General Motors cutting salaried tech workforce to 'prioritize investments'
seekingalpha.com
seekingalpha.com
Headline: GM’s New Car Software Is Good Even Without Apple’s CarPlay
Details: A GM representative initially guided me through the process of syncing my iPhone over Bluetooth to handle calls and texts, and it requires about 16 clicks to grant the necessary privacy permissions. My wife, accustomed to one-click CarPlay access in our Subaru, later went through this on-boarding herself and found it annoying and complicated without the guidance I had.
Logging into apps is done via QR codes, similar to how you’d sign in to streaming services on a modern TV. Once all that’s set up, though, the experience is pretty smooth.
I'm also reminded of Ha Phan, a thoughtful designer who I'm familiar with via Twitter. She went to Ford for a brief stint a few years ago and left when seeing their tech rhetoric didn't match up with their BigCo bureaucracy [3]. Ford is obviously not GM, but I wouldn't expect any different from a legacy automaker.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-06/gm-s-n... [2] https://insideevs.com/reviews/726471/gm-carplay-cadillac-lyr... [3] https://x.com/hpdailyrant/status/1699191645709930841
Said proprietary system was built by Google, though, so no need for in-house people for it.
* GM is laying off more than 1,000 salaried employees globally in its software and services division following a review to streamline the unit’s operations.
* The layoffs include roughly 600 jobs at General Motors’ tech campus near Detroit.
* The job cuts represent about 1.3% of the company’s global salaried workforce of 76,000 as of the end of last year.
I wonder if GM is realizing how bad an idea this is, wants to move on, and thus is doing layoffs.
> New Lincoln Navigator to include spa mode, 48-inch display for videos and gaming
Meanwhile, over on the other side of Detroit, Ford is doing... WTF are they doing? Yeah, yeah, they are following the industry trends and trying to get ahead of them. But what is the point of this trend? I know that some people do have stints in which they live in their car. But that is generally involuntary and done because of financial hardship. IE, they aren't going to buy a $100,000 vehicle and live in it. Spa mode? Videos and gaming? Did they forget that these things are intended for driving?
We want physical buttons and dials, not touchscreens. We don't want our location and driving data recorded and sent over the internet to their servers. We want reliable engine starting, battery life and locks, not "smart" features which can fail due to software updates or being away from cellular reception for too long.
I'm not sure there's a single car being manufactured today that can compete with a car from 10+ years ago for a use case like "Will my key unlock the door and start the engine, after my car has been parked at a forest trailhead for a week".
It’s funny because most people say they have the same opinion as you, but their shopping habits prove themselves wrong. Tech availability in cars has absolutely driven sales, despite everyone’s claims for desiring the alternative.
> Will my key unlock the door and start the engine, after my car has been parked at a forest trailhead for a week
Most car owners in America will never encounter this situation, and absolutely don’t care about it. Those car owners just don’t hang out in hacker news threads about cars.
Car reviews and ratings drive sales, and the creators of such things are 100% beholden to automakers for access to the vehicles they need to do reviews. Thus they hype anything the automakers tell them to hype.
Customers don't get the option to have all the manual controls they would have had in the 2000s plus maps and phone integration.
1. There is a strong correlation between built-in carplay and failing the requirements of marcuskane2's comment.
2. My mom would prefer a car that fails the requirements of marcuskane2's comment and had built-in carplay over the reverse.
What is the significance of this? There is an even greater correlation between built-in wheels and failing the requirements of marcuskane2’s comment.
Whatever negative effects of connectivity have nothing to do with CarPlay/Android Auto. They have to do with the availability of mobile broadband and software advances in 2024 that allow for more rent seeking.
If anything CarPlay/Android Auto are the only thing preventing more rent seeking, by giving people the option to use modern navigation and audio entertainment without going through a car manufacturer.
Sounds like they hired the Bobs.
It’s made it past the House but not the senate yet. [0]
What’s strange is “Effectively, this rule change [initial Section 174 amendment] was designed to encourage enterprises to shift software development activities and the related expenses to the US due to the more favorable tax treatment.” [1]
But seems outsourcing to outside-US has only increased?
[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7024
[1]: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-sof...
What has changed is that companies are re-evaluating the value of "tech"-related expenditures now that they have to account for them the same way they account for other R&D activities, and have generally found that tech expenditures don't have the ROI originally forecast (largely due to being too optimistic when forecasting, but that's what happens when an industry sells itself through a perpetual hype cycle instead of on fundamentals).
In addition to u/gamblor956's answer, for companies that are outsourcing, these decisions aren't only driven by price considerations - distributing teams to deliver in parallel does speed up delivery. And for a lot of subfields in software, the talent pipeline doesn't exist anymore in the US (eg. anything Systems adjacent).
And finally, the layoffs that happened during COVID and in 2023-24 overimpacted workers on visa statuses like H1B, EB1/2, etc, so you had a pretty decent chunk of American trained engineering, product, and marketing talent abroad now who can act as interlocutors between American companies and local talent.
This seems, on the surface, to be a pretty major own-goal. I wonder what the rationale for it is? I expect there's something going on that we havn't heard about yet.
CarPlay and Android Auto don't drive car sales. And most non-techies don't like the CP/AA experiences; they actually prefer the OEM interfaces, even though they're slower, because the OEM interfaces aren't constantly changing every few months.
This see-saw will probably go on a few more years before it reaches equilibrium; probably similar to the same equilibrium that existed before CP/AA but with different suppliers (meaning, in-house workers customizing a third-party solution).
Carplay/Android Auto does not change every few months either. In fact, I have used CarPlay in 20+ vehicles over the last decade, and I love the fact that I never have to learn a new interface, regardless of the car I am using.
What CarPlay/Android Auto do have is the most up to date traffic data and maps information at no extra charge or inconvenience, that synchronize with my searches on my laptop.
As a techie, you just adapt to those UI changes (and may not have even noticed them), but those changes have been a big deal to most of the non-techies I know, especially the older users. It's one of the biggest frustrations they have: after figuring out how to do something they have to re-learn how to do it all over again every few months. With non-techies, even small changes in UI can be annoying, aggravating, or difficult to understand.
Other than that, the changes are within the apps themselves, which people have to become familiar with anyway if they use a smartphone (which even pretty much all old people do nowadays).
Most importantly though is that CarPlay/Android Auto does not preclude automakers from implementing their own UI. It’s simply a free software interface to let people choose to use their phone for the car’s music/navigation, and so not including it is a hostile strategy to force drivers to use the automaker’s UI.