Federal Investigation into Microsoft
- Trevor Alexander Nestor
- 2 days ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
Today's blog article is going to be a bit different. A bit more unhinged - but in a good way.
In previous blog posts I've explained the issues I witnessed at Microsoft and the sorts of emails and messages I've received on a daily basis since going public about the story mentioning things like physical stalking, whistleblower retaliation, ADA non-compliance, pathological lying and dysfunction, replacement of engineers with H1Bs and non functional AI tools like copilot, the inability of Microsoft to provide their engineers the bare minimum of laptop assets that can turn on in a timely manner, the unaffordability of purchasing one's own home near the campus or metro where one is more often expected to work, the gutting of their IT support on campus, missing critical documentation, deliberate information siloing, passive aggressive behaviors, wrongful terminations, and so on.
So now I've filed complaints with several government agencies and I intend to be completely public about the whole process - because what I've found is that unless you apply public pressure, you can and will be gaslighted. This is not something I am doing merely for spectacle - at this point it is a requirement. One might even say that is one core point of the AI tools themselves - they are designed as central information surveillance and control loops to alienate people from one another so that there is always an air of plausible deniability and inability of employees to avoid scapegoating because nobody is there to vouch for them.
What I can tell you is that I will not be tolerating any further gaslighting. I have audios, videos, the physical assets, corroborating statements from employees in and outside of the org, documents, dms, etc in a safe place. There is no further plausible deniability when my doctor specifically requested that I receive adequate support, documentation, and training on the team - and they could not even provide the bare minimum of any basic functional Microsoft assets for the entire duration of my PIP - when my manager failed to answer emails for the entire duration of the PIP - when my 45 day PIP period was abruptly cut short to only 4 days (shortly after submitting a "report-it-now" case for possible security holes) where I was blamed for "not meeting expectations" when they didn't even play the period to demonstrate that out - telling me I had an option between a severance or the 45 day PIP period - in spite of hours and hours of video and audio footage unambiguoisly showing the failure of Microsoft's IT department that they offshored to 3rd party contracting companies in other countries that often interface with laptops that contain sensitive government data (where they then get hacked by those other countries while stupidly instead of fixing that continue to layer on additional security hoops for their own engineers to jump through). Documentation was repeatedly wrong, outdated, missing, and misleading - causing serious delays - and when the AI tools are trained on this - would often produce garbled garbage especially for navigating evolving security processes.
As obvious as these things are, it's remarkable the stupid excuses coming from employment law firms - that's the mechanism for repressing accountability. I've seen case precedents and class action suits often win millions. I'm not in it for the money here but there certainly is an incentive to do the right thing. The claims I've gotten so far are that firms do not have the resources and are inundated with people - and also apparently Microsoft has agreements with many firms to not sue them (totally not corrupt at all). I've been doing intakes from Thailand and I'll be calling every law firm in the United States if I have to.
In one case there was a new requirement for engineers to sign code to pass code reviews (I guess there aren't enough hoops for them to jump through to prove their identity while third party IT contractors in other countries bizarrely don't seem to always have to deal with it). I repeatedly told my manager (who currently has a mentor at the company and who repeatedly would fail to show up to his weekly syncs) that the documentation was wrong - and these are processes you cannot independently intuit. The pattern I would see is denials, which would cause significant delays - until things would reach boiling points - at which point they would be forced to intervene - and then I would be blamed for the delay after. In this case my manager would claim that "everybody else could figure it out" in spite of the fact that I asked coworkers and after attempting it with me for several hours could not figure it out. Eventually they were forced to do a knowledge sharing session where it was revealed that virtually nobody could do it and they were forced to fix the documents.
Since onboarding management would claim that "everybody else could figure it out" (he also claimed that about the onboarding docs where things got so bad after months of delays for basic onboarding tasks they were eventually forced to do an entire hackathon to fix them because it turns out I was correct, and that "nobody else was having issues with their SAW and could figure it out" in spite of their being videos of big fat stacks of these laptops in his office with a sticky note on it saying "broken") in an effort to isolate me and single me out. In one example I spun up cloud resources I needed for a task but did not have the permissions to delete it - and it sat there sitting for weeks because the manager and his elitist attitude just assumed that I was incompetent and needed to just figure out how to use the portal.
I would often hear passive aggressive comments about how I'm a "senior engineer" and therefore needed to "self learn" and "self unblock" which is odd considering in many cases that would require me to work around the security and that my manager currently has a mentor at the company, and others stated that they had a mentor to help with these day to day concerns their entire first year - and wasn't technically possible. Those in roles above me would often approach me for assistance because the documentation was so abysmal and dysfunctional (coworkers refer to it as the "dumpsterfire").
Tasking rarely had any descriptions and when I would attempt to clarify details with coworkers management would act passive aggressively (one example is that during code reviews they would often take many iterations which was typical on the team for everybody because of the poor communications, but then in my PIP the manager claimed that code reviews should not have more than around 2-3 iterations). My PIP bizarrely instructed me to both rely more on support and to do so more urgently, but then depend on support less. I was chastised for asking relevant questions about the database (such as why results do not appear when they normally should after a query - when the reason is that they are kept there for a certain time window - perfectly reasonable thing to ask coworkers especially when you first join a new org) - MONTHS later.
Another example is that I was often tasked to do investigations called IcMs - often to see why cloud resources would go down. First of all - my SAW (secure access work station) which had tooling that I needed would not turn on and the replacement and second replacement both failed and there was a whole month delay just to procure a new yubikey due to yubikey shortages (they can't afford to get their engineers what they need at the largest and most profitable company on the planet in history? I'm calling bullshit). Secondly, if our team was not responsible for the layer of the fault, IcMs had to be sent to other teams. I would at times reach out to people in other teams to discuss - which seemed to be pretty normal considering managers and other team mates were on constant IcM bridges and calls all day discussing these matters - but what I found was different - passive aggressive behaviors.
Feedback I received from my manager was intentionally vague ("needs a revisit") with no context. I was asked to read his mind - in spite of me leaving detailed descriptions in IcMs about my queries and how I arrived at the conclusions that I did. In one case that I documented the manager didn't like a team I sent an IcM to - even though it was correct - just simply because he felt I should have sent to a different team first. This poor communication was a significant problem for the entire duration of my employment - and then the ensuing passive aggressive response when I could not read my manager's mind without discussion. When asking my skip where he thought I could improve, he told me that he did not think I had a technical problem nor communication problem (though they did allude to a culture fit - I guess they are talking about their culture of concealment and gaslighting where they deliberately hire insecure engineers with low self esteem they can easily throw under the bus, though others in the org have had other suspicions).
Apparently based on messages I've received after my wrongful termination, skips in other teams tell their engineers not to work with management in my org because they are continually found throwing problems over the fence when they shouldn't be. The projection, blatant lying, and pathological gaslighting brings a whole new meaning to the Microsoft motto "Microsoft runs on trust." Microsoft runs on gaslighting, isolating employees, and plausible deniability. Does that sound accommodating and inclusive to you? Firing women for going on family medical leave? Throwing engineers under the bus?
I detail many of these things in a 30 minute long rant on tiktok and because there is so much to cover I could probably discuss hours of the damning corruption. After posting on LinkedIn that there is now a federal investigation and that I'm now pursuing a class action lawsuit for ADA non-compliance, wrongful termination, and whistleblower retaliation, I recieved nearly 70k views in a day which is a clear mandate from the public that they like this and want me to double down.
Microsoft is currently in a death spiral, with accusations that the company is also contributing to the bombing of children in Gaza (though Satya Nadella denies this - though based on the pattern of gaslighting and denials I saw I wouldn't doubt it). Those still employed at the company reach out to me now on a daily basis, including in director level roles, thanking me for going public about this because they are so afraid of speaking up because they do not want to be retaliated against - physically intimidated - losing their visas - or losing their jobs.
As for me, I no longer give a shit. You want to replace your engineers with H1Bs from another country to create a toxic culture of concealment and exploitation, undercut wages while your HQ buildings are vacant, rake in record profits while overselling what your shitty AI tools can do, and expect the engineers to transition to another career doing shitty jobs for shitty wages? The buck has to stop somewhere, and I refuse to be the scapegoat.
While all of this is happening, now I have my own visa - and will be living abroad until people sort out this bullshit in the United States. My conditions for returning is that companies must comply with ADA, they can't be gaslighting and retaliating against whistleblowers, attorneys have to do their own jobs before I am willing to get another job myself, I am going to need a big fat pay raise and promotion where I have more sway in decision making for the direction of things and more support and can afford real estate in the area near where I work. In fact I got my job at Microsoft after staging a protest against them first. After writing a scathing email personally to Mark Zuckerberg after the layoffs at Meta a few years ago and for wrongfully terminating me at Boeing for reporting safety violations both companies regularly reach out for me to come back to work there and I've got Anthropic and others lined up too. People are honestly too afraid of standing up for themselves like paranoid frightened little children.
This weird culture of concealment is over. In past years I think that there was a lot of messaging about the problem of having an unearned privilege and entitlement. So I did try to earn my way - earn my privilege. I spent years in retail and manual labor jobs, had a 4.66 GPA, attended the world's top university, was published and cited by leading researchers at the World Economics Forum, worked at Meta, at Banks, at Microsoft, at startups - on experimental flying vehicles and on the US anti ballistic missile defense system with the highest level security clearance in the country - worked closely with (though not directly for) the NSA, approached by the FBI and NMEC for positions, MBA incoming.
I don't think the problem here is that we need to work harder or even smarter. I think the solution here is that we need more people unapologetically getting more entitled and more privileged until these assholes do their fucking jobs and quit scapegoating their own engineers for their failures. If they can't figure it out, they can lose their jobs and get the hell out by public pressure, the law, and force. Don't let them fool you - whenever you are toggled on social media that has nothing to do with you violating "community guidelines" or for racist or political undertones, or because you are a threat in some way, or because you are spam, or you have a problem. It is because they do not want workers to organize. In fact, in my initial post about this which does not contain any curse words or inflammatory rhetoric, I was first banned from reddit's technology subteddit, then shadowbanned entirely. I am emailed from people every day, and apparently, this kind of corporate corruption is aimed even at engineers in India.
In my home town, after I was wrongfully terminated from Boeing for reporting safety issues (my coworkers were then found dead after attempting to testify in front of congress for other safety issues),
I was then left living in my car at which point police told me I wasn't allowed to exist anywhere, shelters were closed due to covid; and then I was forcibly detained and drugged against my will on a 5150 (a problem which will get worse now that Trump claims he would like to arrest homeless people who aren't willing to get "treatment" aka work dead end shitty jobs and be drugged into compliance). Then when I complained at city hall in my home town of Simi Valley, California I was banned from city hall in spite of not making any threats, not making a scene, and being told prior I could have an appointment with the city manager (all while in the city they have been illegally blocking housing developments to artificially inflate housing valuations!).
I was similarly banned from CU Boulder for questioning their selective enforcement of covid lockdowns and for discussing postquantum cryptography with folks at NIST (it turns out that I was correct that postquantum cryptography has a vulnerability with the physics being studied at Microsoft I've discussed in previous posts) - then when I hired an attorney he literally disappeared off the face of the planet and there was an investigation done and he couldn't be found.
I think we have all tried doing things the nice way, the professional way (I know at Microsoft I certainly didn't even raise my voice for the entire duration of dealing with Microsoft's offshored IT support! Have you ever tried using Azure support as a customer?). I was watching the Microsoft protests from my 5 star hotel in Shanghai.
Keep up the good work and pressure gentlemen (and gentlewomen) - if we don't continue to double down, before we know it we are going to live in a society run by unaccountable pedophile rapists and geriatric idiots who can just get away with anything they want while you are coerced into working dead end low wage unstable jobs (oh wait we are already there!). I want to see this kind of thing scaled up until the agencies and attorneys have no other option but to get things done.
No more bullshit excuses, no more concessions and half measures or compromises. Fix the fucking problem. If you don't we are going to force you to do your god damn job.
You are not meeting the expectations of your roles, and I am not obligated to be nice about it for you to get it done, after I've been mistreated and wrongfully terminated.
I spoke with a journalist from the New York Times about my story, and for some reason he was more interested in writing a piece about what jobs engineers are getting after the layoffs than a piece about the clear and blatant violations by the executives. My answer to him? I am not going to work again at all until there is some accountability - and I will be enjoying living in China and Thailand and maybe at times Japan (or even off-grid completely) until then.
In the meantime maybe I'll put my applications in for Elon Musk's new company MacroHard under the condition that I am able to work remotely and not work overtime (why aren't we on Mars yet? Where the hell is the high speed rail when in China I've been zooming around on bullet trains? Why don't they quit building AI data centers and start building millennials some fucking homes? Where are all the self driving electric cars when in China I've been seeing them all over the place - and even flying cars?).
You will own nothing and be happy? More like if I don't own anything there is nothing to lose anymore and you can't expect people to continue playing along.
And people are telling me I shouldn't be so public about this story as it might harm my lawsuit. My response is that it's actually a requirement at this point, because nothing is getting done without public pressure. If they don't like it, and they don't like the bad PR, they can kiss my ass. And I'm going to be ranting all over the internet every day racking up thousands of views with the bad PR until the problem is fixed.
Probably not the answer the journalist was looking for in corporate media, but frankly, I really don't give a damn any more. Get your engineers a fucking laptop that can turn on and if you can't do that I don't want to hear how I didn't meet the expectations of my role, and I'm not going to do a career pivot and waste my time working for less when I wasn't even getting paid enough as it is.
Based on my prior experience working with federal investigations and agencies in the past I have low confidence that anything is going to get done because often times there is a clear and obvious dereliction of duty (they don't want to rock the boat much especially for an average person), but that's why I'm here making this public for if and when that happens they can make a fool of themselves in front of the entire public on the record.
I will also say that I've gotten hundreds of matches on Tinder since going abroad whereas in the United States you have to pay for Tinder plus and a significant portion of the women are distrusting because they have been raped or assaulted, and it can be hard to afford to do anything for many people, or to form a long term stable relationship. I'm not too happy about that. You are either left jumping through endless security hoops to gain trust, people are trying to scam you or get money out of you, people aren't healthy, or you have some sparks going and people being too busy with work/school/obligations ruins it - you lose your job and can't sustain anything long term, or whatever else.
One of the Microsoft leadership principles is to "define the issue before taking action." I've defined the issue very clearly for you - and when I'm not provided any basic functional assets required to do any tasking, I'm not going to be taking another position and will not be coming back until the US gets it's shit together to fix it, and I'm done hearing about how I'm the one with the problem.
