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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

The layoffs are not the issue. It is the decision makers who took the two decisions to both over-hire and then mass-fire shortly after. GM is a great example. The company was the largest and one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world. It doesn't stand a chance against BYD today and it is not by a lack of money (though maybe with a C-suite change).

So my opinion is, yes, the damage is done (or being done) but like GM, it'll probably take 10-15 years until we are in the visible territory. Maybe a bit shorter because this is tech.

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GM is a great example, Intel as well, that its rarely the engineers fault. You can have great talent but if management is dead set on bad decisions over & over, theres nothing to be done.

And the decision to overhire/overfire, set bad strategy, etc all resides in the C-Suite who rarely fire each other or themselves when it all goes wrong. It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step.

> It's only the employees that suffer for every mis-step.

They benefit for the overhiring mis-step.

Not necessarily. If you give up a good job to join a firm that has over-hired, its only obvious in retrospect that you took a bad risk.

This hits home. I wish there was a way to gauge “retrospect” before actually suffering from it. I’m now usually quite weary of “we’ve had to get yet another loan of 60 mil, after 6 years in business because we don’t know how to make a profitable business” also known as a series C or whatever.

I don't work full-time for startups, because of this. I was contracting for a startup last summer for about 6 months. They paid really well, but after researching the company, they were on their 3rd round of funding. The estimated yearly profits were a sliver of this, meaning they were burning through VC money hoping for an acquisition or somehow massively increasing profits. The product was also in a very crowded space with lots of competitors.

They had 3 other contractors working on the same functionality and they were all let go within a couple of weeks, because I could get it done 2X faster and without many integration issues.

I would have gladly kept working as a contractor, but when I refused a full-time work offer, they cut all contact off with me.

I would talk to the FTE frequently and they were always overworked and on multiple teams.

These are great because often the founder managed to take money out at one round of funding or another and is insulated from downside.

> one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world

Off topic, but I'd like some more specific thoughts regarding what you are aware of for specific automotive technologies that GM has innovated over the past decades, to make this statement.

Intuitively, GM cars do not do well internationally, have been known to have creaky interior build quality, have silly features like turning the reverse lights on when you unlock the car in a parking lot, and are not competitive on a scale of luxury compared to their European and Japanese counterparts.

I agree with you that most American cars are junk. I hate all these same features plus others like the weird headlight controls, parking break on the floor in non-trucks, not to mention the loose feeling brakes and steering.

Traditionally, GM sold other models overseas through brands like Holden or Opel, but these have all been sold off or shut down over the past decade or so except in China. GM now has a much heavier reliance on trucks and SUVs in the North American market. They sell some of those same product overseas still, but in much smaller quantities than before.

GM is not innovative. Tesla is innovative. GM is a creaking giant that was bailed out and is reliant on trade barriers to have any domestic customers. Nobody outside the US wants any American cars except Teslas or ever has. They have a terrible reputation except amongst muscle car enthusiasts who like them for reasons other than their actual quality.

Even their foreign brands are widely considered bad cars: "barely Holden' together" etc.

If not for tariffs, we'll all be driving BYDs in a decade.

STFU about GM. People who buy their cars love them, and I don’t trust folks that HN would like to be the designers on the C9 corvette.

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