level. It took over a week before I got any information about registering for health insurance and other benefits, for example, even though everyone reassured me that I was covered. Every single company I’ve worked for in the past had all that stuff ready to go on day 1, and I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to think it would be the same at Bombardier. I mean, they had almost 2 months to get the paperwork ready.
The other surprising thing about losing this job is that from a 12 person team 1 (me) has been fired, 1 is leaving due to his contract being up, and 3 are retiring in the first two quarters of the year. INCLUDING THE MANAGER. Maybe his apparent lack of interest in things was down to his imminent retirement and just having checked out already. It’s a customer service-related team, and while we weren’t always rushing, I really don’t know how the work’s gonna get done. However at this point it’s just not my fucking problem and I really don’t give a shit how they resolve it.
That being said, I’m sure the situation is not unique to my team. There will be very serious problems related to this that will come up in the next few years and inevitably product and customer service quality will suffer.
Well, that’s it. I’ve run out of things to say and I want to put everything aside and never thing about that damned company again. Oh by the way they did screw up my last pay by not paying for unused vacation and personal time, which I just reminded them about. All in all Bombardier is not a company you can trust as an employee.
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