US software engineers need a union.
If I hadn't already landed a job somewhere else, I would only return with a 20% pay bump and an iron-clad contract.
Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
121–130 of 592 posts
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#122Problem with thinking you can replace your employees with AI, this is not the case. This is like thinking you could replace your NASA engineers with IBM computers in the 60s. The AI revolution changes drastically the way people work, and empower them, they multiply their productivity, but they never ever replace domain expertise, and business logic.
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did not. I been saying for decades that software devs form a union. It's just so strange any other profession have unions or bodies that protect their job against this sort of practice. if software devs were lawyers then AI would've been banned
You can negotiate your salary even without a union. Also being part of a union doesn't guarantee you won't be laid off because of AI.
A union absolutely can and should protect workers from frivolous layoffs.
If the company tries to layoff 10% "due to AI" the remaining 90% can strike.
History is full of union solidarity vs idiotic management.
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#124I've lost my ability to believe that things will feel 'normal' at work.
I no longer want to make connection with any coworkers.
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#125Interestingly, 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…
I assume AI lay offs are mostly investor crud anyway. I've never seen them provide any evidence or examples of where AI helped cut those jobs and it always feels like its easier to lie and say you were fired because of AI so that your fired former employees blame AI and not you. Plus, if AI is really making your org more efficient, why aren't you training your employees who are not using it effectively enough? It all smells.
The retention rates before COVID are back, and companies have way more people than they might need, that's the real reason so many places have started to slash, but blaming AI is easier.
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#126And they just go back to work like nothing happened?
That's the interesting question. Are expert engineers willing to go back after being treated that way or knowing what happened to others?
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
That's not mandated by law though. Shouldn't companies following such stupidity be easily out-competed by those that don't? In he market for their products/services but also in the market for employment.
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#128Earlier 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.
There is a huge cost for this either way (severance packages, yes, but also lost productivity, reduced team coherence, etc), but that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily translate to a political cost for the managers involved in pushing the dumb idea, particularly if the CEO was pressuring everyone for cost savings. They will escape by saying, “We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the rig…
> We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?”
And why does the board/shareholders allow a CEO to continue into their position by just following everyone else?
I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is doing, I want to do the opposite." and it's worked for me so far. The area doesn't need yet another "dark and moody" photographer with boring sepia edits, blurry photos with a film preset, and the same exact font and colors on the website as everyone else.
You don't become a pioneer in your industry by just cargo culting everyone else. It's low effort leadership and if I were on the board it certainly would not inspire my confidence in their ability to run a company. You're telling me not a single person at the table asked "Do we have these engineers' institutional knowledge documented somewhere before we fire them all??"
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#129> The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom — and fear — that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn’t replace experience. I'm not sure this story is illustrative of that, when you have a VP of engineering saying “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers tha…
Pre-AI version: Oops, you laid off the higher-salaried people without having them train their replacements, so bring them back, long enough to do that. Now, that training[*] will be for both AI models and lower-salaried hires. Perhaps a second mistake by those who thought they didn't need their most experienced people: Now they think they just need to train the AI better, and then new-grad "AI native" hires will be t…
Is there any substantial number of companies actually training AI? Or do you count writing skills files for Claude as "training"? (Cause it really isn't..)
Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
#130> 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.
Earlier this year I’ve been in calls with leaders from top US companies where their strategy was basically “we have to switch absolutely everything to agentic right now, otherwise we are dead”. That was the full thought.
That made reading their subsequent layoff blog posts pretty depressing