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Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

bloomberg.com

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Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#111

Post by Avicebron »

mikepurvis wrote: post #84
yifanl wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they gave the engineers appropriate severance packages, then they're at least out that much as a stupidity tax, but that's probably the most we can expect as far as consequences for the exec suite.

Presumably they're also out the top 10-20% of talent which immediately found jobs elsewhere and would have little interest in returning to Ford to work under such incompetent management.

This sentiment feels like a relic of a previous age. Yes _maybe_ but it's also equally likely that the best they laid off was on the ropes for months trying to battle ghost job spam and AI filters. It's almost shaming anyone who isn't hired someone immediately as deficient and "not the best". Honestly the conversation should be focused on how the execs can he made responsible.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#112

Post by tanseydavid »

jayd16 wrote: post #45
gm678 wrote: post #20

> Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product. Clearly a lot of careful thought went into their strategy of using AI and firing engineers.

Step 1: fire everyone. Step 2: figure out how to use AI. In that order, apparently.

I don't understand why Ford did not just put the LLM on a PiP.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#113

Post by spwa4 »

khriss wrote: post #86
eunos wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The social contract that American society elect (including these non executive engineers) emphasize career flexibility (right-to-work) and returns of capital than job security. Especially during booming economic years.

I am not sure engineers in say, Europe have any lower career flexibility. It's a false narrative to claim otherwise.

The frustration of being an engineer in Europe comes from the rules that this implies. Well, aside from the fact that this is mostly gone, but still exists in some big public or banking companies.

1) you can only get promoted if the company grows and/or someone above you leaves, or dies, or ... Btw it really requires leaving permanently. They leave for 10 years due to being in coma after a traffic accident? Nope.

2) the oldest person gets promoted (and that means ancienneté: longest in the company). No arguments, no exceptions. To the point that there are plenty of teams that have a manager (who gets the 10% pay boost) and an actual manager (who makes things work). Often not the same person.

3) No mobility (technically, yes, there's mobility, BUT your ancienneté resets in many cases. So it's really stupid to do)

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#117

Post by justonepost2 »

simonw wrote: post #48

This HN headline is editorialized, the Bloomberg headline is "Ford AI Hiccups Push Carmaker to Rehire ‘Gray Beard’ Inspectors". The editorialized headline is also misleading: "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors" - there is nothing in the original story that suggests Ford were expecting AI to "train juniors". And since the Bloomberg headline is behind a paywall the editori…

Cope

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#118

Post by bobson381 »

HPsquared wrote: post #97
foxyv wrote: post #67

There are two kinds of knowledge. There is explicit knowledge which can be codified easily in markdown files or a wiki. Then there is tacit knowledge which is mostly encoded in the experience of an organization's individuals. Explicit knowledge is like the tip of a giant institutional knowledge iceberg.

Maybe they could use a distillation process. Have the AI prompt the senior engineers repeatedly (don't do this). Like squeezing the oil from olives!

One of my favorite pieces of writing on this topic

https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#119

Post by mikepurvis »

Avicebron wrote: post #111
mikepurvis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably they're also out the top 10-20% of talent which immediately found jobs elsewhere and would have little interest in returning to Ford to work under such incompetent management.

This sentiment feels like a relic of a previous age. Yes _maybe_ but it's also equally likely that the best they laid off was on the ropes for months trying to battle ghost job spam and AI filters. It's almost shaming anyone who isn't hired someone immediately as deficient and "not the best". Honestly the conversation should be focused on how the execs can he made responsible.

That's fair. My intent was not to shame the "bottom 80%" which is of course most people, but rather to make a call for accountability. Like specifically the execs should have to answer to their board not just for the wasted time and severance packages, but also for the cost of losing some staff permanently with these shenanigans.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#120

Post by zzzeek »

khriss wrote: post #57

Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'. There seems to be almost unlimited cover for execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs. If it doesn't implode almost immediately, they get massive bonuses, if it blows up in their face, oh well they had the courage to 'take a bold strategic decision' In other words, they don't really have a plan, but they are happy playin…

> execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs.

reading this article I think that is not what happened in this specific case:

> Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions.

> “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”

That is, Ford had been slowly relying more and more on automated tools (if the "rehiring" is over three years, then this all precedes our current "AI" ecosystem) and realized that now that they want to add modern AI tools, they need experienced engineers to train the newer systems, and are hiring people from the open market, where some of these folks were former Ford employees, but nothing like "were laid off due to AI".

That is this doesnt sound at all like "Ford fired 350 engineers to be replaced with AI and is now backtracking", which is certainly what the headline here implied.

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