GM Under CEO Mary Barra Is an Undeniably Soulless and Dishonest Company | Hacker News Reader

GM Under CEO Mary Barra Is an Undeniably Soulless and Dishonest Company

deadlinedetroit.com

32 pointscebert15 comments

I spent quite a while interviewing and looking for opportunities before I got one in July, which let me duck out right before the ugly three rounds of layoffs since August. The wild thing is the swing back and forth -- GM stood up a huge software organization in Tel Aviv, Israel only a few years ago (somewhere around 2018) which had responsibility for many devops projects, the UltraCruise software that was announced, but never made onto a program, all after GM acquired Cruise the autonomy company. That entire development actually caused a huge braindrain out of GM and the Detroit area of roboticists, computer vision experts, etc. When that didn't work out, long after the company should have pulled the plug, they hired Mike Abbott from Apple, who brought in many other Apple people, all to... surprise pull the plug on CarPlay. That group took about 2 years to gut the Tel Aviv office and many jobs in Detroit, as well as Phoenix and Austin (IT hubs for the company) and start a whole new incredibly expensive office in Mountain View, where they're paying about triple for the same role as was being done in Detroit or Austin or Tel Aviv. In the process, the company managed to alienate many of the best performers and lose anyone who could get out, while missing on several major deliverables, like the stop-ship and massive updates to the Blazer EV after the Ars Technica article on it. Hilariously, that entire open source ecosystem that debuted on the Blazer EV is no longer really internally prioritized, since the first layoff in August lost all of the FOSS maintainers employed at the company and most of the software architects responsible for its integration into future generation vehicles. Honestly, couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys...

Mike abbot was a poor hiring choice by GM. He was practically managed out at ACS, and from sound of it also at GM given the 1 year stint.

It's hard for a world class software engineering company to do large software projects. It seems straight up impossible to throw together a large organization in a non-software company and pull off some large project.

It sounds like you got out at the right time. I live in the Greater Detroit area. It’s frustrating to me to hear cycles of the automotive companies claiming they need technical talent, especially in Michigan, and yet run companies and programs so haphazardly. I don’t think they realize the repetitional harm they’re incurring. Everyone at my employer has the mindset of “never work in auto” because these events keep happening.

> the repetitional harm

I'm guessing you meant to write "reputational", but I love this version.

Yes, sorry my bad

> Yes, sorry my bad

I heartily disagree. You've given me a humorous tool for future use :)

I thought 'repetitional' actually worked here, because they kept doing it over and over again.

When was GM ever not a "soulless and dishonest company"? I certainly don't remember any "soul" in their cars in the last 50 years, just a bunch of really terrible cars, though admittedly they're better now than they were in the 70s-90s.

One of Mary Barra's big things to change right away was dress code.

Before her, 10+ pages to describe the rules around how to dress. For loads of workers who never interact with anyone.

She changed it to 'dress appropriately'

So no... GM is doing pretty awesome as of late BECAUSE OF Mary.

I wonder if the previous specificity was due to various union negotiations.

Or simply a culture clash between factory labor and white collar office management

I briefly worked in automotive as a tech worker and we had to completely lock down the slack workspace due to patently unprofessional behavior by many who just seemed to not understand that what you post in corporate chat might as well be painted on a mural for all to see

Imagine what you might hear as banter at a construction site, overheard by HR at a bank

Actually, I have no sense of what real construction-site banter might entail.

What categories of bad did you encounter?

I dont really know how it came to be that way.

Like most bureaucracy it slowly builds up off the 5 monkeys principle.

I do have first hand experience sitting in a meeting as a sysadmin trying to determine if we are a stake holder on the colour of a bolt inside the 5.3L v8 before it came out for the silverado.

Being undeniably soulless and dishonest is still major progress from powering anti-Semitic political campaigns, world war 2, and the Holocaust.

https://jweekly.com/2006/12/01/financing-of-racist-anti-semi...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/n...

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/general-motors-and-the-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com