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

reuters.com

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

#241

Post by ashtonkem »

nogridbag wrote: post #217
MiroF wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A car going at 5mph is still going to kill or main a pedestrian if it hits them. what?

I think this happens fairly often in Manhattan. There's lots of box trucks simply making turns at 5mph and pedestrians crossing obliviously with headphones on or looking at their phones.

Vehicle weight has a large impact on survivability, but not all the way down at 5mph. Plus, vehicles are easy to avoid at 5mph, the majority of the human population can out walk cars at that speed.

That being said, vehicle size is another uncomfortable subject when it comes to road deaths. If we really cared about not killing people on the road, we’d take a long, hard look at what cars we allow to operate on our roads.

Delivery trucks have the benefit of being obviously necessary; I am glad that trucks exist to deliver my food from the train depot (ideally) to my grocery store. But what’s the argument for Suburbans? SUVs not only drastically increase the risk for pedestrians, but they also make the roads more dangerous for other drivers to. For what? Status? A false perception of safety?

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

#242

Post by throwawayjava »

renewiltord wrote: post #135
hckr_news wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just a weasel word that can mean anything. Avoid weasel words. In your situation, why not just say I’m going to put my current efforts and focus on X as you clearly meant.

Because human expression is cool, man. "You guys are killing it!" is way better than "You human beings are performing above average for this task. I appreciate this". Also it's not a weasel word. It's totally just an expression. I find it truly incredible that someone feels the way you do.

If someone told me I were killing it, I would feel like a 22 year old engineer again and have flashbacks to that one PM who loved my work but who came to work still tripping some Mondays. Glad to be making a key stakeholder happy, but holy fuck am I glad we finally fired that tool.

If someone told me I was doing above average and they appreciated my work, I would feel... appreciated and proud of my work.

The world where killing and crushing are used in an unironic way is tiny and occupied mostly by people under 30. Can you retire at 30?

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

#243

Post by jdxcode »

ashtonkem wrote: post #126
mattlondon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously cars and pedestrians should be separated, but you are dramatically understating the impact speed has on pedestrian survival rates. At 5mph your chance of surviving a collision is extremely high. Heck, you have a 93% chance of surviving a 20mph crash, depending on your age. Survival rates drop off quickly with speed however, with only 80% surviving at 30mph, and 45mph being a 50/50 chance for most of the pop…

that makes sense given kinetic energy is mass * velocity^2. That squaring of velocity means every mph as they get higher is even more significant than the ones before.

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

#244

Post by CloudYeller »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #179
anyfoo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I am speechless. You’ve just made public transport less efficient on several axis.

Speechless? Where I live we have full size public buses that are frequently only carrying one or two people. In fact if I had a nickle for every time I've seen a completely empty light rail train in the middle of the day in Denver, I'd be a rich man by now. Public transport in the vast majority of the US is a failure. In Colorado Uber and Lyft probably haul 10-100 times more people every day than ride our public tran…

I think the main complaint about US public transit is that it's dirty and dangerous. If it was super safe and clean in+around all stations and on all trains/buses at all times, people would definitely use it more often.

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

#245

Post by dbuder »

rtkwe wrote: post #84
nabla9 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost 40 percent of those in households making less than $40,000 a year had lost a job in March. Tech sector has had it easy so far.

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.

They were already non viable.

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

#246

Post by colechristensen »

mikepurvis wrote: post #106
asdff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand is there, say for food, but the capital has evaporated and the restaurant no longer exists. To start a new one you would need investors to pay for up front costs, labor, food, and commercial rent, and who is feeling bullish enough to start a business notorious for it's razor thin margins at the start of a recession?

This kind of thing is why it's so confusing to me that more commercial landlords haven't been willing to play ball with their tenants on rent breaks through this crisis. Like, what do you have to gain by throwing out a restaurant or other business that is ready to start right back up the moment the lockdown lifts, vs sitting on an empty unit for months and months while the economy remains in turmoil, getting nothing…

There's not enough downward pressure on rents in general.

Tax unoccupied space, and not a little. 10x property taxes for vacant units with real standards for what counts as occupied.

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

#247

Post by xchaotic »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #93
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.

I would think that even at an AI company only a very small minority actually do AI.

It’s crazy how it creeps-everyone wants to be in AI so suddenly you have project managers with AI in their job title. I bet crisis was just a good excuse to get rid of some of that cruft.

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

#248

Post by baddox »

wutbrodo wrote: post #237
baddox wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the average or median “quality” of employees isn’t really that relevant if you just need more employees to do more total work.

Eh, mythical man-month and all that. As always, the answer is somewhere in the middle, but I'd be surprised if most companies didn't see effects from median employee quality dropping.

That myth concerns adding more engineers to a project that is already started. Of course that doesn’t mean that 100 engineers can’t do more projects than 10 engineers.

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

#249

Post by momokoko »

nostrademons wrote: post #176
mikepurvis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of thing is why it's so confusing to me that more commercial landlords haven't been willing to play ball with their tenants on rent breaks through this crisis. Like, what do you have to gain by throwing out a restaurant or other business that is ready to start right back up the moment the lockdown lifts, vs sitting on an empty unit for months and months while the economy remains in turmoil, getting nothing…

I read somewhere on HN that commercial real estate is financed differently from residential real estate, and in particular, financing costs are related to what a building could earn rather than what a building does earn. If you keep rents the same but have vacancies, your funders apparently don't count that against you, while if reduce rents, suddenly the earning potential of your building has dropped and it will cos…

This is 100% true and this actually does affect residential as well. Many real estate investors make more money from the appreciation of the asset as opposed to current rents. Reducing rent reduces the value of the property on paper because the projected earnings over time decrease.

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

#250

Post by stormbeard »

gamblor956 wrote: post #170
malandrew wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Lyft is still hiring generalist SWEs after laying off 12% of the engineering staff.
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