GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff • Hacker News Board

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#161

Post by Traster » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

greendave wrote: post #27

> Before the layoffs, Cruise had 1,800 full-time employees. Their hiring rate has been remarkable. Less than 3 years ago (6/2017) they had 200 employees. Just over a year ago (3/2019), they had ~1000.

Do people have experience of that ever being a success? Because I would ball park it and say my team can still basically be productive at 33% growth per year - for every 1 new employee you need about 3 established employees. I've got to imagine that the vast majority of those new employees don't know what they're' meant to be doing, and let's face it, they've probably got 16 different people doing the exact same infrastructure job that 16 different teams thought was essential, hired for, and didn't trust anyone else to deliver.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#162

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #88

rtkwe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be a bit weird because a lot of those should come back because the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable.

> the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable They may have. We don't know when or if things will go back to the way they were before March 2020 and how consumer and employer behavior will change. For example, maybe movie theaters are completely screwed. Except as a novelty, the big business chains may not survive. Universal Studios is already pushing back on theater release windows and no live-action mo…

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Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#163

Post by Eridrus » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #123

Eridrus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to find out how much has been invested in self driving cars, but I think you're massively underestimating the cost of building rail in the US. A billion dollars a mile is a realistic figure for rail in cities. NYC spent more than double that recently. For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5 and 100 miles of rail.

A billion dollars per mile of rail is an excessively overpriced cost of construction that ought to have severe political pressure to explain why so much money is being wasted. Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about $100-300 million/mile.

Lol. The reason costs are so high is because there is severe political pressure to keep them that way from contractors, unions, etc, and we're rich enough to afford it.

For context, we have 4 million miles of road in the US. So even with $100m/mile, we're talking trillions of dollars before we even get to the actual feasibility of putting rail everywhere.

Rail is great, but there's no world where it does the same thing self-driving vehicles would.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#164

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #140

zelly wrote: post #39

Remember (approx. 6 months ago) when we were seriously, unironically worried that all menial labor jobs would be taken by AI? Now we're worried about all the AI jobs disappearing.

> Now we're worried about all the AI jobs disappearing. I work in the space, and I'm not[1] worried about that at all. For what it's worth, anyone who knows what they're talking about also wasn't worried that all menial jobs would be taken by AI: fine motor control is really difficult, so paradoxically, janitors are safer than many middle-skilled white collar jobs are. More broadly, my model of AI is one of slow but…

[deleted]

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#165

Post by jedberg » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #111

mattlondon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will a…

I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives…

It's a cost benefit calculation. Sure we can make everyone go 25mph, but how much does that slow down commerce? It's a tradeoff people aren't willing to make. They'd rather sacrifice a few lives than take three hours to get 75 miles.

But the self driving tech allows us to get much safer while still going at normal speeds. Or maybe allows us to be equally safe at higher speeds.

Either way it's a win.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#166

Post by arachnids » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #54

FreedomToCreate wrote: post #26

Just a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to hire as well.

Comments like this show up on all stories about layoffs. I don’t really understand your point. There’s never any reason to have layoffs unless the company deems it a good financial decision, right? And surely all layoffs would hit the lowest performers (by the company’s estimation of performance, which obviously might be flawed), right? So what is the difference between “the company did layoffs of its lowest performe…

People don't want to join companies that have recently had a layoff because they're generally interpreted as a sign that the company isn't doing well financially, outside of companies that advertise firing low performers as an aspect of their culture (Netflix). In an ordinary market, losing low performing business functions might make your company more efficient but it comes with outsized PR cost that makes it harder to hire.

A broader economic crisis offers good cover for such an action. If everyone is laying employees off, it's not as bad if you do it too.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#167

Post by sida » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

> I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars

Guess what, these people have run the numbers

> solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass transit

I think that's thinking small. Why can't self-driving be applied to mass transit.

Let's take out all the cars and replace them with 15 passenger self-driving vans. And set up many stops that are dynamically routed by UberPool. You can get convenience of a car, the cost of a bus and far less pollution.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#168

Post by bobthepanda » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #121

ashtonkem wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives…

A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.

> I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.

The problem is twofold:

1. Cruise and co. may very well run out of money before they develop tech reliable enough to save people en masse. One proposal decades ago to solve the cars vs people problem was to physically grade separate them entirely, but as it turns out building multistory streets doesn't scale very well.

2. People and politicians, today, are using self driving cars as the magic bullet to avoid spending money on other solutions and changing bad habits. Why spend money on rail or buses if the second coming of Jesus for cars is around the corner? And to a degree, there is an opportunity cost to spending money on unproven X rather than proven Y.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#169

Post by arachnids » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #77

cbanek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think in good times, it's trickier to do a layoff. Like you said, it can appear like it's related to financial pressure. In good times, if you do a layoff, investors/shareholders will worry that you are doing it due to financial pressure or limited opportunities to use those employees to make money (growth). The way to say it isn't about financial pressure is to take the PR hit and say these are low performers…

Laying off in good times means you were bad at hiring in the first place. Laying off in the bad times means the bad things weren't your fault. It's a very good way to not have to convey to the market, your investors, your supervisors, and/or yourself that you may not be very good at hiring while also giving yourself another go at it (hopefully with better results, though probably not, unfortunately).

I think everyone is bad at hiring because hiring is hard. The problem is that companies are also bad at letting low performers go because we're human beings and public perception, conflict avoidance and empathy for co-workers influence our decisions

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#170

Post by gamblor956 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #148

throwaway1940 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I’ve heard about the Airbnb and Lyft layoffs, many people who were affected were actually high performers who were paid well but working on projects that were deprioritized by upper management. Laying off these people allowed them to satisfy their budget cuts while laying off relatively few people. Continuing to hire sounds strange, but if the offers are lower the company will still save money. Pausing the…

I don't know how this makes any sense. Engineering is the only way to automate things to allow a business to scale sublinearly. Why layoff high performing engineers when you can reassign them to problems where the goal is to automate things enough to reduce costs to below the cost of keeping them around. Any high performer should be able to create enough value within 6 months to pay the salary for the hole year. If a…

If there isn't sufficient work available, there isn't sufficient work.

For a highly-paid employee, you sometimes just can't create sufficient other work for them to do if you eliminate the work they were originally doing and other people are already doing the work they could putatively have been assigned to.

And quite honestly, a person's understanding of non-engineering functions would have to be extremely limited to think that more than a fraction of them could be automated away. Software has been the "it" industry for decades now. Jobs that haven't been automated by now are hard for software/robotics to take over.