Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 592 posts

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

#191

Post by cakeface »

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…

I don't think it's right to categorize "no consequences".

Leadership made a decision and that decision was bad. This happens all the time, including allocating budget for staff. Any effective organization is going to judge the outcomes of these types of decisions and it's going to come up in performance and hiring. If this was an isolated situation then possibly they won't fire anyone over it. But you really need the context to judge whether the response was correct.

Wasting company resources and making the company look bad in the press won't be rewarded, and that includes at the board level to the CEO.

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

#192

Post by groundzeros2015 »

breakpointalpha wrote: post #121

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.

This is a boom and bust industry. Projects come and go and only to a lesser extent if you work at a software company.

I would recommend IT/server administration as that is a constant business need, if you prefer stability with more limited upside.

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

#193

Post by jm4 »

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…

Generally, you don’t want to punish people for making decisions. At least I don’t. I value people who are willing to try things and I generally believe any decision made in good faith is better than no decision. My litmus test is was it a reasonable decision given the information available at the time in service of a greater goal. I can live with the consequences of that. If it turns out to be a not so great decision then we can fix it. I’m not going to fire someone for the result when the process was sound.

That said, this application of AI was profoundly stupid from the outset. You don’t necessarily fire people for a bad result from a reasonable decision making process, but you do fire them for poor judgment and reasoning. There’s nothing that can fix that except for not letting those people make decisions anymore.

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

#194

Post by jimbokun »

sneak wrote: post #141
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…

Layoffs aren’t “playing with people’s lives”. Employment is only by mutual consent and everyone knows that. Consent can be revoked at any time which is why anyone prudent (especially in a software engineering role) isn’t living paycheck to paycheck. Don’t blame a customer for the vendor’s irresponsibility.

That’s true in the US but not in most other rich countries, where there are legal constraints on terminating an employment contract.

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

#195

Post by daishi55 »

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…

“Consequences for mistakes” is generally not a good way of operating. Kind of the whole idea behind a blameless retro for example.

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

#196

Post by dsjoerg »

burnte wrote: post #169
baron816 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know.

> Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know. Because we've been alive in America long enough to see this cycle thousands of times. The execs rarely face the music for bad decisions. A round of layoffs looks like a failure to us, but to the investors it was a good idea that didn't work out so there's no punishment…

If you allow a likely guess with no evidence to play the role of fact, you're just as bad as the AIs

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

#197

Post by zmgsabst »

vrganj wrote: post #78
thewebguyd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea is everywhere right now, that AI is some magic black box that will solve all your business problems. The sentiment is spreading through the exec team where I work now too. It's like a disease. C-suites completely disconnected from reality and assuming we've already achieved ASI/AGI, and marketing teams & business journals are only furthering that narrative. It's so weird. I don't know what it is about AI th…

Its ideology. > Its like they've been chomping at the bit for decades to get rid of those pesky humans and are so hyped up over it they can't see clearly anymore. This is precisely it. Here's my analysis: AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave. That's why they're all so obsessed w…

They also don’t seem to realize the AI might take over highly paid executive positions before skilled work.

Knowledge or skilled workers can be used by the AI for swarm training data generation; what value do the execs have to AI?

I think the most beautiful part of capitalism is selling elites rope to hang themselves.

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

#198

Post by mannanj »

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…

Seems like this is a theme in our culture, maybe it's a world wide trend. The underlying theme I notice is unaccountability and selective application of rules, laws, norms to some people and not others. It seems to me like people with power, and in leadership positions like executives, get to create an environment where they are able to continually extract from a mass of people.

It reminds me of the conspiracy theories I would hear as a child along the lines of powerful people running the world in shadows. I certainly feel like the ways people like executives keep getting away with unethical and in some cases illegal behavior is there's forces in the shadows supporting their behavior. I was told in history class that throughout history when such types of people arose such as kings in France or massive dictators who conquer countries, that the "good" or "masses" of humans eventually over throw them - well here we are and why isn't that happening?

I see instead a class of people weak, afraid, and defeated and continually asking others "why aren't you doing anything" without the awareness to see "You are the one who is supposed to do something" edit: applying this to myself, I'm certainly trying. Before I was fired at Capital One (as an engineer) I would continue to ask tough questions of integrity to executives and my team and managers, things about integrity, things about inconsistencies in our stated values and how we were actually delivering work. I took some heat, was not very liked, and took continual abuse from my team until I was eventually kicked out. I am happy to share how little I noticed people who felt uncomfortable with team culture and executive communication were just silent and afraid, and in denial as I got attacked and abused by management.

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

#199

Post by K0balt »

KronisLV wrote: post #66
K0balt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Documentation driven development is your friend here. 75% of my workflow is generating documentation, at ever lower levels of abstraction, until it’s just code. The code usually comes out optimal, clean, and bug free (after passing tests) and. Suuuuuper well documented lol. It’s human in the loop over and over again tho

> 75% of my workflow is generating documentation, at ever lower levels of abstraction, until it’s just code Some might hate that writing code (which they enjoy) is turning into that, others might doubt the efficacy of doing that and the claims about it working so well. Personally, I’d say that docs help as long as they’re meaningful and not too long (even AI tools have limited context), but you probably also want to…

I’m sure it depends on the project, stack, and dev. I know loc is a terrible metric, but …

For me, my human only productivity in the firmware work I do is usually around 100-500 loc a day on good days. Obviously more when clean-slating the initial work on a project , but that’s typically a day or two and the same ratios apply.

With ai tools, I roughly 4x that with the same effort, or 2x it working lazily from my phone playing with my 2 year old.

The code is typically also more compact so the LOC metric is strong here IMHO.

Overall I have about the same number of bad-unproductive days, far less bugs (but worse bug hunts) and 10x better documentation lol.

Coding is definitely a different job though.

Post reply on HN