Orbital angular momentum mode-mixing for Laguerre–Gaussian beams scattered by Kerr black holes

My new computational study maps the OAM scattering channel of Kerr in painstaking detail. Here is what it found, why it matters, and where it falls short.

Orbital angular momentum mode-mixing for Laguerre–Gaussian beams scattered by Kerr black holes

https://zenodo.org/records/19830674

Presentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxgYcBmSQVs

So here is something that might surprise you if you have not thought about it before: light can be twisted.

Not in the polarization sense, where the electric field rotates as the wave moves. Something deeper. The phase fronts of a beam (the surfaces of constant phase, the things that look like rippling sheets in a textbook diagram) can wind around the beam's propagation axis like a corkscrew. The number of times they wind is an integer, it is conserved as the beam propagates through empty space, and it is called the topological charge. Physicists also call it orbital angular momentum, or OAM. A pulse of OAM light is sometimes called a vortex photon.

Allen and collaborators worked this out in a famous 1992 paper, and OAM has since become a real workhorse in optics labs. People use it for high-bandwidth communication, quantum information protocols, and, more recently, astronomy.

Which brings us to the question. What happens to a twisted beam of light when it scatters off a spinning black hole? Could it be possible that the missing information from the black hole information paradox might be encoded on OAM modes or light?

That is what this new preprint submitted to Physical Review D. sets out to approach in quantitative detail. And the answer turns out to be more interesting than either "nothing" or "the black hole eats the twist."

The seed for this whole line of inquiry is a 2011 Nature Physics paper by Tamburini, Thidé, Molina-Terriza, and Anzolin. They argued that a Kerr (rotating) black hole should imprint OAM on light passing through its near-zone, because of frame dragging. Spacetime around a spinning black hole literally rotates with the hole, and that rotation should leave a signature on the phase structure of any light that gets close.

If true, this opens up a tantalizing observational possibility. The Event Horizon Telescope and its planned successor, the next-generation EHT, are imaging the photon rings of supermassive black holes like M87* and Sgr A*. If those photon rings carry distinctive OAM signatures tied to the central black hole's spin, an OAM-resolved measurement could become a new probe of the geometry, complementary to standard imaging.

But the 2011 prediction was qualitative. Geometric optics. Order-of-magnitude.

The paper does the boring, hard, necessary thing: it computes the actual scattering, in the full-wave Teukolsky regime, on a 5,250-point grid covering most of the physically relevant parameter space (spin, frequency, input topological charge). And then it asks four very specific questions about what falls out.

Question one: does the twist survive?

The first thing I do is check whether the topological charge of the incident beam matches the topological charge of the outgoing scattered field.

Across all 4,985 grid points where the calculation converges, the deviation between input and output topological charge is at the floating-point machine precision floor. Median deviation: zero. Maximum deviation: about 1.78×10−151.78 \times 10^{-15} 1.78×10−15, which is just numerical noise from double-precision arithmetic.

In other words, twisted light stays twisted. If you send in a beam with topological charge 5, you get back a scattered field with topological charge 5. The black hole does not break the twist.

This is not actually a discovery so much as a certification. The Kerr metric has an axial Killing vector (it is symmetric under rotations around the spin axis), and the scattering equations decompose into modes labeled by a discrete azimuthal quantum number. So azimuthal phase winding is preserved analytically by the structure of the problem. What the calculation shows is that no convention error or implementation bug has crept in to break this property numerically. It is a sanity check on the numerical pipeline, not a physical finding. Azimuthal symmetry guarantees this analytically, so a deviation would have indicated a convention or implementation bug rather than new physics.

Some prior speculative work has suggested vorticity-shifting effects in strong-field gravitational interactions. This calculation is silent on those proposals, since they require breaking axial symmetry or going beyond classical single-frequency scattering. Within the regime the paper studies (axisymmetric, single-frequency, classical electromagnetic scattering), no such shift exists.

Question two: does the energy stay in one mode?

Here is where it gets more interesting. The topological charge is preserved, but that is just the integer that labels the helical phase. It does not say anything about how the energy of the beam is distributed across the spheroidal multipole tower.

I track the centroid of the OAM spectrum, written ⟨l⟩\langle l \rangle ⟨l⟩, which is the first moment of the mode-mixing distribution. What he finds is that ⟨l⟩\langle l \rangle ⟨l⟩ is always greater than or equal to the input linl_\text{in} lin​. The shift is strictly upward. Frame dragging plus finite-frequency wave-optics effects pump power from the input multipole into higher members of the tower, never lower.

The size of this shift is set by the dimensionless combination aωa\omega aω, where aa a is the spin parameter and ω\omega ω is the frequency of the wave. When aω∼O(1)a\omega \sim O(1) aω∼O(1), the centroid can shift by 5 or more units of ll l. When you are far from that regime, the shift is suppressed below 0.5.

There is also a saturation. For input topological charge lin≥7l_\text{in} \geq 7 lin​≥7, the centroid shift caps out at around 1.5 to 2, almost regardless of where you are in the spin-frequency plane. The reason is the centrifugal barrier. The angular momentum potential goes like l(l+1)/r2l(l+1)/r^2 l(l+1)/r2, and at high ll l this gets steep enough that mixing into modes far above linl_\text{in} lin​ is suppressed by tunneling factors that do not really care about Kerr parameters. The light gets bumped up by one or two units, and that is about it.

Question three: what does the dominant mode do?

If you watch the dominant multipole lpeakl_\text{peak} lpeak​ (the single multipole carrying the most power in the outgoing field) as you sweep across the spin-frequency plane, it does not vary smoothly. It moves in a staircase. For lin=1l_\text{in} = 1 lin​=1, the dominant mode jumps from l=1l=1 l=1 to l=2l=2 l=2 to l=3l=3 l=3 and so on up to about l=8l=8 l=8, in sharp bands as you crank up the spin and frequency.

The bands have to be sharp because lpeakl_\text{peak} lpeak​ is by definition an integer. But the underlying physics here is that Kerr scattering pumps power through the multipole tower in unit-of-ll l increments. The spin and frequency together determine how many steps the dominant power has climbed.

This is the kind of structure you do not get from a smooth geometric-optics calculation. It is a wave-optics signature, full stop, and it lives in a regime where the eikonal description fails.

Question four: is the calculation actually right?

The total mode-mixing norm (the unnormalized power in the outgoing field, summed over modes) shows a sharp ridge in parameter space where the amplitude rises by one to two orders of magnitude.

The ridge tracks a specific curve: ω≈mΩH\omega \approx m \Omega_H ω≈mΩH​, where ΩH\Omega_H ΩH​ is the angular velocity of the black hole horizon and m=linm = l_\text{in} m=lin​ is the azimuthal quantum number. This is the superradiant threshold, the boundary across which a corotating mode gets amplified at the expense of horizon angular momentum.

The fact that the ridge sits exactly there, and migrates correctly as linl_\text{in} lin​ changes, is a non-trivial cross-check that the calculation is wired up correctly. Spin-1 superradiance is a known phenomenon (the maximum amplification factor is about 4.4% for electromagnetic perturbations near extremality), and this pipeline reproduces its location in parameter space without it being put in by hand.

So what does this all mean?

Here is where I want to be careful, because this paper is doing something important but limited, and the limits matter.

What it gives us is a quantitative reference dataset. If you want to know what the full-wave OAM scattering matrix of a Kerr black hole looks like in the parameter range relevant to photon rings, you can now go look it up. Geometric-optics calculations can be checked against it. Future observations can be compared to it. Lab analog experiments (acoustic superradiance from rotating absorbers, for instance, like the Cromb et al. 2020 result) can be benchmarked against scaled versions of these predictions.

What it does not give us is a direct path to observing Kerr OAM signatures with the EHT. At the relevant frequencies (230 GHz, 345 GHz) and for a black hole as massive as M87*, the dimensionless frequency Mω is around 10¹⁶, which is far above the parameter range the paper explores meaning EHT operates in the deep geometric-optics regime (Mω ≫ 1), not the long-wavelength wave-optics regime where these mode-mixing effects are pronounced. Direct detection would need either coherent integration across very broad frequency ranges or new OAM-resolved interferometric techniques that do not yet exist.

It also does not, by itself, tell us anything about the black hole information paradox or about whether OAM channels carry quantum information through Hawking radiation. The classical OAM channel exists, and it is well-behaved, and that is a necessary condition for any soft-hair information-channel proposal to work. But necessary is not sufficient. The quantum question stays open.

Twisted light bouncing off a spinning black hole comes out twisted in the same way it went in, but with its energy reshuffled along a discrete staircase whose steps you can predict. That is a clean, solid result. The follow-up questions (geometric-optics comparisons, gravitational waves, quantum information) are now sitting on top of an actual computational foundation rather than a pile of order-of-magnitude estimates.

Reference: T. Nestor, "Orbital angular momentum mode-mixing for Laguerre-Gaussian beams scattered by Kerr black holes," April 2026.

I Reported Microsoft for Wrongful Dismissals. Then Someone Wrote a Hit Piece About Me Claiming I was in DOGE.

Last year, I was employed at Microsoft as a senior engineer. What happened to me there, and what I've since learned is happening to hundreds of others, should alarm everyone working in tech.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-192472108

Microsoft has been systematically gaslighting, scapegoating, and wrongfully terminating employees while publicly claiming its layoffs are about "flattening management." Public data tells a different story: only 17% of impacted roles in Redmond were classified as managerial. The rest? Engineers and workers quietly pushed out through manufactured performance failures, denied ADA accommodations, firing of employees on family medical leave, and a culture of concealment designed to give executives plausible deniability.

I know this because it happened to me. I've also spent months collecting stories from other recently fired or laid off from Microsoft which is the primary reason for posting my story - people experiencing the same pattern of isolation, gaslighting, and retaliation and a collective recognition of the issue is now required. That reporting triggered an investigation, which is currently pending.

Shortly after, a hit piece appeared about me on Substack. It went viral.

What the hit piece actually says

The piece ties me to DOGE, Elon Musk, and an alleged insider threat to national security, based on one fact: I had registered an LLC with "Department of Government Efficiency" in the name.

Here is the full explanation, in one paragraph:

The LLC was created to organize residents (particularly in my hometown of Simi Valley, California) against illegal housing moratoriums that were blocking affordable housing development. The name, borrowing DOGE's branding, was deliberate political satire aimed at the conservative local government responsible for those moratoriums. I never intended to formally register it as a business, and when I discovered it had been filed, I was the one who proactively reported it to Microsoft HR and had it dissolved. The hit piece frames this as something that had to be uncovered. I reported it myself. I have never had any contact with DOGE and while I was sponsored for a TS/SCI w/FSP I never actually used it on any program. I have spent years publicly criticizing Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. I advocate for Medicare for All and affordable housing. Of course, the ultimate irony is that I was wrongfully accused of DOGE membership while simultaneously reporting on the mass layoffs and wrongful firings at major tech companies.

I was also accused of “harassing Boulder PD” to distract from SA victims, having affiliations to Dr. Peterson, and even spreading rumors of “Jewish space lasers.” Here's the reality: CU Boulder has systemically been covering up rape in fraternities and I complained to CU Boulder PD about a wrongful campus exclusion order after reporting declines of mental health of students, cocaine sales near campus, and inconsistent covid restrictions - shortly before a mass shooting and riot in the city where students were found flipping police cars. When it comes to Dr. Peterson during a time of unemployment I did interview him but was critical of his ideological framing - rather than insisting on a purely cultural or psychological origin of despondency I pushed Peterson that a part of the reason that the gender roles are no longer feasible is socioeconomic precarity. The comment about “Jewish space lasers” was sarcastic.

The piece then padded this with seven-year-old social media posts, out-of-context tweets, and ideological profiling to paint a picture of someone it could attach to a villain narrative. It worked. It got 200 restacks. My response did not.

Why this matters beyond me:

This is not just about a hit piece. This is a playbook.

When someone triggers accountability for a powerful institution, the response is rarely a direct rebuttal. Instead, the person is discredited through character attacks, placed in a political box, their history stripped of context, their motivations reframed as sinister. Political polarization is a clever tool of dividing the public to avoid institutional accountability: no matter what complaint is presented - half of the population can be easily mobilized against a target. The goal is not to refute the claims. The goal is to make the messenger radioactive.

It worked on me temporarily. But the investigations are still open.

What I documented at Microsoft is real: wrongful terminations, denied disability accommodations, coordinated H-1B lobbying while conducting mass layoffs of American workers as well as visa holders, and a deliberate culture of concealment enforced through AI surveillance and performance manipulation. I have corroborating accounts from multiple former employees.

The broader picture:

Microsoft submitted $2.35 million in federal lobbying disclosures in April 2025, directed at the Department of Labor and DHS, focused on H-1B visa expansion, immediately before announcing 9,000 layoffs. From 2021 to 2024, Microsoft submitted H-1B requests at a rate of 5.17 for every one net new job created in the U.S.

This is not a labor shortage. This is wage suppression - and that is nothing negative to say about the H1B visa holders themselves.

Meanwhile, AI tools that Microsoft sold publicly as productivity breakthroughs were, internally, producing garbled outputs on security processes they hadn't been trained on; employees were being performance-managed for failures caused by missing documentation, nonfunctional tooling, and withheld information. When I raised this, I was told to "self-unblock", which would have required violating security policy.

When in a culture of concealment and gaslighting employees cannot meaningfully bring up legitimate security bottlenecks or holes or the source of delays - that's when problems arise. In one instance I was blamed for delays on responding to email while in spite of refreshing my inbox I found I did not recieve emails for hours after they were sent to me (issues that have since even been corroborated by crew members of the Artemis II mission):

https://youtube.com/shorts/64maKfqD0Nw?si=8H2LDOCXoZ2AL2pM

Amid new pushes for "zero trust" security, I couldn't help but to consider the irony. Microsoft's motto has been "Microsoft runs on trust" - but what happens when Microsoft doesn't trust their own engineers at their Redmond campus, but somehow trusts third party contracting companies abroad? The consequence of this is that due to friction, their own engineers aren't able to do their own tasking.

I was then placed on a PIP with timelines that a colleague with five or more years at Microsoft confirmed were not reasonable. I was given the option between a 45 day PIP or to take severance - then only 4 days into the 45 day period, I was wrongfully fired without severance. The stated reason for my firing was delays on a feature item, delays caused by the exact environment I've described: missing documentation, nonfunctional tooling, withheld information, and denied ADA accommodations. The firing had nothing to do with the LLC. Microsoft HR already knew about the LLC because I told them.

For the entire duration of my PIP I did not have any functional hardware that could even at minimum turn on to access repositories due to the elimination of Microsoft's on site IT department where employees are plagued with months of delays for issues like yubikey shortages and SAW failures. This is an issue that many Microsoft users are painfully aware of - the issues with Microsoft support. AI is sold as a panacea to rationalize gutting critical support staff but when there are inevitable failures as a direct result of this individuals are scapegoated.

Microsoft's own internal research shows that employees are more likely to use AI tools due to fear of judgment from other coworkers - while established peer reviewed research in the field of psychology shows psychological safety in teams promotes team success. When AI tools replace workplace coordination, unintended bottlenecks arise especially with evolving security measures that are not captured by AI models. This is particularly problematic when deployed as a replacement for teachers in classrooms or a replacement for doctors and nurses in medical settings:

What I'm asking:

I'm not asking you to take my side. I'm asking you to consider the pattern: a worker reports institutional wrongdoing, a state and/or federal investigation opens, and within months a viral hit piece appears tying that worker to the most politically toxic figures of the moment, with no meaningful evidence.

One of the Microsoft leadership principles is that you must first identify issues before you can take action.

What I’m saying here is that the largest, most wealthy corporation on the planet in history by market cap should have been able to do the bare minimum of provide their engineer functional laptops that could at minimum turn on and access repositories in a reasonable amount of time rather than resort to scapegoating and gaslighting of their engineers when bottlenecks are identified, and provide proper accommodations requested directly from a doctor.

That pattern should concern you regardless of your politics. This is no longer a matter of just “moving on” continuing to allow these violations of worker protections will only continue to embolden this misconduct from tech giants.

The investigations are ongoing, and I spoke just today with WSHRC on the case assignment. The irony is that now, instead of getting a DOGE audit they will be getting an audit from the state of Washington instead - with hundreds of thousands looking on. I will continue to publish what I find.

Trevor Nestor is an independent researcher and former Microsoft senior engineer. His full account of the Microsoft situation is at [The Problem with Microsoft]. The state and federal investigations referenced in this piece are active as of the date of publication.

Update on my Case Against Microsoft

Trevor Nestor v Microsoft state of Washington and federal government investigation into Microsoft, forming the basis for a possible class action lawsuit and broader movement for tech company accountability.

Employees are often put on retaliatory or inactionable PIPs at these tech companies as a form of gaslighting to scapegoat their own engineers for poor management decisions - violations of labor law have become normalized under a toxic culture of fear, intimidation, and concealment.

Redditor expresses commonplace fear that creates a chilling effect in reporting or discussing corporate corruption, which subverts efforts to organize workers.

Notice of investigation into Microsoft with address redacted (though I don't live there so it doesn't make much of a difference).

In previous blog posts I described a recent state investigation (from the state of Washington, though the representative told me that it would be forwarded to the proper federal channels as well) I triggered into Microsoft (yes, not just a complaint - the actual investigation that has started) for wrongful terminations, ADA noncompliance, and whistleblower retaliation, and while I received overwhelmingly positive reception on both Reddit and LinkedIn for the story, racking up hundreds of thousands of views across platforms, I started to find things were somewhat different in some select subreddits.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditBotHunters/s/KppwU0WGRH

https://www.trevornestor.com/post/my-affiliation-with-doge-llc-and-other-questions-about-credibility

In my original article I explained the issues | 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 H1B visa holders and non functional Al tools like copilot to undercut wages and working conditions to the point that employees cannot do their jobs, 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, whistleblower retaliation, and so on. All details about and context for this original complaint that I will be discussing - along with the relevance of AI and the H1B visa program can be found in the link below in greater detail.

After posting in some subreddits, responses on my thread contained a litany of logically fallacious character assassination attempts, Kafka traps, and ad hominems, and claimed that going public might damage my case or the optics, or Microsoft might retaliate (even illegally) if I do (possibly due to astroturfing - the act of manipulating social media for positive PR, which Microsoft is said to participate in): https://www.pcworld.com/article/439883/microsoft-caught-astroturfing-bloggers-again-to-promote-internet-explorer.html

https://www.fastcompany.com/91192544/whats-astroturfing-the-deceptive-campaign-strategy-explaine) .

In one substack article, I've been accused of vaccine skepticism, responding to and having direct affiliations to Elon Musk, harassing the CU Boulder police department, belief that space lasers caused the Colorado wildfires, distracting from domestic violence victims, and direct affiliations to DOGE.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cyberintel/p/microsoft-engineer-registers-private?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=36qsol

The irony is that what I've done is advocate for Medicare for all, criticize Elon Musk for his desire to increase birth rates while failing to look at the socioeconomic conditions creating anxiety about having children, reporting declining mental health of students to the CU Boulder police department immediately before a mass shooting in the city and a violent riot of students flipping police cars, make a sarcastic comment about the wildfires, advocate for worker protections against physical intimidations reported outside of work hours, and file a complaint against wrongful terminations.

I initially deleted the original story (which I was cautious not to include any information that could possibly violate any NDAs) from my blog and LinkedIn - but after some review of this, in spite of general advice to avoid public attention for legal matters, I've decided to double down on going public, because in doing so, others both at the company and who have been recently wrongfully terminated have messaged me thanking me for doing what they have been afraid to do themselves (some have even reported physical intimidations) - which only bolsters my position. This includes even those in director level positions still employed at the company, as well as journalists. In this way, going public was actually a necessity.

Since going public others in principal level roles and even director level roles still employed at the company agree with my assessment.

Delay on your feature work outside of your control due to inadequate working conditions and ADA noncompliance, reporting violations with a report-it-now case, or you are going on family medical leave? Prepare to get gaslighted and scapegoated with an inactionable PIP.

The way these corporations continue to get away with violations of labor law like wrongful terminations is precisely by means of isolating individuals, controlling narratives and public perceptions, and gaslighting campaigns under a thin guise of care and plausible deniability - one might even argue that this is a part of the purpose for AI itself. The way I see it, even if gatekeepers through formal channels fail to hold Microsoft accountable, by going public and resisting fear and intimidation, I've already won. More critically, discussing these matters is not illegal - the information here is already public knowledge and taken from chats outside of work which do not contain trade secrets or internal chats/emails/code.

Microsoft layoffs do not account for the thousands of workers also gaslighted with inactionable or retaliatory PIPs. AI is likely not able to replicate creative value creation within organizations which scales exponentially within trophic networks and teams.

Can AI really replace human teams? While Microsoft claims that they run on trust, that is running thin where it appears now they are running on blatant lies and corporate corruption that trickles down throughout the company

I will be deleting some of the more speculative or inflammatory comments on the matter and redact the original article, but it is important to note that the current trend at Microsoft cannot continue - regardless of the tone or the optics of my complaints - the bottom line is that Microsoft has violated labor law, and regardless if judges, attorneys, or investigators are paid off or have conflicts of interest - when your employees no longer have anything to lose, they only have things to gain by going public about it. In fact, even the CEO recently apologized about these matters.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-admits-lack-of-empathy-after-layoffs-and-return-to-office-push-tells-employees-we-will-do-better/articleshow/123845950.cms

Tone policing at the company has become a major problem, so that when issues arise, employees are too frightened to complain as it has become common to issue retaliatory PIPs, and many employees fear losing their visas.

Microsoft no longer has in house tech support and the tech support has been offshored to third party contracting companies - and they have been hacked by these other countries they have offshored their IT support to.

Lack of proper training and support for onboarding proprietary internal systems leaves employees scapegoated when it inevitably leads to delays, and even in spite of ADA accommodations requests for proper documentation, training, and support.

Employees at the company refer to the documentation as "the dumpsterfire"

Beyond violations of worker protections, the internal problems at Microsoft forces us to think critically and re-evaluate what the ultimate goals are and purpose is behind these investments in AI, quantum computing, and cryptography, and if more could be achieved by investing directly in local communities and teams where value in trophic social networks scales exponentially - not only from the perspective of ethics, but from the perspective of pure computational capability and product quality - and as an information survelliance, control, and synthesis tool, AIs will then thus reflect.

At Microsoft, I found myself heavily discouraged from discussing anything with teammates. In fact, during my onboarding - I was criticized harshly for asking the perfectly reasonable question about why results do not appear for a correct query in their database - where the reason was that they are kept there for a certain time window. I heard this used against me months after I asked, in spite of the fact that those in roles above me would frequently consult me to assist them with what was so poorly documented in our team, they could not even figure out.

Onboarding was so turbulent that after extended delays, the entire org was eventually forced to do a hackathon to fix critical documents, and while my manager would throughout my employment attempt to isolate me by claiming that when I encountered blockers which required outside interventions, nobody else was facing them. I would often find that after asking coworkers - virtually everybody would be facing similar blockers - all saving face - creating massive inefficiencies within the org.

One example was that with the rollout of new secure signing processes for code, the manager claimed "nobody else" was having issues with it - then when calling 2 coworkers to run the process with me - neither could get it to work, in spite of hours of time on the matter. When they were eventually forced to do a knowledge sharing session after weeks of delays, it was then revealed once again that the documentation was wrong and missing critical information, and virtually nobody could do it.

Lack of lateral information sharing is a serious problem at Microsoft where there seems to be a passive aggressive attitude when employees reach out to team mates or managers.

In spite of being encouraged on the company portal to reach out to coworkers across teams to foster innovation at the company (with an internal tool called "whois") I was chastised for reaching out to the research and development department regarding my insights into their Majorana One quantum computing chip (which critics say they lied to their investors about, evading public questioning and scrutiny when it wasn't actually functional and not based on any established physics, which seems to be a pattern).

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-dismisses-quantum-computing-skepticism

I had interest in the topic as my undergraduate professor at UC Berkeley was fields medalist in mathematics Dr. Richard Borcherds who specializes in lattice maths and the physics implicated in Majorana fermion spin lattices. Now, I have been published on the topic and cited by leading scientists, and have a second paper out invited for a second round of peer review at Elsevier on the topic. In my PIP, I was both told to depend on others more, but paradoxically depend on others less.

How can creativity and innovation thrive without a sense a psychological safety and support on teams for curiousity and discussion or collaboration, where everybody is too annoyed and preoccupied?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373367302_The_Power_of_Psychological_Safety_Investigating_its_Impact_on_Team_Learning_Team_Efficacy_and_Team_Productivity

In spite of the insistence that as a senior engineer, I should have just been "self learning" and "self unblocking" as my manager put it (who would frequently just not show up to his weekly syncs) it is not possible to grasp proprietary internal systems without proper permissions or tribal knowledge, and relying on AI tools trained on missing, outdated, wrong, or misleading documentation about evolving security processes produce garbled garbage when asked about it. This is also why these AI tools will never replace teachers, no matter how badly tech leaders would like them to. In fact, in many cases, to "self unblock" when I was asked would have been a violation of Microsoft security policy.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7812618/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661324002638

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811922007984

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-38292-6

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5373371

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396388808_Building_a_Cheap_Scalable_Error_Corrected_Room_Temperature_Topological_Quantum_Computer_with_Current_Technology_Using_Only_Social_Networks_of_People

https://ipipublishing.org/index.php/ipil/article/view/171

Microsoft released a report on careers most likely to be replaceable by AI. Interestingly, journalist appeared on the list. Microsoft leadership apparently and conveniently holds the view that there is no need to investigate any corruption and that this can be completely automated, and that no humans are even needed to proofread the content. Reads more like a wishlist than an objective report.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/applicability-vs-job-displacement-further-notes-on-our-recent-research-on-ai-and-occupations/

There is no further plausible deniability when my doctor specifically requested that | 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 that could even at minimum turn on - in fact, my manager failed to answer emails for the entire duration of the PIP period. I was told that I had the option between a severance and a 45 day PIP period, and 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 | was blamed for "not meeting expectations" when they didn't even play the period out to demonstrate that.

I have retained 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). While Washington requires 2 party consent for audio recordings, at the beginning of each call to the IT support there was a message stating that the calls "may be recorded for quality and training purposes." I will be handing this evidence over to state investigators along with the physical assets themselves, and documentation regarding the continual and constant refusal for accommodations when requested and basic support required to do tasking (which often lacked descriptions, and for which feedback was often intentionally vague).

Manager claimed that "nobody else" was having issues with their secure access workstation (though there is video footage of a stack of these laptops with a sticky note that says "broken"), and that it was unreasonable that it was taking over 3 months to get one to the point that I could even access teams. With a full month delay due to yubikey shortages alone, this Redditor begs to differ

Institutionalized gaslighting.

As others have pointed out, Washington is an "at will" state, meaning Microsoft reserves the right to lay workers off (within limits like those imposed by the WARN legislation), but wrongful terminations, ADA noncompliance, whisleblower retaliation, dishonest practices like I've described, and physical intimidations outside of work are not. There is no excuse for one of the largest corporations by market cap in history to fail to provide their engineers the bare minimum working conditions they need to succeed - and then to gaslight and lie about them.

With the culture of concealment and gaslighting, if you are not a culture fit, you might just be the only employee exercising your rights.

I will provide further updates as they come, but for now, first, we will see what the response is and the actions that are taken by the state. Things will not change unless we begin to demand change and accountability.