Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla • Hacker News Board

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#251

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 8:54 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #128

mkl95 wrote: post #43

The state of European software is not good. The strategy at the average European company is to spend most of the money on a sales people army and have a few engineers build the product. This strategy often fires back as the customer base grows, because customers want software that actually works. Paying your tech debt is not feasible when your engineering department is small and they are also expected to build new fe…

That seems a popular sentiment in this thread. But there are of course quite a few unicorns that emerged out of Europe and there is of course the notion that a lot of the mobile networks in the world are running on software that came out of Ericsson or Nokia, which are the dominant options if you don't want to go with Huawei instead. There is of course the notion that Silicon Valley has produced a lot of amazing comp…

>a lot of the mobile networks in the world are running on software that came out of Ericsson or Nokia

Ericsson's and Nokia's software divisions are offshoring bodyshops at this point. They do the complex RF R&D in Finland, Sweden and Germany and the software/firmware is offshored to Eastern Europe and India.

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#252

Post by mellavora » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 8:58 AM UTC

zxienin wrote: post #123

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. An organization thinks software engineers aren't very important. And it doesn't pay the sort of salaries you need to get the top talent. So it doesn't have any top-tier software engineers, and their software team struggles to deliver valuable projects. And you can see this in their hiring. All full of interns. I remember when VW was advertising a “software school”. T…

> do you know how bad German universities are? I am surprised from this quoted comment. Are German unis really bad? Why is there such a perception?

I have been involved in several comparisons of German to US universities. The good German ones are ahead of most/all US ones in terms of several academic measures.

Though most of those measures are about research output (# papers published, # high-impact papers, # awards won by faculty weighted by award prestige, # post-docs placed to tenure-track positions, # conferences chaired, # journal editors...)

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#253

Post by rolisz » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

martin8412 wrote: post #218

pjmlp wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay and benefits are good, 40 h/w + extra when overtime happens, 30 day vacation,....

That's the default for everyone working in Europe

Europe is composed of a lot of countries, which all have different laws. In Romania, minimum vacation days are 20 days and very few companies give more than that, except maybe for seniority.

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#254

Post by PicassoCTs » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:09 AM UTC

Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #184

lacker wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is simply not valued in Europe, and not because there aren't amazing developers there -- there are many. But software isn't considered important In many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. An organization thinks software engineers aren't very important. And it doesn't pay the sort of salaries you need to get the top talent. So it doesn't have any top-tier software engineers, and their software team stru…

I’ve seen big telco not having any internal dev - only bad management. When their partner do not deliver, or very slowly because they’re cheap, they make “escalation”… So it’s even worse than not valuing the work. It’s destroying it. (By the way, it’s not only telco, but also food distribution, small business…)

Nothing more ridiculous, then a tribe of MBAs dancing around the one software engineer whos project they run into the ground - making "pressure"

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#255

Post by PicassoCTs » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:13 AM UTC

martin8412 wrote: post #218

pjmlp wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay and benefits are good, 40 h/w + extra when overtime happens, 30 day vacation,....

That's the default for everyone working in Europe

Is it really though? I ve been going around european companies and its all work till you drop 80h culture and no holiday, cause we need a guy on standbye. That stuff only ever exists on paper.

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#256

Post by arghnoname » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:16 AM UTC

Gravityloss wrote: post #236

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I still cannot get over that answer. I mean, Fraunhofer is a major German research org and it should be in their business to promote such solutions. To fire something like this out, in front of the people who definitely attended those universities, that was shocking. To this day I don’t know if I was simply naive or if my question was stupid in any way.

if Fraunhofer also a competitor to universities?

By and large, the 'best' research institutes in Germany are not the universities, but Max Planck and institutes like Fraunhofer. They may be loosely affiliated with the universities, but the University faculty and the research faculty are not one and the same. Students getting a doctorate may have that doctorate minted by the affiliated university, but all real work actually happens at the research institute.

Students can get doctorates directly from German universities and research is done there, but it's just not organized like American universities. Prime prestige centers are research institutes and they're spread around the country.

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#257

Post by barry-cotter » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:16 AM UTC

hulahoof wrote: post #203

barry-cotter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Australia is a petrostate pretending to be a service economy Come now, it’s more of an iron ore or coal state than an oil one. Beef is more of their exports. https://oec.world/en/profile/country/aus

As an Australian I agreed with your comment, but the link you shared indicate that petroleum actually is a larger export for us > The top exports of Australia are Iron Ore ($79.6B), Coal Briquettes ($36.4B), Petroleum Gas ($26.8B), Gold ($17.7B), and Frozen Bovine Meat ($4B)

That’s natural gas, not petroleum as in the liquid. A fine pedantic distinction I know but if natural gas is petroleum so is coal.

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#258

Post by arghnoname » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:22 AM UTC

foepys wrote: post #219

TMWNN wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aksss is being sarcastic. When universities are compared across nations, a frequent retort to the preeminence of the top US universities is "But universities in [ insert European country here ] are free!". aksss's point is that, as MrBuddyCasino indicated, you tend to get what you pay for.

US metrics based on research programs for how good a university is don't apply to Europe. Comparisons based on those are worthless and the fact it is still being done frequently can be attributed to either incompetence or malice.

Yes, it's so obviously a completely ridiculous metric that it has to be willful at this point. It doesn't seem like anyone tries to measure how well educated the undergraduates are in terms of skills acquired, etc, by how many papers a totally different population occupying a similar space pump out instead.

It shouldn't need to be said, but no amount of Nobel prizes in the world is going to make one whit of difference for introductory calculus instruction. When the prime research centers are decoupled from the universities and these silly little metrics, it's no wonder that European universities are "bad."

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#259

Post by lajosbacs » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:28 AM UTC

tibbydudeza wrote: post #36

dependsontheq wrote: post #8

I wouldn't call it "woes". I have been driving an VW ID 3 since last year, it runs their custom Android OS System and should have all of the latest features. It has been quite an experience. The car is fine, basic driving functions are fine, even the driver assist features are generally fine if they are running. The software running all the displays and the "augmented" heads up display is ridiculous. The car one did…

"leave the car with all smart keys, go at least 50 meters from the car, wait for 15 minutes" Some engineer actually coded for this - LOL.

Tesla does the same. Mine stopped working on the highway (it let me get off it though) and on the gas station, this was its v suggested way to reset. But as this was in the dead of night in the freezing winter, I had a lot of doubts before doing this. When a guy with a crane arrived, I finally left the car and was not able to open it again.

Re: Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla

#260

Post by avtolik » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:30 AM UTC

erdos4d wrote: post #172

> Herbert Diess’s master plan for beating Tesla Inc. hinged on replacing calloused factory hands with the nimble fingertips of 10,000 software workers who would transform Volkswagen AG into a tech player. How can any product with 10K developers on it NOT collapse under its own weight?

Well, for a start it is not a single product. VW is a huge group consisting of a lot of brands, and hundreds of products(vehicles). I guess he wanted to bring the software development of all of these under a single company.