GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
reuters.com
reuters.com
Now we're worried about all the AI jobs disappearing.
They may have. We don't know when or if things will go back to the way they were before March 2020 and how consumer and employer behavior will change.
For example, maybe movie theaters are completely screwed. Except as a novelty, the big business chains may not survive. Universal Studios is already pushing back on theater release windows and no live-action movies are being filmed right now, and who knows for how long that lasts. Will the public feel safe enough to go back into theaters all at once before theaters run out of money as if nothing happened? I imagine some of those jobs at least are permanently gone.
Employers will probably maintain work from home and cut back on office space. All those jobs that support maintaining offices may not come back either.
I don't think the restaurant business will jump back either, people can't just restart their failed restaurant as if they didn't lose all that money they needed to keep their already slim margin business open before the pandemic.
There will certainly be a bit of both, but it's not like you won't be able to find a restaurant after the pandemic.
Restaurants will remain available, but will movie theaters? They were already being disrupted by streaming services.
I think there will be a greater demand for office real estate because suddenly everyone needs double the space and (spacious) cubicles or standalone offices will make a comeback.
That is, unless every company goes full remote.
Theaters were on the way out before any of this started. Movie ticket sales have been declining for years. That trend will only get worse.
the need for theatres and cinemas have not disappeared. They will come back once the virus situation is under control (in say 2-4 yrs time, when vaccine is available). Therefore, the jobs will come back in 2-4 yrs time.
The companies will have been different - the old incumbents will have bankrupted by then. But that doesn't matter - as long as there is new investment, new companies will spring up to soak up the demand.
Same with office spaces. It's not like the need for office space will disappear indefinitely.
There is an arguable difference here, a lot of people were willing to WFH before the crisis, but most businesses didn't allow it. A crisis like this, forcing businesses to accept WFH, has the side benefit of doing a large experiment where business owners see whether WFH works for them, maybe even has good sides to it, but also what's negative about it.
Before, many employers were just apprehensive and would only think about this in theory. Many now see in practice what they were afraid about, and maybe they're not as afraid anymore.
So maybe office space will rebound, but maybe not. I'm quite sure in my city most office jobs are doable from home, however for meetings we might get back to some balanced level of WFH + office work. But it may never rebound to pre-crisis levels.
As an aside, I’ve stopped being surprised with how out of touch and in a bubble HN posts are. There’s so much understanding of human nature out there that is missing here.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/05/14/...
2. https://nypost.com/2020/05/09/carnival-swamped-with-bookings...
I step away from the site every few days to help stay centered.
I hope things return to normal as quickly as possible, our economy depends on it. Very few people can afford to weather this without a strong economy.
In the US when you lose your job you lose your healthcare too. Healthcare can’t be fixed in a hurry but we can all agree to be reasonable and keep as many people working as we can.
Same stuff happens with global warming preds. You’re getting the worst case, x100, every time.
Do you have an academic source for the global warming claim?
For myself:
I love cappuccino and bought several per week from cafes near me. I was missing them, so did a bit of research into home espresso and bought a nespresso and semi-automatic milk frother. My homemade cappuccino is excellent. It takes 2 minutes to make with just about zero cleanup. I have had better cappuccino, but seriously the extra time, money and hassle are no longer worth it for me. I will make it at home. It's also 6x cheaper.
I like to treat myself to steak every now and then, but only ever at a restaurant. I recently bought a package of strip steaks and did some trial and error on a George Foreman grill I found in the back of the cupboard I hadn't used in years. I figured out a process that works with that piece of equipment, and now I can knock out an amazing steak in exactly 4 minutes. It's cooked exactly how I like it. Why bother with the hassle and expense of going out for one? Plus it's 4x cheaper.
I doubt I'll completely stop going out or getting delivery, but if I reduce by 10% and everybody else does too, we're talking a lot of businesses that will close.
Counter example: We basically rarely ordered delivery and preferred take-outs. However, due to the increased delivery usage recently we figured that since delivery costs are similar for a restaurant 5 miles or 15 miles out, we are getting food from restaurants further out than we would normally not go to as they were too much of a drive.
That’s like saying because I can drink at home I’m not going to bars.
Let me guess: everyone in the world is ditching Microsoft WORD for Emacs too.
Adjust accordingly to your liking, but in general, you can easily achieve premium steakhouse quality with this approach with 30 min to 1 hour, start to finish. Mostly the sous vide as used here is about bringing the internal temperature up so that the steak cooks quickly and more evenly than a steak pulled right out of the fridge. This is even less cleanup than a foreman since the only thing getting dirty is the surface you season on (usually the paper the steak is wrapped in) and the grill you just need to brush with a wire scraper.
I recommend a VacMaster VP215, but I understand if that's way outside your budget. I personally use mine daily for lots of things besides sous vide like storing food, saving sauces
Seems like a bit of a misincentive here, and a recipe for lenders to go bust too. Then again, it seems like commercial real estate has periodic financial crises, so this seems to reflect reality. Get ready for the next one.
Tax unoccupied space, and not a little. 10x property taxes for vacant units with real standards for what counts as occupied.
https://globalnews.ca/news/6523554/empty-homes-tax-results-2...
Vancouver's normal property tax rate is just 0.26%, and the vacancy surcharge is 1% per that article.
The effects can be generational when families have children.
I work in the space, and I'm not[1] worried about that at all. For what it's worth, anyone who knows what they're talking about also wasn't worried that all menial jobs would be taken by AI: fine motor control is really difficult, so paradoxically, janitors are safer than many middle-skilled white collar jobs are. More broadly, my model of AI is one of slow but inexorable progress: the dirty secret of tech eating the world is that most industries are run obscenely inefficiently. This doesn't suggest that Google et al can just jump into any random industry with both feet and have immediate success, but this is largely due to inertia (and in some case, regulatory barriers slowing transitions of any kind[2]), both of which are short- and medium-run concerns.
The Cruise announcement in particular is a bit of a strange one to choose to make this point:
> The layoffs represent about 8% of Cruise’s workforce. The losses were mostly in business strategy, product development, design, and recruiting. The company also dismissed staff working on Lidar engineering in Pasadena, Calif.[3]
Cruise has >2 years of runway in the bank right now[3], is a financial entity separate from GM (no longer wholly owned), and is shifting their resources away from "close to market" towards "investing in the research problem", just like other SDC companies like Waymo. The Covid downturn, like most downturns, is just a useful pretext to engage in this restructuring.
I usually tend towards taking the pessimistic view of uncertainty that affects me personally, I guess because I'm relatively risk-averse. But all the signals I've seen from the economic impact of Covid indicate that AI jobs are going to be affected by the general economic downturn but be in much _better_ relative shape than many other jobs: while shelter-in-place won't last forever, the more-lsating effects will likely include things like increased inshoring of manufacturing and an increase in demand for delivery and logistics (both central applications for robotics). The trend of people spending more time online is only increasing too, and the applications of AI there are self-explanatory from the last decade (people really do underestimate what ML specialists do: "decreasing Google's datacenter cooling costs by 40%" isn't the central AI problem most people think of, but it's the kind of things that creates massive amounts of value.
Possible longer-term trends that pose challenges for autonomous vehicle companies in particular (not AI eng in general) potentially include a) some deurbanization and b) less theoretical demand in shared transportation methods; but the latter may be somewhat mitigated by the refugees from transit to robotaxis (esp given that sharing an air pocket is so much more dangerous and hard to control than sharing surfaces).
[1] With caveats, I guess; I and most of my friends in the field have been in or adjacent to AI for a lot longer than the current boom, so we're seeing a very different picture than people who did a Tensorflow tutorial two years ago.
[2] Since I know this will be misinterpreted, I'll clarify: This isn't a suggestion that regulations are bad and should be run rough-shod over, just an acknowledgement that even good regulation tends to slow large shifts in the way industries run, just by introducing complexity and barriers to entry due to tribal knowledge of regulatory compliance. This isn't a criticism of regulation, just a well-known downside.
[3] https://electrek.co/2020/05/14/gm-cruise-lays-off-8-of-staff...
I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've worked in computer vision startups and know how powerful the tech can be, but it still can't account with even a fraction of challenging driving conditions. I don't think anything short of general purpose AI could handle it. We are some pretty big discoveries away from general AI.
I also don't think they solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass transit: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...
Of course, the environmentalist in me is saddened by the thought of further driving down the cost of that shipping mode which might be most compatible with being switched to rail freight.
When the rain or snow or haboob kicks in, I guess your car will pull over to the side of the road and you'll need to drive manually until conditions improve. We'll need to keep the steering wheel around for the foreseeable future.
Just level 3 or 4 autonomous vehicles would probably be good enough to be worth buying.
Much better approach would be using ML as a safety sensor helper and let people drive the cars instead. For example, ML algorithm can detect if a pedestrian is on the road even on low vision conditions and might warn the driver, or check if there a car is acting weirdly on the road and warn the driver to be aware.
I think there is a catch 22 situation going on with self-driving cars. By the time we get to self driving cars at human level, we will already have cybernetic beings at human intelligence level and that will change the entire industries and the society itself, which might actually decrease the profits expected by self-driving car companies.
For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5 and 100 miles of rail.
That being said, elevated railways have always been a very hard sell in dense areas, and ground level has its own host of problems.
Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about $100-300 million/mile.
Where within the United States is this true? (note: United States is known for high construction costs)
e: or just downvote me - but I don't know anywhere with a $100 million/mile subway system.
For context, we have 4 million miles of road in the US. So even with $100m/mile, we're talking trillions of dollars before we even get to the actual feasibility of putting rail everywhere.
Rail is great, but there's no world where it does the same thing self-driving vehicles would.
1) How much safer than humans does SDC need to be before we can ethically use it?
2) When will it be legalized?
The ethics is a hard question. My preference is safety standards should be way higher than the vehicular carnage we accept today. I doubt most people think that way though.
Legalization (and commercialization, especially if corporate liability is waived), could come at any moment. Given the US government accepts 3000 daily COVID19 deaths as a reasonable baseline, it seems there would be little moral qualms. If SDCs are about as good (or maybe even no more than a little worse) than human drivers approval could be granted, ethics be damned.
E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will automatically adjust the speed to match the car in front and so on (right down to slamming on the brakes to avoid a rear-end shunt if needed). Then there are the self-parking cars, the ones with synthetic overhead 360 degree camera viewpoints, ones that prevent "unintended acceleration" in car parks, ones that read the road signs to let you know the speed limit etc. And these are "normal" cars that a common joe can afford, not high-end six-figure Mercedes/BMW/Lexus/Tesla etc
This sort of tech was science fiction not so long ago, yet now it is literally standard-fit.
There will be a slow but steady "encroachment" of more and more automation into cars as the years go by - you can guarantee that companies like Cruise are churning out the patents at the least for this sort of thing, even if not outright directly licensing technologies. It feels like a land-grab phase right now, even if there is no real intention to reach L5.
And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives, we’d implement these measures today rather than banking on a long term tech solution.
I believe that self driving is about a fantasy world in which we can ignore all the negative consequences of a low density, car centric world. Pedestrian deaths? AI magic will solve it. Long commutes? Just eat breakfast in your car! Emissions? Why well just switch over to EVs! Never mind that half of this tech is either not real, or orders of magnitude less efficient than the transit that Europe has used for almost half a century!
The truth is we can fix all of these things right now, but it would involve sacrifices for those whom the system is already benefitting. So instead we’ve made up a fantasy world where we can have our cake and eat it too.
I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.
At 5mph your chance of surviving a collision is extremely high. Heck, you have a 93% chance of surviving a 20mph crash, depending on your age. Survival rates drop off quickly with speed however, with only 80% surviving at 30mph, and 45mph being a 50/50 chance for most of the population.
The effect is that slowing cars down from 35mph to 20mph in areas where pedestrians are close to cars could potentially double the chance of a pedestrian surviving a crash. And that’s not even accounting for how much less likely a collision is to happen at 20mph than 35mph.
Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds
Edit: of course, we can and should add more tech to make cars safer. That’s why backup cameras and seat belts are mandatory, and that’s a good thing. But as an argument for self driving cars, I think that they really come up short when there are tons of effective strategies available right now that we aren’t applying. And that’s my point.
what?
That being said, vehicle size is another uncomfortable subject when it comes to road deaths. If we really cared about not killing people on the road, we’d take a long, hard look at what cars we allow to operate on our roads.
Delivery trucks have the benefit of being obviously necessary; I am glad that trucks exist to deliver my food from the train depot (ideally) to my grocery store. But what’s the argument for Suburbans? SUVs not only drastically increase the risk for pedestrians, but they also make the roads more dangerous for other drivers to. For what? Status? A false perception of safety?
The problem is twofold:
1. Cruise and co. may very well run out of money before they develop tech reliable enough to save people en masse. One proposal decades ago to solve the cars vs people problem was to physically grade separate them entirely, but as it turns out building multistory streets doesn't scale very well.
2. People and politicians, today, are using self driving cars as the magic bullet to avoid spending money on other solutions and changing bad habits. Why spend money on rail or buses if the second coming of Jesus for cars is around the corner? And to a degree, there is an opportunity cost to spending money on unproven X rather than proven Y.
It is not just the energy involved from 5mph - not every accident is a cut and dry collision. A car doing 0.5mph still going to crush your skull when you go under the wheels.
People are killed frequently in London (and I am sure other places) when they are crushed by slow moving vehicles turning left or right and the driver just did not see the person there and they are either slowly run-over and pinned between the vehicle and something else and crushed.
Should we add tech to prevent these accidents? Of course. But let’s not kid ourselves about the actual numbers of where and why cars kill people.
As a means of comparison; back up cameras are mandatory to prevent children from being backed over at slow speed. This is an obvious improvement, but numerically quite small, with estimates being that it saves about 50-70 lives nationally per year. This is far less than the number of pedestrians and cyclists struck and killed in Los Angeles per year alone.
But the self driving tech allows us to get much safer while still going at normal speeds. Or maybe allows us to be equally safe at higher speeds.
Either way it's a win.
Secondly I find it disturbing that discussions around acceptable traffic fatalities focus on unnamed and unspecified people as the apparently acceptable fatalities in pursuit of shorter commutes. I think this let’s a lot of people push off that moral calculus as something that happens to other, lesser, people. See: the reactions once people realized that Uber’s self driving car had killed a homeless woman. A better question is “what is the acceptable level of risk for you and your family to accept in return for faster commutes?”
Finally, don’t underestimate the feedback effect. High speeds are only economically necessary, if they even are, because we’ve chosen to design cities in a way that assumes high speed car traffic. Continuing to focus on keeping traffic going just puts off very necessary and politically difficult discussions about public transit and housing density. We could setup a society where 25mph in the cities works just fine, but we’ve made the explicit choice not to, and continue to reinforce that.
I don't have the numbers on hand, but I would wager to guess that a good chunk of road injuries and deaths happen not just between drivers and pedestrians, but between drivers and other drivers.
Also, most areas in the US where pedestrians can be present are already limited to 25mph/35mph.
To be fair to my original point, we can also reduce driver fatalities by slowing down highways and offering non-car transit options. The lowest hanging fruit in this area is probably shifting cargo transit from road to rail as much as possible, which might actually save the public money, since interstate highway companies receive billions of dollars in subsidy via subsidized road maintenance.
Secondarily would be high speed rail between major metropolitan areas, which would potentially save both road miles (and deaths) but drastically shorten the commute for some citizens.
Non-driver != pedestrian. Non-drivers include car passengers.
https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa...
The main person I put at risk when driving fast is me. Others too, sure, but mostly me.
So it's not at all bout killing "other lesser people". People mostly just think some risks are worth the reward.
If you have a million commuters on the streets, each taking a total of an hour a day for their commute, 20 days per month, increasing the average commute time by just 1% effectively costs >300 lives per year.
The basic rule of any change you want to make to the system is that speeds need to go up, not down. Better AI assist systems help speeds go up, therefore they reduce the cost of commuting in human lives.
Take out "cars" from that phrase and I think there might be a different answer to it, sooner or later.
Specifically I liked Otto's original proposals and it sounded almost viable. The idea of having a Sacramento -> Chicago or Houston to Dallas routes for trucking with autonomous vehicles, with the last mile routes covered by normal container trucks sounded like it would work in the near term.
The fact that these are big rig trucks ensures the unit volume cost of the hardware isn't going to be a big problem (a 25k computer in a 35k car vs a 120k one in a 800k truck), the servicing can be legally mandated (patch upgrades or cleaning cameras), the power supply management can also be handled if they want to go electric with a container + rig model.
There are fewer questions about a long haul highway only self-driving route, maybe even something which will change the economics of shipping stuff through the panama canal vs going over land in a hub-spoke model without a train depot style unloading/inventory station.
But that's not the idea. It is the camel's nose under the tent.
The goal is to get them on the road somewhere, and then gradually expand use as they can re-legislate at the cost of pedestrians.
There's a template for doing this - when cars were first commercialized, pedestrians had to be kicked off the roads, so they invented "jaywalkers", and launched a huge propaganda campaign to make it a thing[1].
Too much money and priming has been dumped into self-driving tech to abandon, so they'll try to create markets by pushing the squishy slow things that complain when they get smooshed out of the way.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
In my field of AI in radiology, I see a lot of people trying to completely automate things that don't have to be, and thereby fail to innovate on the particularly hard parts. Sometimes it's better to just have a human somewhere in the loop to make the harder judgement calls.
Sure, we have that ... right now. Called trains. Train even carry trucks. Trains are vastly more fuel efficient than trucks.
The advantage trucks have over trains is their flexibility, their any point to any other point ability. Take that out and it can be automated but that automation isn't to be more efficient than ... 19th century technology. Ha.
How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality.
I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.
I've never heard of "expectancy value" in my life - it's definitely not a standard probability term.
Waymo cars go 11,000+ miles without driver intervention on average.
I would encourage doing actual research into this subject, rather than relying on your gut or the news articles you read.
Most self-driving is done in warm climates, in a circle. These companies are amassing thousands of empty miles on the same streets every day to impress people who don't know any better.
I lived on a branch of the main Google circuit, and often they were the only traffic for most of the day. Even saw three Google vehicles in a line, but two were more common.
What's the value of "self-driving" with no weather, traffic or route variation? PR and regulatory filing stats.
There was a driver, but I'm fairly certain that the drivers are not actively driving but are legally required to be there.
What? That's not at all what disengagements mean
They said the same thing about a Computer beating a Human at Chess or Go, or Radiology, or countless other examples. I don't see why a random person on hackernews would be any more correct than any of the previous naysayers.
But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to make the economics work out.
We will all have been riding around happily in cars without steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to pass.
It's possible that remote assistance centers will never shut down entirely, even 100 years from now, still waiting on the off-chance that a .00000000001% edge case pops up that the system still can't handle.
It's not crazy to imagine that computers could handle split second decisions better than humans but choose to bail out to the side of the road if there's something they can't handle.
Tunnels have to kept clear of obstacles. If an SDC would have to stop, so would a human-driven car.
For the others, stopped cars are very common.
I live in a smaller city and we have full size buses that only come by every half an hour, which means if you miss a connection it could take you an hour and a half to travel a distance you could easily drive in 15-20 minutes. If the buses came by more often, more people would ride them, but that would be cost prohibitive if you had to pay all the drivers.
Guess what, these people have run the numbers
> solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass transit
I think that's thinking small. Why can't self-driving be applied to mass transit.
Let's take out all the cars and replace them with 15 passenger self-driving vans. And set up many stops that are dynamically routed by UberPool. You can get convenience of a car, the cost of a bus and far less pollution.
Lane miles in the US are in the many millions. Each mile of track costs a million+ dollars. You're talking many trillions of dollars to railify every road in the country.
So no, there's basically no way that's cheaper than figuring out self-driving.
It is totally fine to dislike Musk or to think that autopilot is unsafe today, but how can you look at billions of miles and say that it isn't going to work within the next few years.
When drivers go a few trillion miles per year in the US, any anomaly in your driving software is going to be measured in deaths per hour. There is a built-in human sympathy for accidents caused by people which will not be at all present with accidents caused by machines. You can't sure a maker for wrongful death by a faulty human, you can easily sue a car company.
It will just take one cute kid getting killed by an errant robot car to end the dream completely. Machines don't make human mistakes, they make mistakes that are alien and frightening, things you couldn't ever a person imagine doing.
The public will get scared and automatic driving will be banned.
For Tesla and everyone else doing unattended driving, it isn't a matter of covering the last few bits left, it's a matter of increasing precision by several factors of ten, and ultimately, I'm guessing robot cars won't be a reality until their intelligence starts to reach the point where people are asking questions about sentience.
I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but having a ton of data isn't a cheat code that makes rapid progress inevitable.
Do these folks even try to hide their lies?
Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay off in their lidar team.
Can companies be sued for these types of basically false claims or are we just stuck commenting on what lies they seem come up with. Can you imagine if your day to day life involved interacting with folks this dishonest?
If I made a programming language that got rid a basic object maps for example, I’d eliminate the scenarios where one would use a lookup map.
These people construct their own language, and so long as we speak their language, we can’t really speak against them. The words don’t exist by design.
Also there are plenty of individuals and private organizations who can sue if they can prove damages.
Edit: In fact come to think of it, even in blackjack when you double down, it's as much about committing as it is the doubling of the bet. You have to take one and only one card and that ends your turn, so you're turning down all other options to do this one thing, and in exchange for taking that risky move you get to double your bet.
This is in the original meaning in gambling (you are convinced you are right and so double your bet) and elsewhere.
Only in PR land is a cash flow pullback and risk reduction step such as a headcount reduction called a doubling down. It goes to show how pernicious these types of intentional miswordings are.
Many of the phone people either left the company or went to work on Alexa. They also did a massive inventory write down for the phone in their quarterly report.
And it's pretty rare (if ever) that someone says "I'm doubling down on X" and they mean to say "I'm going to double the size of my bet across all my activities." Pretty much the opposite.
Cruise won’t work out. GM is dead.
The PR guy (Milin Mehta) used to work at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange. They are known for suing to identify ten reviewers on Glassdoor, claiming they are former employees in breach of their severance contract.
Why work at companies like this?
> The company will “continue to hire aggressively in the most critical areas within engineering, which right now means doubling down on senior leadership and senior IC roles to further support out improving core tech objective,” Ammann wrote in the memo. “From here we expect to recruit and grow across our engineering teams for the balance of the year.”
The worst I can say about this is that Cruise is bad at PR: the fact that people are dumb enough to so badly and confidently misread a message is something that comms people are supposed to plan for and mitigate.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/cruise-lays-off-8-of-workf...
The Reuters article focused on the layoffs, lack of confirmation on number of layoffs, and PR quote etc - I wish I'd seen this article earlier.
First to go.
In what way is this obvious? Per Techcrunch[1], they moved their Pasadena lidar team to SF[2], presumably parting ways with those not willing to relocate. The linked article has a quote from the CEO saying:
> The company will “continue to hire aggressively in the most critical areas within engineering, which right now means doubling down on senior leadership and senior IC roles to further support out improving core tech objective,” Ammann wrote in the memo. “From here we expect to recruit and grow across our engineering teams for the balance of the year.”
That seems pretty definitively contradictory to the claim that they're not hiring or expanding engineering.
This is from probably thirty seconds of Googling, but apparently that's far above the effort bar for topmost top-level comments on HN... (this is in reference to GP's moronic comment, not you).
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/cruise-lays-off-8-of-workf...
[2] I wondered why they had a team in Pasadena while headquartered in SF... it was an acquisition that they hadn't consolidated.
Nothing wrong with it, but always know your place in a company. Don’t ever be lulled into rhetoric such as ‘doubling down on engineering’.
‘We care about code quality’ - code quality sucks at the company, ‘we care about work life balance’ - there is none at the company, ‘we value innovation’ - can’t even suggest anything to product, stay on spec....
‘We care about future tech’ — lay off r&d at the first sight of a downturn.
Just shut the fuck up already.
My favorite: "We adhere to the highest ethical principles" - as they give you a 500 page ethics doc that no one reads or follows.
But I've actually found it's a good / reliable tell. You just stay away from companies like this that can't talk straight and you end up a LOT happier. I don't mean they need to be nice - but just clear relatively honest normal English language communication.
ie, "we're cutting back to reduce our burn rate." vs "we are doubling down on engineering talent." Some PR people actually get it I think and can basically be honest while adding some things you may not have thought of. Not in this case though!
Sadly, a requisite skillet now days is having to navigate all the bullshit.
When I was less responsible (younger) I would do that sometimes.
Someone does a BS bunch of lines, stand up and thank them from the staff for committing to the additional resources for staff.
Follow-up with third parties unironically echoing the message with outcomes the business does not want (ie, please send in your proposals as we are doubling down on our engineering).
I make too much money to do anything like this (and have more control anyways) plus if you are more senior you are expected to understand the game.
When I wasn't sure I wanted to continue, the hiring manager called me for 45 minutes to discuss why, and convinced me that I should continue without making any promises and without lying about the fact that my concerns were real and that it wasn't garaunteed that my concerns would be fixed, but I felt better because he told me about how they're trying to fix them. Contrast that with my last company which blew smoke up my ass for the whole interview process and later I found it was a very badly run company on top of badly designed tech and bad financial modeling and that anything to fix it was impossible because of the politics.
Further, I've been talking to the interviewers like they're real people rather than some god sent down to flummox me with dumb programming exercises and show off how cool they are.
I'll never do another interview the "old way" again, I like being treated as a human in a two way process rather than a one way information extraction exercise.
That's just a translation error. "To adhere" means "to stick"; while the formalized version sounds like they stick to high ethical princilples, what they meant is they stick it to them.
Self driving will be solved with computer vision. Lidar is an unnecessary technology even for full level 5 autonomy. Most self driving companies have come to this conclusion by now.
> Anthony Levandowski, former Google/Waymo engineer, now backtracks on lidar and says, ”Elon is right.”
What humans do 'just fine' isn't very relevant to self-driving tech. Humans balance just fine as well and yet the state of the art for robots is quite primitive.
Airplanes also don't fly like birds.
> lidar is really expensive
Which, again, is somewhat separate to whether it is effective.
That's the whole point. Full autonomy will never truly happen until computers can do what human brains can with regards to driving. No amount of sensor technology will make up for that fact. It's a software problem, not a hardware problem.
Somewhat, but if lidar was really cheap it wouldn't really matter if it was also not-necessary.
Humans have the biology for visual systems, and constant training, and it still takes us almost a decade to fully process distance properly. (This is why children will run in front of moving vehicles--they can't actually tell how far away they vehicles are.)
(I think Musk's 'data' to justify this is that humans don't have LIDAR. Which is true, but irrelevant, unless he's seriously proposing AGI)
You have to cut your budget by 30% -- you can do this as a haircut everyone takes, or you can be selective, and ask one group to take less of a cut and other groups to take more. Your overall spend will be more heavily weighted towards groups that take less of a cut, obviously.
You can also leave your overall budget for one team unchanged, or even grow it, and simply change your focus by putting more emphasis (and budget) on one set of activities vs another.
In the Cruise case either scenario is possible. They can have decided that 3rd party LIDAR is good enough, and not strategic enough, that they should cut there. That could be the sum of it, while other groups like HR, Marketing, etc takes bigger cuts. Alternatively they could use the same logic to cut the LIDAR team and then take the savings generated to invest more heavily in (made up example) route planning or something.
There are too many LIDAR startups chasing too little market for LIDARs. The delay in self-driving cars reaching the market means automotive LIDARs are only selling in sample quantities. GM/Cruise may not need an in-house LIDAR unit.
Looks like GM is catching up to where the industry was a year ago, from A cofounder of Waymo.
"I think it's time to double down on email marketing" -> my teammates understand that means I'm going to switch where I put most of my effort.
I can just imagine you saying "Yet you're not allocating 8 hours a day instead of 4 on this. I'm going to sue you"
God, that would be exhausting.
I find it truly incredible that someone feels the way you do.
If someone told me I was doing above average and they appreciated my work, I would feel... appreciated and proud of my work.
The world where killing and crushing are used in an unironic way is tiny and occupied mostly by people under 30. Can you retire at 30?
That is literally what they said, using a colloquialism that has exactly the desired meaning.
The Lidar team laid off is not part of Cruise's essential engineering team. It belongs to a small, research/demo-focused company that Cruise bought a long time ago which claimed they would make solid-state Lidars that costs 99% less than currently available lidars, which would cut most of the cost to self-driving cars using lidars today.
They function as a separate entity from Cruise and have very little to do with Cruise's core self-driving technology team on a day to day basis.
As the article has made clear, within Cruise's engineering team, only the non-essential teams (i.e. not core self-driving technology) have been impacted by this layoff.
It was unable to either pass the bicylists or lurk back far enough that they could go about their own business. Meanwhile it disrupted the flow for all the rest of us regular drivers.
This is not the easiest roadway situation to "teach" an autonomous-driving system, but it's been a known issue for a long time. Not sure why Cruise couldn't get it right.
"Would you like to be rewarded handsomely?"
"Which of these statements most resonate with you?"
They paid me $500 for about an hour to sit through their sales pitch. Then I finally caved and had an interview where the hardest question was how to flatten an array. I passed on that place...
BTW I don't have an opinion on parent comments.
Seems like suddenly they got worried about how long they can maintain the burn rate.
Doesn't help that driving and commuting fell off the map.
Note GM has another product called SuperCruise which is a totally different thing.
It's thinking in terms of plentiful resources, versus thinkin in terms of the minimum required. You can get rid of all those guys working on the automated fur slippers, but you might want to hire a few more guys working on the automated bus doors.
My curiosity is with, how does a company totally change their culture and do a complete 180%? From having workers completely hating their current company to completely not seeing themselves in moving to a different company. As some companies used to have employees mentioning it is the worst tech company in the bay area to one of the best in the bay area
There are a lot of FAANG and ex-FAANG employees on this board, and you can find lots of people who love their job and feel like they are well-treated, compensated and respected and doing a meaningful impactful job, and there are plenty who felt ignored, underpaid and disrespected while working as a cog in an machine designed to sell ads.
Now in bad times, it's considered "prudent," because everyone is under financial pressure. Laying off people preemptively wins in both ways in that in can look like you're eliminating financial pressure when everyone is worried about it (as opposed to the good times, where you will be singled out), as well as being able to get rid of the lowest performers and reducing pay of everyone else while avoiding bad PR, and even being considered good because you're still employing the rest. As long as the business remains solvent it's a win-win for the company.
Not saying this is good or bad for the economy or the employees, but just reflecting on some of the game theory of this.
The comment above yours is basically saying: #2 might not be the case, especially with only 8% being laid off"
Evidence against this is the fact that they also laid off lidar engineering staff in Pasadena; I don't know Cruise's business, but this also seems like the kind of consolidation you'd expect a relatively healthy company to do (though "healthy" is a weird word for a pre-product R&D co).
Source: https://electrek.co/2020/05/14/gm-cruise-lays-off-8-of-staff...
Such a crisis is a good moment to slim down the workforce since it is a legitimate restructuring and it avoids any image harm. and it's not just low performers that suffer sometimes. An average performer might get caught in the net if the pay/performance ratio is not good. Many good performers also do just because the area they worked in is not deemed profitable or necessary anymore.
1. Whether the company might cut deeper later
2. Whether other companies will be forced to follow suit
3. Because of 1 and 2, whether the average HN reader should worry about their livelihood.
(HN readers are, of course, 100% high performers their employers are lucky to have)
A broader economic crisis offers good cover for such an action. If everyone is laying employees off, it's not as bad if you do it too.
This is a confusing question, seems the answer seems embedded in the question...the former signals that there's "financial pressure" on the company over and above the reasonable baseline that every company faces, while the latter doesn't. A 100% financially healthy and secure company may choose to pay the ongoing cost of restructuring during good economic times, since layoffs in good times may have PR costs (for recruitment, for example) that outweigh the carrying costs of the low performers (or unbalanced departments, or whatever). If a downturn lowers this cost, then you'd expect companies to take advantage of it.
From layoffs I saw as a contractor, layoffs of this size are often not based on individual performance. Usually it's whole departments or functions that get laid off. If you have a good network you may be able to jump somewhere else.
Laying off these people allowed them to satisfy their budget cuts while laying off relatively few people.
Continuing to hire sounds strange, but if the offers are lower the company will still save money. Pausing the recruiting pipeline would also hurt them once things start picking up again.
Now this may not be possible at smaller companies but at a company the size of AirBnB or Lyft certainly has enough problems that could still be better automated to help reduce costs further.
For a highly-paid employee, you sometimes just can't create sufficient other work for them to do if you eliminate the work they were originally doing and other people are already doing the work they could putatively have been assigned to.
And quite honestly, a person's understanding of non-engineering functions would have to be extremely limited to think that more than a fraction of them could be automated away. Software has been the "it" industry for decades now. Jobs that haven't been automated by now are hard for software/robotics to take over.
Their hiring rate has been remarkable. Less than 3 years ago (6/2017) they had 200 employees. Just over a year ago (3/2019), they had ~1000.
Then the 201 people hire the next 1, and the 202 hire the next one, and so forth.
Or that most companies are willing to hire people who aren't perfect candidates because a fair amount of internal training is expected. Hiring only unicorn candidates who already have the perfect qualifications and don't need any training/onboarding is a peculiarly Silicon Valley phenomenon.
"Thursday, the layoff includes staff at an engineering team in Padasedna, California"
The article says "Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee and David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio". Two editors missed the typo.
Obviously this is a bad thing, but not entirely surprising they had to hold the brakes during this time.
So much internal overlap and fragmentation that I would not be shocked they are hiring and firing at the same time - perhaps even the same people
Ie, waymo's tech is interesting but we have cruise so we are OK. Or tesla's tech looks interesting, but we have cruise.
I'd love to know what the kit they use for self driving costs. It looks monumentally expensive when you see one of their cars driving around.
I'm interested in MobileEye's next version of tech - wish they'd be pushing harder or did the Intel borg swallow them? They seemed to have a practical and pretty reasonably priced approach.
When I proposed this to nVidia engineers, fairly high up, they argued that if humans could do it with two eyes, they could do it in 3 years. It's now 5 years later.
Cheap flights and ludicrous interconnectedness are not that necessary and are barely more than disease vectors.
Local food, local communities, and work in your basement on anything via the internet is a development for quite some time now.
Goods can stay transported as before, but shuffling tourists around the globe via government financing said industries out from bancruptcy every ten years is dumb, corona or no corona.