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

#191

Post by GCA10 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

Sample of 1, but driving alongside a Cruise car in San Francisco last year was absolutely terrifying. It was coming up on bicyclists going the same direction, ahead of it, and kept swerving back and forth by four feet or so, depending on whether it "saw" them or not.

It was unable to either pass the bicylists or lurk back far enough that they could go about their own business. Meanwhile it disrupted the flow for all the rest of us regular drivers.

This is not the easiest roadway situation to "teach" an autonomous-driving system, but it's been a known issue for a long time. Not sure why Cruise couldn't get it right.

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

#192

Post by wutbrodo » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:47 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…

> So what is the difference between “the company did layoffs of its lowest performers due to financial pressure caused in part by the pandemic” and “the company did layoffs of its lowest performers using the pandemic as an excuse to avoid bad PR”?

This is a confusing question, seems the answer seems embedded in the question...the former signals that there's "financial pressure" on the company over and above the reasonable baseline that every company faces, while the latter doesn't. A 100% financially healthy and secure company may choose to pay the ongoing cost of restructuring during good economic times, since layoffs in good times may have PR costs (for recruitment, for example) that outweigh the carrying costs of the low performers (or unbalanced departments, or whatever). If a downturn lowers this cost, then you'd expect companies to take advantage of it.

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

#193

Post by wutbrodo » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:48 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 don't know what world you live in where any company (beyond a tiny, tiny scale) isn't "bad at hiring". Especially not using the ludicrous bar of "never hiring low performers"

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

#194

Post by mkolodny » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #159

MiroF wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality. I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.

There aren't any self driving cars on the road that don't have a safety driver, and the ones that are out there get confused all the time. The Uber one had a software dev turn off the lidar sensor to test the computer vision at night and it ended up killing a woman crossing the street.

Source on your Uber "fact"?

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

#195

Post by ivalm » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #85

paxys wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

800 hires a year means ~15 people starting every week. Every one of those 800 positions likely received hundreds of resumes, which needed to be sifted through. Then you need to have calls with each candidate, narrow down the pool further. Then all the onsite rounds. For an initial team of 200 that is an impossible task.

The "initial" 200 people don't hire the next 800, they hire the next 1. Then the 201 people hire the next 1, and the 202 hire the next one, and so forth.

To hire so many you have to hire a lot in parallel. Also, even once hired, probably the engineer shouldn't have "interview more engineers" as his first priority.

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

#196

Post by wutbrodo » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:55 PM UTC

curiousllama wrote: post #63

baddox wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I see a layoff story, I think two things: 1. Those poor folks losing their jobs... 2. That company must be under a lot of financial pressure The comment above yours is basically saying: #2 might not be the case, especially with only 8% being laid off"

Exactly, and the nature of the layoffs in this situation only supports this: Cruise (like other SDC companies) has switched their stance from "launch is imminent" to "we have more technical work to do". The fact that business development, product, and marketing were the lion's share of the layoffs seems like exactly the strategic move that a pushed-off launch date would imply, economic downturn or no.

Evidence against this is the fact that they also laid off lidar engineering staff in Pasadena; I don't know Cruise's business, but this also seems like the kind of consolidation you'd expect a relatively healthy company to do (though "healthy" is a weird word for a pre-product R&D co).

Source: https://electrek.co/2020/05/14/gm-cruise-lays-off-8-of-staff...

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

#197

Post by filoleg » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #190

jedberg wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First, we only need to slow down cars to 25mph where pedestrians are present. It’s not like cities with low pedestrian fatalities are stuck in the Middle Ages. Places where pedestrians are separated from cars can and should go faster. Secondly I find it disturbing that discussions around acceptable traffic fatalities focus on unnamed and unspecified people as the apparently acceptable fatalities in pursuit of shorter…

> we only need to slow down cars to 25mph where pedestrians are present.

I don't have the numbers on hand, but I would wager to guess that a good chunk of road injuries and deaths happen not just between drivers and pedestrians, but between drivers and other drivers.

Also, most areas in the US where pedestrians can be present are already limited to 25mph/35mph.

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

#198

Post by joking » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

fiftyfifty wrote: post #189

anyfoo wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you comparing your scheme to a defunct system, then? The cities in Europe I’ve lived in, and the cities in Asia I’ve visited, haven’t had that problem at all.

Because there is a market there, actual money to be made, that would be a lot more realistic for companies like Cruise and Waymo to solve than some pie in the sky self driving car. They could have been working towards a public transportation system that doesn't require millions of dollars in capital construction costs to put in place first. But that's not as sexy I guess.

It would be nice and easy just putting some sensors or special paint on the road, the problem is when those automatic vans share the same space than the rest of vehicles, you will have a crash frequently, in barcelona the light rail has crashed with several vehicles even when they don’t share the platform but on the intersections with crossing streets

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

#199

Post by jmastrangelo » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

fiftyfifty wrote: post #189

anyfoo wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you comparing your scheme to a defunct system, then? The cities in Europe I’ve lived in, and the cities in Asia I’ve visited, haven’t had that problem at all.

Because there is a market there, actual money to be made, that would be a lot more realistic for companies like Cruise and Waymo to solve than some pie in the sky self driving car. They could have been working towards a public transportation system that doesn't require millions of dollars in capital construction costs to put in place first. But that's not as sexy I guess.

Agreed, the goal isn't to replace transit in places that are well suited to it, its to provide better transportation in all the places transit isn't well suited.

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

#200

Post by _jal » Thu, May 14, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

virtue3 wrote: post #116

gopalv wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. ... > I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. Take out "cars" from that phrase and I think there might be a different answer to it, sooner or later. Specifically I liked Otto's original proposals and it sounded almost viable. The idea of having a Sacramento -> Chicago or Houston to Dallas routes for trucking with autonomous vehi…

Ho would this provide significant benefit over a rail freight system?

It won't - if the idea is to keep it confined to specific overland routes, it is economically absurd vs. trains.

But that's not the idea. It is the camel's nose under the tent.

The goal is to get them on the road somewhere, and then gradually expand use as they can re-legislate at the cost of pedestrians.

There's a template for doing this - when cars were first commercialized, pedestrians had to be kicked off the roads, so they invented "jaywalkers", and launched a huge propaganda campaign to make it a thing[1].

Too much money and priming has been dumped into self-driving tech to abandon, so they'll try to create markets by pushing the squishy slow things that complain when they get smooshed out of the way.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history