Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by mathattack » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #94

For those of us who lived through the "Offshoring" Craze of the mid-2000s, this has the exact same arc. Corp CEOs / CFOs golf buddies coouldn't stop yapping about how much they saved paying people less by offshoring. So step 1, they fire a bunch of people and send work overseas, driving up their financial metrics for 5-6 quarters until their staff and their organization finally break at stage 2. Turns out cultural an…

You’ve hit on a big reason - short term gains. The partners at Accenture, Infosys and the rest circle the execs at old industry companies. The companies start performing worse, though nothing some accounting gimmicks can’t cover. Then they have a very bad quarter, enough that it will ruin their fiscal year. Fingers start pointing, and talk turns to “belt tightening” and “turning fixed costs to variable.” All of a sudden the proposals from Big Consulting that provide savings bankable this fiscal year sound very good.

It doesn’t take long for the cracks to show:

- Not enough program/project management.

- An intuition that service dropped but no good metrics.

- Retrain the outsourcers after the first team quit.

- Inability to size new projects.

- Shadow IT departments form in the business units.

- The outsourcers don’t care about things like vendor consolidation or holding other vendors feet to the fire.

All of this might still be worth it if it’s done strategically to improve a chronically underperforming IT department. It’s rarely effective when rushed to cover up poor performance of the core business.

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

#272

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

ldng wrote: post #179

giancarlostoro wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Plus you can't say it's because Trump's terrible economics so safer to blame AI.

I asked a buddy who works at one of the Big 4 and he said its the remnants of the Great Resignation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation

Kind of made sense to me, I saw some of those outcomes happen in a former employer as well, they had an influx of income during 2020 that was not going to stay around forever (restaurant industry).

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

#273

Post by civet_java » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #156

simianwords wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any consequence for execs who don't layoff when they are supposed to? You have to look at the situation symmetrically.

Why does it need to be symmetric? There’s no reason we couldn’t decide that we want to err on the side of employing too many people. We already do with legislation that requires severance packages and tax benefits for hiring. Many countries go much further.

> There’s no reason we couldn’t decide that we want to err on the side of employing too many people.

One might bring up the personal consequences bourne by surplus employees who're then laid off during the unavoidable corrective phase - or is that not something society should care about? What are you optimising for?

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

#274

Post by Forgeties79 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

alpha_squared wrote: post #218

jm4 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I agree that you don't want to punish people for making bad decisions, I do think there should be a carveout for when those decisions impact people's lives.

Yeah they didn’t like… migrate them to bad software they had to undo or something. They laid off hundreds of people due to overhyped products/trend chasing.

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

#275

Post by drob518 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

shuwix wrote: post #207

mukbangpervert wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the added cost that the best people are the least likely to return after a layoff.

And those which return will have zero loyalty to firm. Once you were dumped for AI gamble, you will never do the extra work, because you will probably be dumped in year or so, when someone else will get same or different stupid idea. But it's not stupid idea, it's more like desperate attempt to remain in game in competitive market by doing what everyone else does. Idea crafted to final decision by people paid to see…

Absolutely. And why would you? Companies spend lots of time talking about loyalty and teamwork, but they show their colors when they do these layoffs. Smaller companies, often still run by the founder, can be much better. The only large company I ever saw command any employee loyalty was Hewlett-Packard when Bill and Dave were still running things. At one point, in the 1970s, they needed to cut payroll by 10%, so they asked the employees: we can cut 10% of the people, or everyone can take a 10% temporary pay cut. The employees voted for the pay cut. So, every other Friday, the company was shut down and everyone, all the way up to the CEO took a 10% pay cut. When times improved, they bumped everyone back up to full pay and moved on. That created huge loyalty. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Bill and Dave passed the reins to others and eventually HP became like all the other companies and fell apart.

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

#276

Post by LogicFailsMe » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

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.

Top men.

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

#277

Post by joelfried » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

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.

Of course in that order!

Step 3: Rehire key personnel at lower cost than whomever was fired in Step 1. Step 4: Take credit for cost reductions . . . and give yourself a raise!

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

#278

Post by foxyv » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

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!

I think that this is doable. Similar to having a new employee shadow a more experienced one and observe, you could implement a sort of program where AI shadows experienced employees and asks questions when they do something it doesn't understand.

But this is difficult to implement since AI doesn't have a body to follow someone around and it would take immense amounts of compute to do so using telemetry and cameras. You would literally be spying on employees 24x7 for weeks at a time with the express goal of replacing them someday.

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

#279

Post by topgrain2 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

grosswait wrote: post #211

luckydata wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh poor babies they got sad their human sacrifices didn't work, that's surely as much punishment as losing your livelihood because a pack of morons act randomly based on feels.

Life is not fair and there are no guarantees. It’s a hard phase of realization to go through but life’s surprises are easier to get past once you do.

An excellent argument for advocating to Make the Bastards Pay when they get away with some unfair bullshit.

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

#280

Post by Legend2440 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

shimman wrote: post #203

Legend2440 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't talk like a perpetual labor machine wouldn't be awesome if you had it. You just want to make sure you have it, and not your boss using it against you.

There was a reason why the phrase "perpetual" was used, to invoked how unrealistic perpetual energy machines are and how futile it is for the human race to chase such dreams. How many tens of trillions of capital have been incinerated in reducing the quality of life for workers compared to actually uplifting them?

Sure, you'll need energy inputs, you're not going to beat thermodynamics. But we're not capturing even 0.01% of available energy yet, there's a lot of room to grow.

Industrial capitalism has been fantastic for quality of life. Here I am sitting in an air-conditioned office browsing HN during a workday, instead of slaving away in the fields as a peasant farmer. I'll take more automation please.