A big brain move. First, they cut CarPlay/Android Auto because they want to provide a full custom experience. Second, they fire the people who are supposed to be responsible for that experience.
A lesson I learned at my first programming gig. I worked with a lot of really smart people, one might describe as 'rock stars' or 10x or whatever. The company was flush with government contracts and it showed.
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.
Last year GM offered Voluntary Separation Package. Those who had 5 or more years of experience would get 1 month of pay + prorated bonus + health insurance compensation.
You can guess who took the offer. 5000 of your experienced employees who have the ability to pursue other opportunities.
Absolutely. The good engineers are always the first to leave a smelly ship. Then you're just left with engineers whose chief skill is kissing their manager's ass.
This seems like a great
Reason to avoid hiring as much as possible , and use contractors for any work that could potentially be lost by non-renewal of contracts or program cancellations.
Agreed on your first point, not on your second point. Lots of tech companies did over-hire during the pandemic in a way that had entirely foreseeable results, but everyone simply got caught up in the FOMO.
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.
I'd venture a company like GM would just try and replace them with as many third party contractors or outsourced vendors, and not actually "slim the team down", etc
Twitter became a much worse app (as far as user experience goes) imo after the firings. The replies to a tweet being filled with bots/ads instead of relevant conversation alone makes the app borderline unusable.
They have released ton's more features including AI - grok, premium subscription with no ads, growth has been record high all run with much less engineers, it's more optimized and better now IMO. In tech companies, it's not just about headcount, one needs a strong leader to drive company towards greater success like Elon.
It's baffling that people can still think this way in 2024. Almost none of Musk's forecasts, estimates, or product promises have been delivered on time. His history is basically a long list of missed deadlines. Believing that Musk is a good leader is pure delusion, especially now.
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.
I care. I'm sure Musk cares. I'm sure the private investors care. I'm sure the 500M+ paying users of X care.
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.
The site was seriously broken for a long time. And that attracted all kinds of bots, and 'List of 10 Machiavellian things to learn' kind of bots, not to forgot all sorts of other evil bots.
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.
This is the path I took when purchasing my most recent vehicle. A ford with a ~5" non-touch screen. Basically just big enough to show you the backup camera and the radio station.
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.
Android Auto is really useful for navigation and playing your own music/podcasts. I don't own a car but every rental car I've had over the past decade has supported it and I don't know what I'd do without it, it's that essential.
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.
I had a Dodge pickup with the most basic radio package, no screens or infotainment. Per the law it had a backup camera, the screen for which was in the rear view mirror. It was perfect.
Carplay doesn’t provide the backup camera. That’s safety equipment, including Apple in that loop would be malpractice.
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.
No, backup cameras are better than rear visibility has ever been. If a small child is sitting directly in front of your rear bumper, can you see that in any car? I don't think so. But with any modern car with a proper backup camera, the kid is easy to see on the monitor. This, in fact, is the main reason these cameras were mandated: lots of kids were getting run over, usually by their own parents. Of course, worse visibility makes it even more likely, but rear visibility has never been great in any car.
I have an old jeep and I’m dying to put a backup camera on that thing. I can basically reach the bumper from the driver seat and I still prefer the visibility that a backup camera brings.
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.
No, they don't. What if the child were smaller, or lying on the ground?
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.
I'm not moving the goalposts at all. A fisheye lens is normal on any backup camera. My statement that you quoted is literally correct: you cannot see a small child lying down directly in front of your rear bumper, in any car. Why you're trying to disprove this, I have no idea.
yeah, seriously. In WA, you can't hold your phone while you drive. I guess in theory, you could mount your phone on your dashboard where it gets sun/heat damaged?
Why do you need to use your phone while driving? Set your nav at the start of your trip, start your music at the start of your drive. Skipping or anything else is easy to do when stopped at a light.
My phone has always done just fine mounted on a dash, never had any concerns around sun/heat damage.
> My phone has always done just fine mounted on a dash
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.
I live in Michigan with a similar law. Law does not allow you to touch your phone when your car is not legally parked.
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.
Do they actually require it? I've noticed that Waze, for instance, will default to rerouting you if you don't respond to the prompt. Which is great - they seem to have taken into account the fact that folk might be driving, so let's just keep getting them there as fast as possible.
I thought so too, but to be honest I haven’t missed it too much in my Tesla. It already covers my streaming music use cases, and built in navigation is good enough.
How does it work when you have something in your calendar?
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.
Tesla owner here. If you have the Tesla app installed on your phone, you can "share" addresses from map apps to it and it will auto-sync them to your car. So the workflow is open calendar on your phone, click on location for appointment, open with Tesla app. It's not quite as seamless as android auto, but much better than having to type everything in manually.
The method I've seen is to run a carputer with Android installed and use the Tesla web browser to connect to it (no jailbreak needed).
https://teslaandroid.com/
Not that I think this is a Twitter-in-a-weekend project, but… what is a car infotainment system doing?
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?
>Didn’t they also go with a plan to cut CarPlay and android auto. Seems like they are on track to shittify and get left behind
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.
Companies have been really hammering software engineers with layoffs, but the need for software to be written has only been increasing. I think the execs at these companies have been snowed over by Copilot demos and vastly overestimate the productivity gains it can realize.
In a time when cars are increasingly more connected than ever. More sensors and controls. Literally more software in cars today than ever before and they do this?
The remaining legacy, domestic auto manufacturers are just kind of circling the drain. They all have stupid problems and largely seem to have ridden the coat tails of an older generation that vowed to buy American.
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.
If bugs weren’t so prevalent I’d think a squirrel’s been eating your wires haha. That’s a lot. My Honda has a few but I’m happy with it although I think someday it might kill me with these phantom lane corrections.
It’s a 3 year old vehicle. The backup sensor might be a wiring issue, but everything else is pure software issue.
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.
Funny, my Chevrolet has most of the same issues and it drives me mad. The most infuriating one is where the infotainment comes on but is unresponsive to all input. You're stuck if you left the radio too loud or on a station you don't like.
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.
Not per Wikipedia[1]:"Through the Troubled Asset Relief Program the US Treasury invested a total $51 billion into the GM bankruptcy. Until December 10, 2013, the U. S. Treasury recovered $39 billion from selling its GM stake. The final direct cost to the Treasury of the GM bailout was $11-12 billion ($10.5 billion for General Motors and $1.5 billion for former GM financing GMAC, now known as Ally)."
Because a business cycle contraction occurred? If GM had been allowed to fail, other companies would have filled the gap in the market, and new businesses would have emerged, most likely generating even greater tax revenue over time. While there may have been some short-term thumb twiddling, the market would have eventually created new jobs elsewhere, jobs that would have been even more productive. There's a great opportunity cost to "saving" millions of unproductive jobs.
Not true at all; both the bondholders, who under the law were supposed to be senior, got screwed over, and certain non-union salaried employee pensions, were severely cut out of pension money by the PBGC.
The sensors and controls are made by companies like Bosch. GM doesn't need any expertise in this stuff, they just buy parts from companies that have it.
Not true. A few exceptional vendors like Bosch excepted, manufacturers are increasingly in-sourcing development away from the tier suppliers. It's a lot of work managing them to get quality outcomes and that system has repeatedly bitten manufacturers hard in the past decade. It also lengthens development timelines significantly and raises the cost of mid-development changes, when they actually need faster, more responsive development practices.
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.
Cutting 1000 software engineers doesn't necessarily mean they won't be needing the services of 1000 software engineers. They could just be moving to contract out the work instead of having more in-house staff.
> The moves come two months after former Apple Inc. executives David Richardson and Baris Cetinok were promoted to senior vice president roles in the group
I wonder if they're doing this to just move the jobs to the Bay Area.
Connect the dots as in why it makes sense? Or provide evidence? I can't tell you why it would make sense to the executives, but below are job searches for keyword software. You can yada yada and say maybe it's fake postings in which case I'm not sure what to say - but it's well known internally GM wants to expand the Mountain View office.
Where did I, or anyone, suggest they're fake job postings?
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.
Automakers already have satellite offices in major tech areas. Toyota, Mercedes, GM, Ford, and Kia/Hyundai all have bay area offices that mainly cater to software people already. I know this layoff affected the Austin GM office too.
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.
I have a slightly contra view here. Conway's law means you often ship your engineering structure in your code. As such, larger dev teams will necessitate more modules. This will lead to more code and to more bugs
Some modularity is desired. Enough to support a thousand devs? Hard to say.
Don't take this as defending specific headcounts, but rather a response to the general idea. Modern vehicles have probably the highest inherent complexity of any thing most people regularly interact with. These are heavily regulated, safety critical electro-pneumo-mechanical distributed systems built to survive decades of severe conditions and piecemeal maintenance by the kind of people who work at jiffy lube.
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.
We need better bike infrastructure, like everywhere. Let's spur some competition in that area, so we can cook ourselves more slowly by taking cars off the road, and also let the invisible hand of the market take GM out of business.
Please, please disagree with this comment instead of downvoting it. As a normal person, I have no idea if there is a good counterargument, or if the downvoting is just kneejerk politics or a disapproval of tone.
A 50% tariff on foreign workers means you're forcing companies to pay employees in other countries much more than in the US. They obviously aren't just going to shut down their international presence, so that's just transferring money from the US to these other countries. Since the companies would just raise prices in the markets that can most afford it (ie the US), and use those to offset the increased costs elsewhere.
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.
When you do this kind of stuff, you make American companies less competitive as a whole. If GM can get as good software for cheaper by outsourcing (granted, they almost certain cannot), then they should do it because that might help save tens of thousands of other jobs within the company and broader economy. The government should not generally be in the business of telling companies how to build software.
I don't agree with this. The US government needs to encourage an economic structure that is best for US citizens. The company is not looking to save other jobs, but rather to increase their profits for stakeholders. Other industries are highly regulated, such as Medicine, Law, or otherwise have tariffs that combat against this. This is also a slap in the face to the US citizens that bailed out the company previously.
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.
