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GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

reuters.com

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Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#141

Post by rsynnott »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #22
aphextron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay off in their lidar team. Self driving will be solved with computer vision. Lidar is an unnecessary technology even for full level 5 autonomy. Most self driving companies have come to this conclusion by now.

Any data to back this up besides Musk saying his approach's the best?

Do you really need anything other than the divinely inspired word of St Elon of Cars?

(I think Musk's 'data' to justify this is that humans don't have LIDAR. Which is true, but irrelevant, unless he's seriously proposing AGI)

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#142

Post by ghaff »

zelly wrote: post #129
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable They may have. We don't know when or if things will go back to the way they were before March 2020 and how consumer and employer behavior will change. For example, maybe movie theaters are completely screwed. Except as a novelty, the big business chains may not survive. Universal Studios is already pushing back on theater release windows and no live-action mo…

> Employers will probably maintain work from home and cut back on office space. All those jobs that support maintaining offices may not come back either. I think there will be a greater demand for office real estate because suddenly everyone needs double the space and (spacious) cubicles or standalone offices will make a comeback. That is, unless every company goes full remote.

You maintain a location with a handful of dedicated offices together with hoteling and conference rooms for people to come in a day per week or so.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#143

Post by malandrew »

puranjay wrote: post #95
rtkwe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be a bit weird because a lot of those should come back because the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable.

I doubt the consumer confidence will be the same. Not to mention that some people will be staying at home much longer.

And some people will cook more. For example, we have a lovely little neopolitan pizza joint a block away, but two days ago I received an Ooni Koda 16 and have discovered how easy it is to make my own neopolitan pizzas. That's basically a permanent reduction in my spending on pizza if/when it does reopen.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#144

Post by gizmo385 »

etrk wrote: post #103
kylec wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're very far away from general-purpose self-driving that can drive in all locations, conditions, and handle all scenarios. But we don't necessarily need an all-or-nothing solution - I think we could be reasonably close to a self-driving system that can handle a whitelisted set of roads and highways, especially if those roads were augmented to accommodate that self-driving in some way.

Regardless of road quality, weather conditions are unpredictable. When the rain or snow or haboob kicks in, I guess your car will pull over to the side of the road and you'll need to drive manually until conditions improve. We'll need to keep the steering wheel around for the foreseeable future.

Does anyone know what Waymo does when a haboob happens? Those are at least relatively common in the Phoenix area.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#145

Post by michaelt »

baddox wrote: post #54
FreedomToCreate wrote: post #26

Just a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to hire as well.

Comments like this show up on all stories about layoffs. I don’t really understand your point. There’s never any reason to have layoffs unless the company deems it a good financial decision, right? And surely all layoffs would hit the lowest performers (by the company’s estimation of performance, which obviously might be flawed), right? So what is the difference between “the company did layoffs of its lowest performe…

> So what is the difference between “the company did layoffs of its lowest performers due to financial pressure caused in part by the pandemic” and “the company did layoffs of its lowest performers using the pandemic as an excuse to avoid bad PR”?

1. Whether the company might cut deeper later

2. Whether other companies will be forced to follow suit

3. Because of 1 and 2, whether the average HN reader should worry about their livelihood.

(HN readers are, of course, 100% high performers their employers are lucky to have)

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#146

Post by MiroF »

jcranmer wrote: post #123
Eridrus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to find out how much has been invested in self driving cars, but I think you're massively underestimating the cost of building rail in the US. A billion dollars a mile is a realistic figure for rail in cities. NYC spent more than double that recently. For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5 and 100 miles of rail.

A billion dollars per mile of rail is an excessively overpriced cost of construction that ought to have severe political pressure to explain why so much money is being wasted. Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about $100-300 million/mile.

> Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about $100-300 million/mile.

Where within the United States is this true? (note: United States is known for high construction costs)

e: or just downvote me - but I don't know anywhere with a $100 million/mile subway system.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#147

Post by fiftyfifty »

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self driving tech should have first gone in the early stages. Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5 minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that could be cost effective. Something like that could change public transport and would be very accessible to even small cities.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#148

Post by malandrew »

throwaway1940 wrote: post #127
FreedomToCreate wrote: post #26

Just a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to hire as well.

From what I’ve heard about the Airbnb and Lyft layoffs, many people who were affected were actually high performers who were paid well but working on projects that were deprioritized by upper management. Laying off these people allowed them to satisfy their budget cuts while laying off relatively few people. Continuing to hire sounds strange, but if the offers are lower the company will still save money. Pausing the…

I don't know how this makes any sense. Engineering is the only way to automate things to allow a business to scale sublinearly. Why layoff high performing engineers when you can reassign them to problems where the goal is to automate things enough to reduce costs to below the cost of keeping them around. Any high performer should be able to create enough value within 6 months to pay the salary for the hole year. If anything, you buy your company the optionality to further layoff non-engineers that you can't yet layoff until their job is automated.

Now this may not be possible at smaller companies but at a company the size of AirBnB or Lyft certainly has enough problems that could still be better automated to help reduce costs further.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#149

Post by MiroF »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #147
djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self driving tech should have first gone in the early stages. Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5 minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that…

Transporting people together in a single thing is much more efficient than having a big roomy box for every person.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#150

Post by MiroF »

mattlondon wrote: post #121
ashtonkem wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives…

A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.

> A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them.

what?

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