Car companies have an infuriating software problem
ft.com
ft.com
I worked in this industry. It used to move slow and consistent. Incremental progress or evolutionary improvent some used to call it. Wisdom borne from time and experience culminating in modules that ran on hundres of millions of cars, they to five years to finish but golly was it finished, no updates needed. They sold to every competitor, and even our own suppliers. Across the Atlantic and the pacific they scoffed at our POS cars, flimsy plastic trim, akward power trains. But, the beating heart of their cars ran our code.
Lots of grey beards, round tables, lecture rooms, the new kids like me squeezing into whatever room we could find to listen in. For some of these geezers their day job was just to investigate, educate, bring up the next generation. Some just sat around doing mostly nothing at all, schmoozig around the coffee machine, except when an exec or a new hire got a smart idea, skewer and stop them dead in the tracks, back to caf. They used to brag about how refined their bom was and the lengths they went to test the foundation that we now stood upon.
The age of #innovation. New ceo, new board, new directors. We aren't a car company, we are mobility! We are SAFE, scrum, stories, velocity! 5 years? No! 1 year, or else. That's how the apples success don't ya know? Features! Bugs? Bugs don't have story points and we aren't in the business of shipping bugs so why are you talking about the last release? Why does your test bench cost $5mil, can't you do that with a raspberry pi and a beagle bone? Why do you have so many testers and QAs, this team we hired from the valley is gonna white the AI that can auto-test everything. Why are you paying so much to license this esoteric tool chain? O P E N S O U R C E buddy! The car is a phone ...with wheels!
The grey beards are gone, picked up and left when the winds changed or forced off the boat altogether. No promotions unless you're a yes man. SV kids that have never opened the hood of their cars or been around at a company long enough to see a product live and die in the market. More product managers than QAs. If you have a mortgage or kids, better put up and shut up.You get the idea.
Also, some of the graybeards really held back certain innovations like security. Just roll your own crypto (spoiler it was broken).
Some of the older people were great though, really understood the electronics and vehicle communication systems, but in my experience the best software people were usually the manufacturing engineers. They had some really cool ideas and implementations that I didn't really appreciate until much later.
The coders for vehicle systems themselves were either electrical engineers who barely understood software, or software people who never opened a car (like you said).
I think most of the people who are pushing scrum and related ilk are cargo cutting, and aren't actually tech bros. I think a lot of this influence comes from the big consulting companies excited to make tons of money on "transformation".
Independent to this, you have the cloud providers, who are actually from Silicon Valley invading the stack from the backend and storage side, and now AI and analytics.