My experience

Overview

I was mostly responsible for testing minor bugs relating to the HMI and back end controllers for commodity car audio (think radio, bluetooth). This was done on both test benches and development mules, at customer facilities and at the company's own garage. My bug spreadsheet eventually comprised about 80 different issues in various stages of investigation at the time of my exit. Testing involved opening the ticket, recording the reproduction procedure, following it in the vehicle or test bench on a specific software patch, and noting the result while running a CAN traffic recorder to get the data. On some issues I was shown how to debug the traffic record and find possible causes of the issue in software. Depending on the urgency of the issue, I was often required to work at Ford facilities and sometimes over weekends or after COB. When at Ford, I interacted closely with their engineers as the resident interface for my company. They were usually some shade of angry that our tech was causing problems for them when I had to show up, requiring me to manage expectations and think on my feet about ways to defuse the situation.

One of the people I reported to was a young guy who was clearly being groomed for management, and they used me as his subordinate guinea pig to see if he was cut out for it (Example of inescapable Ford corporate culture). He was fine as a manager but it was obvious to me that he was grossly over-representing his experience to his superiors; he sometimes accompanied me on trips to customer facilities and was constantly micromanaging my work, despite clearly having even less experience than what little I did in issue testing. He preferred I was not in the meetings he had with his superiors, probably because when I was, I quickly noticed him completely misrepresenting his level of involvement and taking credit for my achievements. Another thing emblematic of the culture, the garage was mostly full of development vehicles to do testing with. However, the CEO drove a Tesla and insisted that two spots in the already crowded garage stayed empty at all times for him to park his Tesla in. There was some admin goon that would always show up and scold me for parking a test vehicle (usually a Bronco or F150 Raptor, both huge vehicles) too close to the CEO's spot. I mean sorry man, but I already parked in 2 other cars getting this close to them and the CEO isn't even here today. All of this was despite having a mostly empty parking lot, just for executives, literally right next to the garage. Corporate culture straight out of Office Space aside, the experience was extremely valuable and allowed me to get a good job right as I graduated. Not with Visteon though, the management is trying to move as many full-time engineering positions as they can to Mexico.