GM to Cut More Than 1k Software Engineers, Mostly in US
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On the contractor front though, you aren't going to remotely get the best and brightest by going that way, not unless you're actually contracting with industry leaders who are going to be charging way more than FTEs will cost you (and there aren't that many industry leaders). There are so many good tech companies out there offering FTE positions, so a company offering a lower-paid, lower-benefits contracting positions is simply not going to be competitive in the labor marketplace.
Apparently one of the largest contracts wasn't renewed, and there was a couple rounds of back to back layoffs. Though none of them were affected, every single one was gone within a year. The only people that remained were those who couldn't get a job elsewhere, and those super comfortable who weren't necessarily bad but not setting the world on fire. The company was pretty much a zombie until it was bought out years later.
You can guess who took the offer. 5000 of your experienced employees who have the ability to pursue other opportunities.
For a long time, the search and trending section was broken. Many times you could not hear anything in a space, empty tweets would show up, tweets would come up with Unix timestamp and therefore sorting was broken. Site would be down a lot of times. Even till date you don't see an ad for a thing you want to buy.
Perhaps the biggest damage is there seems to a significant increase in toxicity platform wide.
>>They have released ton's more features including AI - grok
Compared to most AI products out there, you can't even try their AI product and see if you want to buy subscription.
>>In tech companies, it's not just about headcount, one needs a strong leader to drive company towards greater success like Elon.
Note, code and features are not all there is to a business. Its only natural for us developers to assume the world revolves around us. The reality is actually very different. You need lots of other people to keep a company running.
At this rate Mr Musk won't see return on his investments anytime soon.
As a reminder, the sitting POTUS announced the suspension of their reelection campaign on X. It wasn't announced on CNN or the NYT or via WH direct broadcast, it was on X. These events will be written about without any political rose-colored-glasses in 100 years from now.
You can regurgitate your genuinely stupid rhetoric all you want, but I hope you understand that nobody of any importance, relevance, or power agrees with you -- in fact, they haven't for a few years now if you've been paying attention to anything in reality.
Nobody cares about the things you're enumerating. But, even if they did, Musk is better on those points than anyone you're going to suggest.
You should be genuinely embarrassed at your brain dead and stupid reply.
We can only have intelligent discussion here if you're willing to. Dismissing the conversation so severely suggests you're a liar, propagandist, demon, and/or retard (possibly, all of the above) acting in bad faith.
The onus is on you to demonstrate the ad hominem fallacy here, not me. If you can't even imagine a world where the owner of X cares, you're so disconnected from reality that derision the only means of bring you back down to Earth. The bar cannot be any lower.
I can see why the elite view people like you as slaves.
I will often put locations in my calendar, get in my car, and then I can tap the location of my next appointment in CarPlay to route me to my next location.
I think I’d miss similar integration with a lot of apps that require my personal data to be useful.
I can’t see something from the OEM doing this well, especially if I’m not willing to send all my data to them. I would have been squeamish about it before, but it’s a hard no after the auto marker privacy report came out and everyone did horribly.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...
I had a friend who avoided a situation like this because he was in a 1989 Miata and was able to see the child who was looking at the stickers that my friend placed on his rear bumper at the time. So yes, there are cars that exist that can do this.
The idea that any car has such visibility that you can see something small on the ground immediately in front of the rear bumper is just ridiculous. Of course your chances of seeing a child in a Miata are far, far better than in a 2024 pickup truck or mega-SUV, but nothing will give you the visibility of a camera with fisheye lens mounted on the rear bumper.
> If a small child is sitting directly in front of your rear bumper, can you see that in any car?
No one mentioned comparing it directly to a fisheye lens (of course that's better!). Please don't move the goalposts.
Ever wonder why there’s a delay when you shift into reverse? That’s a whole other system. Made, tested, and proven by actual engineers. Not the bootcamp types.
You're saying Android Auto, especially in rentals, is essential for music and navigation, and that you don't know what you'd do without it. I'm saying, Android Auto isn't essential - the phone that you brought with you on your trip can literally do all of the same things. Heck, Android Auto is basically more akin to a mirrored screen, because it's your phone doing all of the work anyway.
It might not be on a screen that's built in to the dashboard, sure, but you've got all of your "essentials" in your pocket no matter the car nor the car's amenities. Find the most optimal spot to set your phone, plug it in via audio cable or bluetooth audio, et voila.
That's the problem though. There is usually no good place for a phone. And the phone holders with suction cups are never that great IME.
But you're kind of right. If we had a phone holder in the middle of the dash we wouldn't need AndroidAuto, it's just mirroring the screen.
I love having physical controls for everything.
Honestly though, as much as I hate touch screens, this thing is terrible.
The biggest issue is the software, which admittedly has nothing to do with the form factor. It just crashes all the time, and is annoying to use. The backup camera is difficult to see. Not having navigation readily available is frustrating once you've driven vehicles that do have it. Mounting your phone is not a good substitute.
I think you really have to shoot for a design where 80-90% of your functions are physical buttons/knobs while also having the advanced software and high definition display that android auto/car play offer.
My phone has always done just fine mounted on a dash, never had any concerns around sun/heat damage.
Just one example, but map apps will often require an interaction to accept alternate routes around congestion.
I actually got a ticket doing exactly what you described. I was stopped and interacted with my phone, but I was not parked. They were doing enforcement that day to prove a point.
Phone (and their batteries) can be permanently damaged in heat. Some phones monitor the temperature. If the phone exceeds temp thresholds, it warns you (blocking navigation information), stops charging, and may even shutdown to prevent further damage.
If you're in a cooler climate and/or run the AC, maybe you wont have issues.
Show a map, working Bluetooth drivers (obviously the white whale of the modern world), control a music playlist, and route a phone call. Aren’t there already standard protocols to communicate with a phone for all of these things already?
Typically cars come with their own complete voice control system.
Customers expect much of the car to be accessible remotely and well, my GM Bolt EUV is far behind everyone else in this regard.
No, this isn't the case at all. To enshittify (you forgot the "en") means to get worse over time, as a result of poor management decisions that seek to increase profits. It implies that there was a time before, when the thing was actually good. But this is GM here: it's been making terrible cars for many decades now. I don't really see how it can enshittify.
I suspect this a poor move on GM's part.
Really great company that the tax payer was forced to rescue.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reor...
> A study by the Center for Automotive Research found that the GM bailout saved 1.2 million jobs and preserved $34.9 billion in tax revenue.
The whole point was to avoid the economic fallout of a GM collapse (and with it, yet another bank for the FDIC to deal with).
Yeah, like in 1929.
> If GM had been allowed to fail, other companies would have filled the gap
Which ones? A failure of GM would have hit Ford as well, because they share a lot of suppliers.
Anecdotally, but my Ford F-150 has so many software bugs it’s insane. It’s mechanically reliable, but the software is terrible.
* backup sensor don’t work about 10% of the time
* backup camera won’t engage about 1% of the time
* main screen will boot loop a few times before it fully turns on about 5% of the time
* heated and cooled seats seem to choose random setting when the car is remote started.
* lane centering system will crash if you try to take it through a turn that’s too tight. Have to turn the vehicle off, open the door to fix it.
* my trailer system won’t remember custom made trailers. I don’t really have a use for the system, but annoying none the less.
* auto power folding mirrors often get confused about their state when shutting down or starting the car up. Annoying, but easily fixed.
* my digital instrument panel will occasionally not turn on
* my digital instrument panel will occasional forget all of my custom settings. Different problem than above.
* Not really a bug, but the car has soooooooooo many popup notifications. There will literally be status messages that are overlaid by an almost identical, but different message. Thank you, F-150, I know that I plugged my cooler into the outlet in the bed. Please stop asking me if I want the generator on. The car is running, I want the generator on.
The physical vehicle is rock solid and I’m extremely happy with that. However, I just want to rip out all of the electronics and replace them with the magic that Kia/Hyundai built in their vehicle.
I largely get this impression anytime I step into an American vehicle. It feels like it was designed by a committee of out of touch executives.
Many of the “won’t turn on” things actually involve the component powering on (like the backlight turns on), but the digital components just don’t work.
One difference is it's also not mechanically too sound, to boot. The rear end needed a complete rebuild at 9k miles. Yes, nine thousand.
The issue with companies like GM is that while most people recognize what I've just said internally, there's a lot of conflict between traditional management processes/styles/cultures and the changes they need to make to adapt. These kinds of layoffs tend to result from the financial fragility they've built up. When some minor event puts clouds on the financial horizon, management only understands one tool to make changes and that's layoffs/pay cuts.
I wonder if they're doing this to just move the jobs to the Bay Area.
42 jobs listed in Mountain View https://search-careers.gm.com/en/jobs/?search=software&locat...
6 in Detroit https://search-careers.gm.com/en/jobs/?search=software&locat...
16 in Austin https://search-careers.gm.com/en/jobs/?search=software&locat...
I'm pointing out the bit of your logic where they didn't offer the ~600 engineers in Michigan comparable jobs in the Mountain View office. And due to COL changes, you know damn well they'd have materially lower salary expectations than Mountain View natives.
That's the part of your "just move the jobs to the Bay Area" theory which doesn't make sense. Relocating trained employees is massively more cost-effective than firing + hiring + training.
It also seems like designing the hardware and software in the same place would be useful, so it actually feels like they were designed to go together.
The hardware design is done by geographically separated teams for various reasons, often in multiple countries. You just ship the hardware where it needs to go, which you have to do anyway to get it from the factory to an office building.
Some modularity is desired. Enough to support a thousand devs? Hard to say.
Every one of those attributes adds an order of magnitude to the headcount. There's simply no option to do small teams that might escape Conway's law. Sometimes I'm amazed cars work at all.
Large teams churn in ways smaller teams don't. Competing teams, as the different product teams almost certainly are will be different.
like what, exactly?
Why work at GM, as a second rate employee (physical engineering is first tier) for much lower than what you make at basically any tech company.
If they're referring to hiring immigrants in the US, it's still kind of the same thing. A 50% tariff on immigrant employees means it's cheaper to just outsource, so now all that money is just going outside. On the other hand, the money the immigrant employee makes is mostly being spent within the US.
If you wanted to limit the ability of companies to pay immigrant workers less, you'd be better off making the initial immigration process harder, but the immigration to permanent residency process faster, that way fewer skilled immigrants get in, but once in they're not exploitable for very long. Since they can't easily import more workers, they're forced to deal with everyone at an equal level.
If you want to limit outsourcing, you'd have to start with onshoring the supply chain and either encourage automation or provide an incentive strong enough to keep those companies globally competitive.
Literally everything that does not require a US stamp or certification is being outsourced. Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, non-software architecture, customer support, project management, and even accounting. This is not good for the US as a country. American workers are not competitive right now, unfortunately, considering the high cost of living and strength of the dollar. Also, American workers will find it hard to get a work visa in a very low cost of living country if they do wish to pursue a career where their field has been outsourced.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-19/gm-to-cut...
[dupe] either way
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41290899