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 playing with people's lives via layoffs, since it's the 'in' thing to do. The incentives are huge on the upside and zero on the downside for them.
yifanl 34 minutes ago [-]
If they gave the engineers appropriate severance packages, then they're at least out that much as a stupidity tax, but that's probably the most we can expect as far as consequences for the exec suite.
drob518 26 minutes ago [-]
There is a huge cost for this either way (severance packages, yes, but also lost productivity, reduced team coherence, etc), but that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily translate to a political cost for the managers involved in pushing the dumb idea, particularly if the CEO was pressuring everyone for cost savings. They will escape by saying, “We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?”
thewebguyd 7 minutes ago [-]
> We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?”
And why does the board/shareholders allow a CEO to continue into their position by just following everyone else?
I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is doing, I want to do the opposite." and it's worked for me so far. The area doesn't need yet another "dark and moody" photographer with boring sepia edits, blurry photos with a film preset, and the same exact font and colors on the website as everyone else.
You don't become a pioneer in your industry by just cargo culting everyone else. It's low effort leadership and if I were on the board it certainly would not inspire my confidence in their ability to run a company. You're telling me not a single person at the table asked "Do we have these engineers' institutional knowledge documented somewhere before we fire them all??"
mikepurvis 29 minutes ago [-]
Presumably they're also out the top 10-20% of talent which immediately found jobs elsewhere and would have little interest in returning to Ford to work under such incompetent management.
Avicebron 17 minutes ago [-]
This sentiment feels like a relic of a previous age. Yes _maybe_ but it's also equally likely that the best they laid off was on the ropes for months trying to battle ghost job spam and AI filters. It's almost shaming anyone who isn't hired someone immediately as deficient and "not the best". Honestly the conversation should be focused on how the execs can he made responsible.
mikepurvis 13 minutes ago [-]
That's fair. My intent was not to shame the "bottom 80%" which is of course most people, but rather to make a call for accountability. Like specifically the execs should have to answer to their board not just for the wasted time and severance packages, but also for the cost of losing some staff permanently with these shenanigans.
jghn 4 minutes ago [-]
Or, if they're anything like me, even if I hadn't yet moved along they'd find that for them my price has gone up in the interim time period.
calgoo 25 minutes ago [-]
They could always be hired as contractors at x5 the cost for a fixed contract over 2 years to train the ai.
thewebguyd 2 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn't be a bad deal tbh depending on age and how much you have already for financial independence in retirement.
If my employer offered me a deal that would allow me to retire early, comfortably, to train my AI replacement, I'd take it. If they succeed, well I'd have gotten laid off anyway. If they fail, I get to laugh all the way to the bank with my newly found free time.
rootnod3 22 minutes ago [-]
Not really those execs paying that stupidity tax though. They still get their bonuses. Pretty much zero consequences.
giancarlostoro 9 minutes ago [-]
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 smells.
The retention rates before COVID are back, and companies have way more people than they might need, that's the real reason so many places have started to slash, but blaming AI is easier.
lenerdenator 2 minutes ago [-]
The saying used to be "with great risk comes great reward".
Risk is inconvenient to shareholders, who also happen to be the people with the most political power in the US. They're:
1) retirees living off a pension/retirement fund backed by shares of companies like Ford
2) investors who have plenty of money to ~~bribe~~ donate to political campaigns or
3) C-suiters put in place by the other two groups who are compensated primarily in shares.
These groups are all incentivized to see the risk to their income streams minimized as much as possible. Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes.
Thus, we got rid of the risk.
zzzeek 12 minutes ago [-]
> execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs.
reading this article I think that is not what happened in this specific case:
> Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions.
> “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,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”
That is, Ford had been slowly relying more and more on automated tools (if the "rehiring" is over three years, then this all precedes our current "AI" ecosystem) and realized that now that they want to add modern AI tools, they need experienced engineers to train the newer systems, and are hiring people from the open market, where some of these folks were former Ford employees, but nothing like "were laid off due to AI".
That is this doesnt sound at all like "Ford fired 350 engineers to be replaced with AI and is now backtracking", which is certainly what the headline here implied.
cyanydeez 36 minutes ago [-]
corporatism is on equal footing with prosperity gospel.
nekusar 43 seconds ago [-]
Yep.
I'm prosperous because god/market deems me worthy.
simianwords 24 minutes ago [-]
Is there any consequence for execs who don't layoff when they are supposed to? You have to look at the situation symmetrically.
eunos 32 minutes ago [-]
The social contract that American society elect (including these non executive engineers) emphasize career flexibility (right-to-work) and returns of capital than job security. Especially during booming economic years.
khriss 28 minutes ago [-]
I am not sure engineers in say, Europe have any lower career flexibility. It's a false narrative to claim otherwise.
spwa4 17 minutes ago [-]
The frustration of being an engineer in Europe comes from the rules that this implies. Well, aside from the fact that this is mostly gone, but still exists in some big public or banking companies.
1) you can only get promoted if the company grows and/or someone above you leaves, or dies, or ... Btw it really requires leaving permanently. They leave for 10 years due to being in coma after a traffic accident? Nope.
2) the oldest person gets promoted (and that means ancienneté: longest in the company). No arguments, no exceptions. To the point that there are plenty of teams that have a manager (who gets the 10% pay boost) and an actual manager (who makes things work). Often not the same person.
3) No mobility (technically, yes, there's mobility, BUT your ancienneté resets in many cases. So it's really stupid to do)
teiferer 8 minutes ago [-]
That's not mandated by law though. Shouldn't companies following such stupidity be easily out-competed by those that don't? In he market for their products/services but also in the market for employment.
stagger87 52 minutes ago [-]
> The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom — and fear — that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn’t replace experience.
I'm not sure this story is illustrative of that, when you have a VP of engineering saying “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.”
He's saving face while almost certainly trying to figure out how to make the new systems work so that next time he won't need to rehire engineers.
rapind 29 minutes ago [-]
> He's saving face while almost certainly trying to figure out how to make the new systems work so that next time he won't need to rehire engineers.
Yup. They jumped the gun. Now they need to hire them back so they can loot their expertise and never hire another senior. I'm not saying this will work, but it's pretty obviously the plan.
neilv 26 minutes ago [-]
Pre-AI version: Oops, you laid off the higher-salaried people without having them train their replacements, so bring them back, long enough to do that.
Now, that replacement will be for both AI models and lower-salaried hires.
Perhaps a second mistake by those who thought they didn't need their most experienced people: Now they think they just need to train the AI better, and then new-grad "AI native" hires will be the most cost-effective way to operate/oversee the AI and do whatever it can't.
teiferer 7 minutes ago [-]
Is there any substantial number of companies actually training AI? Or do you count writing skills files for Claude as "training"? (Cause it really isn't..)
jvanderbot 27 minutes ago [-]
Maybe. That's one interpretation. A lot of hiring/firing decisions get read through the lens of AI, hard pro or hard con. Reality is always a mixed bag. They certainly will want to try to build up a better automated pipeline, but the question is can they, and can they cost-effectively vs hiring a few more people?
gm678 51 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
thewebguyd 42 minutes ago [-]
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 that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind. 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.
ryandrake 23 minutes ago [-]
"Line must go up, forever."
These guys have squeezed out every cost and slack from their system. They've found the exact revenue-maximizing prices and segmentation for their products. They've cut quality to the point where customers will just barely not reject their product. They have used every legal and accounting trick at their disposal to keep that line going up. But, next quarter, line must still go up!
The final massive cost to cut are all those damn human bodies that they they still have to keep around. They've driven down salaries and benefits to the minimum they can get away with, and they've extracted the maximum value from employees they can. But they haven't figured out how to get rid of them entirely. They are staring down the barrel of the gun and just can't see a way to cut this cost further. Now, magic AI comes along, and everyone is saying that the black box can replace those bodies. The C-suites believe it. They have to believe it. Line must go up! This is how they'll do it for a few more quarters. This is why the messaging is so unified across the industry, across every C-suite out there. They all need to believe.
disgruntledphd2 33 minutes ago [-]
> It's so weird. I don't know what it is about AI that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind. 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.
It's just a hype cycle. In my 15 years in data, I've seen around 3-4. Every time leadership get way too invested in the possibilities, and they waste tons of money on doomed efforts. A good example of the prior one was "Big Data" which was even more pointless than the current AI boom.
Don't get me wrong, there is valuable tech there (at the very least, being able to reliably generate structured data from unstructured input is incredibly valuable in data), but the current hype is way off the charts.
simianwords 20 minutes ago [-]
I think you are misleading people by calling it a "hype cycle". There is no going back from this technology. It is going to encroach every part of lives more and more.
What does hype even mean concretely? I think this is just a coping mechanism if you ask me.
dgellow 3 minutes ago [-]
Hype cycle doesn’t imply the technology has no value. But we should be able to talk about it as the boring, nerdy technology it is without that whole doom trolling and “AI will literally solve everything”
greenavocado 1 minutes ago [-]
> I don't know what it is about AI that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind.
1. Zero personal risk because cargo culting is a valid excuse in Executive World. If investors are on board, its good, no matter how stupid or destructive it actually is.
2. Friendship with the country's leadership equals access to cheap debt financing since money is all fake and generated out of thin air
3. Too big to fail
vrganj 30 minutes ago [-]
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 with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it.
Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then?
All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.
dgellow 5 minutes ago [-]
Earlier this year I’ve been in calls with leaders from top US companies where their strategy was basically “we have to switch absolutely everything to agentic right now, otherwise we are dead”. That was the full thought.
That made reading their subsequent layoff blog posts pretty depressing
jayd16 44 minutes ago [-]
Step 1: fire everyone.
Step 2: figure out how to use AI.
In that order, apparently.
tanseydavid 17 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand why Ford did not just put the LLM on a PiP.
zamalek 30 minutes ago [-]
Alternatively:
Step 1: 30 minute conversation with AI on how to use AI. Step 2: fire everyone.
30 minutes ago [-]
nosioptar 48 minutes ago [-]
Had a couple of Taurusii back in the day. 100% ended up having a problem where the power steering pump shit the bed because a plastic piece in the pressurized side failed. Paid to repair one, oem pump broke on drive home due to same plastic piece under pressure.
My point being, Ford's had shit for brains for decades. Its a fucking wonder any of their vehicles make it out of the parking lot.
I had a Focus in the 2000's that was the most reliable car I ever owned. Rust got it eventually but it still started instantly at any temperature and ran like a new car.
cactacea 30 minutes ago [-]
It was also designed by European engineers, not in Michigan. Not saying that's the reason the Focus is more reliable than a Taurus but they didn't follow the "typical" Ford design process at the time for that vehicle. For what it is worth I owned a 1992 Taurus and it left me stranded more times than I can count. Just some of the issues I had were a water pump that exploded and a seized A/C compressor.
nosioptar 38 minutes ago [-]
If I had a nickel for every broken focus door handle I've fixed... (There's a weak pin that always breaks.)
SoftTalker 17 minutes ago [-]
LOL yeah I had that too. Forgot about it. Cheap fix was an aftermarket door handle from Amazon or RockAuto or someplace like that.
I'm not saying it was a perfect car. The interior was cheap, the sheet metal seemed to be recycled tin cans, and it definitely showed its age by the time I got rid of it. But that engine and drivetrain seemed to be bulletproof.
saltcured 20 minutes ago [-]
Well, the business plan came out of this mysterious box, after we fed in the payroll reduction requirement...
draginol 38 seconds ago [-]
This is what we are finding a lot with the "AI normies". Because the AI responses are so confident new users of it think it must be correct.
AI is confidently wrong a lot. And so you can imagine a lot of execs thinking the AI can do a lot more than it really can.
foxyv 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
HPsquared 25 minutes ago [-]
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!
bobson381 14 minutes ago [-]
One of my favorite pieces of writing on this topic
Ford has hired 350 engineers over the last 3 years which happened alongside short comings in using AI inspection tooling.
This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots, which use old school CNNs on custom IBM hardware.
Sanzig 49 minutes ago [-]
Setting aside how shortsighted it is to fire your employees to replace them with AI, Ford also screwed up by firing the wrong employees. LLMs work best in the hands of experienced senior engineers who can work at a high level of abstraction because they already understand all the pieces underneath.
In a sense, using an LLM agent is like providing instructions to a very smart, very quick junior who despite being brilliant has some blind spots and lacks institutional knowledge. That's something that seniors excel at, so by firing your seniors you've fired the people best positioned to make full use of LLMs.
46 minutes ago [-]
Legend2440 47 minutes ago [-]
Who says Ford fired any employees? The article doesn't.
avgDev 45 minutes ago [-]
"Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors" In order to rehire someone they must laid off or fired? You don't rehire new employees?
Legend2440 44 minutes ago [-]
Farther down it clarifies that only some of them were former employees, and others were poached from other companies:
>Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers
And not all former employees were laid off. Senior 'greybeards' have many job opportunities elsewhere and often leave for better offers.
foxyv 34 minutes ago [-]
I think most of them were losses by attrition. Where they don't replace lost employees. That's usually the preferred method of downsizing if you can get away with it.
reactordev 57 minutes ago [-]
This is going to be the norm across the board as the models have failed to live up to the hype.
I do think LLMs and agents and all are great at helping you through tough problems but we aren’t there yet on getting them to do all the work while we just architect and design. Again, it’s close, and for your use cases you might be there already but for low level and big corporate lift and shifts, it’s not there yet.
I have agents, agents of agents, and I still find myself having to carve big chunks of my project off and feed it to the dogs because it’s garbage code. (GLM-5.2)
K0balt 42 minutes ago [-]
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
KronisLV 35 minutes ago [-]
> 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 codify what you can into code.
For example I wrote a tool in Go and goja called ProjectLint (not public yet but anyone can do that in a week) where you write custom rules in regular ECMAScript that can check whatever you want - code conventions across languages, project structure and architecture and all the stuff that goes under “In this project, we do X but don’t do Y” that just telling an LLM about (or colleagues) will be worth nothing (even memories and focus are limited), instead CI gates that.
I guess I reinvented a simplified and stack-agnostic version of ArchUnit but whatever, it works for me and I can use the same tool in Python and Java projects and elsewhere as well as parallelize all the read only checks and run sequentially the potential-write ones that might auto-fix stuff.
Who is we? Are you mistaking this for an activist platform?
jayanaka98 51 minutes ago [-]
The reason AI fails in Industry is that SKILL.md or other knowledge-injection methods do not guarantee compliance. AI just thinks it "knows better".
Tade0 45 minutes ago [-]
A friend of mine prepared an arsenal of hooks and the like to address this and LLMs still disobey them at times.
I don't have high hopes that there exists a bulletproof solution to this.
Kiln6125 42 minutes ago [-]
Personally, for me that represents job security. Having a human with a high level of domain knowledge in the loop seems pretty required to get any meaningful results.
contravariant 38 minutes ago [-]
If compliance was the main issue we wouldn't have had to invent ways for computers to do something other than exactly what they were asked.
bigstrat2003 36 minutes ago [-]
We didn't have to do that. It is, in fact, extremely stupid that we have done that. Computers are valuable because they are fast and deterministic. Fast but stochastic has no value.
teiferer 4 minutes ago [-]
> Fast but stochastic has no value.
He valuations of a bunch of AI unicorns disagree.
steve1977 42 minutes ago [-]
Not sure if this was ironic. I guess it mainly fails because a lot of
knowledge and experience is intuitive and not codified.
exabrial 25 minutes ago [-]
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 and communication barriers are things we haven't really figured out how to communicate across efficiently, and that only a handful of people are truly rockstars at it; others just aren't cut out for it. Stage 3 anyone that is competent to get another job already left, leaving a smoldering shell of company that dies by attrition at stage 5.
moomin 25 minutes ago [-]
I feel like "Company ditches staff in favour of AI" stories currently fit into two categories 1) The CEO is actually ditching staff for other reasons like falling revenue, but "going AI first" sounds a lot better 2) The CEO is making a mistake.
bonesss 18 minutes ago [-]
My speculation is straightforward: adding “AI” to the sticker ups the share price, dropping headcount improves the balance sheets upping the share price, and doing both at once could be perfect for a CEO bonus or strategic board member sell off.
GL26 9 minutes ago [-]
Problem with thinking you can replace your employees with AI, this is not the case. This is like thinking you could replace your NASA engineers with IBM computers in the 60s. The AI revolution changes drastically the way people work, and empower them, they multiply their productivity, but they never ever replace domain expertise, and business logic.
breakpointalpha 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
vasac 54 minutes ago [-]
The first attempt failed, so they caved in, but they’ll try again after a while and lay those people off again.
shimman 49 minutes ago [-]
The dream of perpetual labor machine is something capitalists are willing to destroy the planet in order to chase their fictitious dream. Oppressors must be stopped.
Legend2440 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
AI is a great revolutionary tool for work, but it is still a tool and needs humans to drive it. Obviously companies heard the promise of "Replace your large headcount expense with cheap tokens" and creamed their pants. Its funny to see them walk back, it will be at least a few years if not more before it replaces humans fully (and will need another breakthrough)
csours 9 minutes ago [-]
I've lost my ability to believe that things will feel 'normal' at work.
I no longer want to make connection with any coworkers.
meerita 27 minutes ago [-]
This is excellent news. I'm glad some executives are starting to understand that AI will never replace an engineer with knowledge. AI is just a tool that needs guidance. If they put people without knowledge in charge of the machine gun, they will never be able to hit any target. Junior and mid-level engineers will never become super engineers by telling AI, "Just do this."
arjie 49 minutes ago [-]
How interesting. So a Ford car is now more reliable than a Toyota soon after purchase but Toyota didn’t fire anyone and Ford fired, implemented automated reviews, and rehired. So their process didn’t bring them back to neutral. It placed them above the traditionally reliable manufacturers.
So maybe the key is firing everyone and then rehiring the good guys after you implement automated systems.
Though I’m somewhat surprised. I didn’t expect Porsches to top a reliability measure. I thought they were in the “fancy but unreliable” bin. Interesting.
Ekaros 20 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if Porsche is allowed to exist in point where they are not fully cost optimised so there is more spend on those slight things that keep reliability. Most other large manufacturer cars seem to be cost optimised while least amount of that is carried over to customers...
brianmckenzie 35 minutes ago [-]
I've had two different Porsches, a Cayman S and a Macan. Neither gave me a day of trouble. You just have to do all the maintenance, which is obviously expensive.
SoftTalker 47 minutes ago [-]
The Porsche 911 is pretty reliable, it's basically the same car they've made for over 50 years so they've got it figured out.
jeffbee 24 minutes ago [-]
This seems like a totally crazy statement. The only common thing that a current and 50-year-old 911 share is that there are six holes in the engine block.
jeffffff 31 minutes ago [-]
porsche is part of volkswagen, so it's not that surprising that they're decently reliable. i probably see 10 porsches for every ferrari, lamborghini, etc that i see, and i think a large part of that is reliability - even absurdly rich people don't want to deal with an unreliable car when there is a more reliable alternative.
realo 46 minutes ago [-]
Maybe... but the re-hiring probably involved very substantial salary raises for the re-hirees.
An expensive process.
flowerthoughts 15 minutes ago [-]
I wonder which of the management consulting companies caused this fire/rehire experiment.
38 minutes ago [-]
gorbachev 19 minutes ago [-]
So...don't buy any Ford vehicles designed and/or manufactured in the last 8 months or so?
dolphinscorpion 37 minutes ago [-]
They will try it again next year, after they slap an AI camera on the rehired people.
migueldeicaza 43 minutes ago [-]
I do wonder if the rehiring was just at a lower compensation level.
"Welcome back, you are now two levels down"
nova22033 33 minutes ago [-]
Were these engineers fired and replaced with AI? Article implies they brought back retired engineers.
mhurron 45 minutes ago [-]
350 of how many laid off? If 350 is a fraction of the total replaced with AI that's going to be counted as a win for AI reducing costs, they just were a little to ambitious with the initial round. That'll be counted as a learning experience because we're early in the replace people with unintelligent tools process.
K0balt 45 minutes ago [-]
This is exactly the idiotic use case of AI coming back to bite them.
The short sighted gains (and I’ll assume that they are chasing quarterlies as usual) are to be had by firing most of the junior engineers, keeping the seniors because with AI they can n* their productivity.
Basically you can fire 2x junior engineers for every senior engineer you keep. But the senior engineers are the keystone here, and without juniors eventually becoming senior engineers you’ll eventually be screwed.
But, that’s a problem for the -next- c-suite gang… so…
skywhopper 51 minutes ago [-]
The folks who make the decision to throw away these engineers in the first place are the ones who should be laid off.
edoceo 48 minutes ago [-]
Nice thing about the C-suite is that you get authority and compensation without responsibility. You just claim responsibility when things are good. And when bad, the underlings who have responsibilities but no authority take the heat.
LNSY 40 minutes ago [-]
And this is why the C-suite is the single best target for replacement by AI.
LNSY 41 minutes ago [-]
The only job AI's are capable are doing is the role of executive. I think we should replace every C-Suiter with AI.
neversupervised 43 minutes ago [-]
This just feeds a certain narrative and allows people to take exactly the wrong conclusion. Just because there’s some uncertainty at the edge, it doesn’t change where things are going.
prescriptivist 36 minutes ago [-]
Sorry but this reeks of marketing. To what extent was Ford actually attempting to replace these engineers with AI tools in the last three years or were they just letting them go by attrition? Was this the result of an actual AI influenced layoff? I read both the Verge and the Bloomberg piece and none of this seems to be articulated but it sure does seem to capture a vibe right now that companies are footgunning themselves all over the place with LLMs, despite no evidence of this being related to any of that...
feverzsj 52 minutes ago [-]
And they just go back to work like nothing happened?
dethos 9 minutes ago [-]
That's the interesting question. Are expert engineers willing to go back after being treated that way or knowing what happened to others?
snootypoot 50 minutes ago [-]
amazing, the same company that says people should not be allowed to repair their own vehicles. henry ford is rolling in his grave.
justonepost2 16 minutes ago [-]
All the people happy about this are just holding back the progress of our species smh.
won’t someone think of the lightcone!
26 minutes ago [-]
tamimio 24 minutes ago [-]
> Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it
I would rephrase it as it’s only as good as you know what you are doing. Even if the trained input is good, keeping it to scope and making sure it delivers without workarounds requires a human brain who have the past experience.
tossitawayplz 60 minutes ago [-]
I would literally be homeless before I went back to a company that fired me to replace me with AI, then asked me to come back.
ryan_n 55 minutes ago [-]
Or maybe people just have bills to pay and/or want to support their families. A little critical thinking and empathy goes a long way...
riazrizvi 55 minutes ago [-]
When you first lose everything, in the process you end up having to pawn expensive principles like that, so when other things like this happen, it's easy to seize the opportunity.
azan_ 51 minutes ago [-]
Were you ever homeless and starving?
mattbettinson 49 minutes ago [-]
I doubt it :)
McGlockenshire 28 minutes ago [-]
As a homeless person, do not wish homelessness on yourself.
deadbabe 58 minutes ago [-]
How about if they doubled your previous salary?
Tade0 54 minutes ago [-]
I guess the crux of the issue is that there's no guarantee that the company would not find a different, equally harebrained, reason to lay GP off.
fred_is_fred 52 minutes ago [-]
There's no guarantee in any job that you won't be laid off.
Tade0 31 minutes ago [-]
True, but if you already know that a given company tends to fire on a whim, you'd be excused to feel a little bit distrustful.
bigstrat2003 28 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't go back, regardless of salary offer, unless I didn't have any other jobs lined up. If I'm not employed than any job (even a bad one) beats being unemployed. But if I was employed, I wouldn't go back to a job where they laid me off for stupid reasons, no matter how much money they offered.
jayd16 42 minutes ago [-]
For how long?
xienze 47 minutes ago [-]
Doesn't seem bad to me. Come back for a pay bump and get paid while you search for a new job.
simonw 43 minutes ago [-]
This HN headline is editorialized, the Bloomberg headline is "Ford AI Hiccups Push Carmaker to Rehire ‘Gray Beard’ Inspectors".
The editorialized headline is also misleading: "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors" - there is nothing in the original story that suggests Ford were expecting AI to "train juniors".
And since the Bloomberg headline is behind a paywall the editorialized headline is most of what we have to go on.
I hope those engineers made Ford pay out the nose.
zuzululu 44 minutes ago [-]
They did not. I been saying for decades that software devs form a union.
It's just so strange any other profession have unions or bodies that protect their job against this sort of practice.
if software devs were lawyers then AI would've been banned
cbg0 29 minutes ago [-]
You can negotiate your salary even without a union. Also being part of a union doesn't guarantee you won't be laid off because of AI.
breakpointalpha 9 minutes ago [-]
A union absolutely can and should protect workers from frivolous layoffs.
If the company tries to layoff 10% "due to AI" the remaining 90% can strike.
History is full of union solidarity vs idiotic management.
Noaidi 29 minutes ago [-]
If AI thinks so much faster than humans. does it age fater than humans? and in that case, does AI have dementia already?
josefritzishere 34 minutes ago [-]
The impression I'm getting over this huge number of AI roll backs is that AI is useful in some circumstances, but it's just not a cure-all. It is expensive, and increasingly so, straining the ROI scenario. My expectation is that the use-case for successful AI implementations is ultimately going to be narrow.
conartist6 1 hours ago [-]
foot, meet gun
rvz 48 minutes ago [-]
So "AGI" was not found internally at Ford and they didn't know they needed actual engineers to keep the lights on?
It's OK to just say that the plan was to rehire back the engineers for far less compensation.
qsxfthnkp2322 40 minutes ago [-]
Management at these USA companies could give zero fucks about you.
It’s a disease that has spread throughout all of capitalism.
Outsourcing, cheaper labor, layoffs.
This place is not anywhere close to a dream anymore because upper management pay needs to be higher. No wonder people are leaving the USA.
Avoid buying a house. Be one of them homeless living out of your car because it’s too hard to get ahead.
Really. You need to be in the investor class or else you are dependent on a w2 where that company gives zero fucks who you are. When you are moved to a new manager who decides he doesn’t like you it’s lights out and you were already paycheck to paycheck.
Don’t even mention the food or health systems in place here.
maxothex 18 minutes ago [-]
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T-8805-5 58 minutes ago [-]
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alanwreath 1 hours ago [-]
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prayze 56 minutes ago [-]
Thanks GPT
cryo32 59 minutes ago [-]
Quite frankly I’m enjoying the schadenfreude on this one.
Rendered at 16:19:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
In other words, they don't really have a plan, but they are happy playing with people's lives via layoffs, since it's the 'in' thing to do. The incentives are huge on the upside and zero on the downside for them.
And why does the board/shareholders allow a CEO to continue into their position by just following everyone else?
I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is doing, I want to do the opposite." and it's worked for me so far. The area doesn't need yet another "dark and moody" photographer with boring sepia edits, blurry photos with a film preset, and the same exact font and colors on the website as everyone else.
You don't become a pioneer in your industry by just cargo culting everyone else. It's low effort leadership and if I were on the board it certainly would not inspire my confidence in their ability to run a company. You're telling me not a single person at the table asked "Do we have these engineers' institutional knowledge documented somewhere before we fire them all??"
If my employer offered me a deal that would allow me to retire early, comfortably, to train my AI replacement, I'd take it. If they succeed, well I'd have gotten laid off anyway. If they fail, I get to laugh all the way to the bank with my newly found free time.
The retention rates before COVID are back, and companies have way more people than they might need, that's the real reason so many places have started to slash, but blaming AI is easier.
Risk is inconvenient to shareholders, who also happen to be the people with the most political power in the US. They're:
1) retirees living off a pension/retirement fund backed by shares of companies like Ford
2) investors who have plenty of money to ~~bribe~~ donate to political campaigns or
3) C-suiters put in place by the other two groups who are compensated primarily in shares.
These groups are all incentivized to see the risk to their income streams minimized as much as possible. Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes.
Thus, we got rid of the risk.
reading this article I think that is not what happened in this specific case:
> Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions.
> “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,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”
That is, Ford had been slowly relying more and more on automated tools (if the "rehiring" is over three years, then this all precedes our current "AI" ecosystem) and realized that now that they want to add modern AI tools, they need experienced engineers to train the newer systems, and are hiring people from the open market, where some of these folks were former Ford employees, but nothing like "were laid off due to AI".
That is this doesnt sound at all like "Ford fired 350 engineers to be replaced with AI and is now backtracking", which is certainly what the headline here implied.
I'm prosperous because god/market deems me worthy.
1) you can only get promoted if the company grows and/or someone above you leaves, or dies, or ... Btw it really requires leaving permanently. They leave for 10 years due to being in coma after a traffic accident? Nope.
2) the oldest person gets promoted (and that means ancienneté: longest in the company). No arguments, no exceptions. To the point that there are plenty of teams that have a manager (who gets the 10% pay boost) and an actual manager (who makes things work). Often not the same person.
3) No mobility (technically, yes, there's mobility, BUT your ancienneté resets in many cases. So it's really stupid to do)
I'm not sure this story is illustrative of that, when you have a VP of engineering saying “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.”
He's saving face while almost certainly trying to figure out how to make the new systems work so that next time he won't need to rehire engineers.
Yup. They jumped the gun. Now they need to hire them back so they can loot their expertise and never hire another senior. I'm not saying this will work, but it's pretty obviously the plan.
Now, that replacement will be for both AI models and lower-salaried hires.
Perhaps a second mistake by those who thought they didn't need their most experienced people: Now they think they just need to train the AI better, and then new-grad "AI native" hires will be the most cost-effective way to operate/oversee the AI and do whatever it can't.
Clearly a lot of careful thought went into their strategy of using AI and firing engineers.
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 that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind. 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.
These guys have squeezed out every cost and slack from their system. They've found the exact revenue-maximizing prices and segmentation for their products. They've cut quality to the point where customers will just barely not reject their product. They have used every legal and accounting trick at their disposal to keep that line going up. But, next quarter, line must still go up!
The final massive cost to cut are all those damn human bodies that they they still have to keep around. They've driven down salaries and benefits to the minimum they can get away with, and they've extracted the maximum value from employees they can. But they haven't figured out how to get rid of them entirely. They are staring down the barrel of the gun and just can't see a way to cut this cost further. Now, magic AI comes along, and everyone is saying that the black box can replace those bodies. The C-suites believe it. They have to believe it. Line must go up! This is how they'll do it for a few more quarters. This is why the messaging is so unified across the industry, across every C-suite out there. They all need to believe.
It's just a hype cycle. In my 15 years in data, I've seen around 3-4. Every time leadership get way too invested in the possibilities, and they waste tons of money on doomed efforts. A good example of the prior one was "Big Data" which was even more pointless than the current AI boom.
Don't get me wrong, there is valuable tech there (at the very least, being able to reliably generate structured data from unstructured input is incredibly valuable in data), but the current hype is way off the charts.
What does hype even mean concretely? I think this is just a coping mechanism if you ask me.
1. Zero personal risk because cargo culting is a valid excuse in Executive World. If investors are on board, its good, no matter how stupid or destructive it actually is.
2. Friendship with the country's leadership equals access to cheap debt financing since money is all fake and generated out of thin air
3. Too big to fail
> 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 with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it.
Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then?
All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.
That made reading their subsequent layoff blog posts pretty depressing
In that order, apparently.
Step 1: 30 minute conversation with AI on how to use AI. Step 2: fire everyone.
My point being, Ford's had shit for brains for decades. Its a fucking wonder any of their vehicles make it out of the parking lot.
I'm not saying it was a perfect car. The interior was cheap, the sheet metal seemed to be recycled tin cans, and it definitely showed its age by the time I got rid of it. But that engine and drivetrain seemed to be bulletproof.
AI is confidently wrong a lot. And so you can imagine a lot of execs thinking the AI can do a lot more than it really can.
https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...
This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots, which use old school CNNs on custom IBM hardware.
In a sense, using an LLM agent is like providing instructions to a very smart, very quick junior who despite being brilliant has some blind spots and lacks institutional knowledge. That's something that seniors excel at, so by firing your seniors you've fired the people best positioned to make full use of LLMs.
>Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers
And not all former employees were laid off. Senior 'greybeards' have many job opportunities elsewhere and often leave for better offers.
I do think LLMs and agents and all are great at helping you through tough problems but we aren’t there yet on getting them to do all the work while we just architect and design. Again, it’s close, and for your use cases you might be there already but for low level and big corporate lift and shifts, it’s not there yet.
I have agents, agents of agents, and I still find myself having to carve big chunks of my project off and feed it to the dogs because it’s garbage code. (GLM-5.2)
It’s human in the loop over and over again tho
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 codify what you can into code.
For example I wrote a tool in Go and goja called ProjectLint (not public yet but anyone can do that in a week) where you write custom rules in regular ECMAScript that can check whatever you want - code conventions across languages, project structure and architecture and all the stuff that goes under “In this project, we do X but don’t do Y” that just telling an LLM about (or colleagues) will be worth nothing (even memories and focus are limited), instead CI gates that.
I guess I reinvented a simplified and stack-agnostic version of ArchUnit but whatever, it works for me and I can use the same tool in Python and Java projects and elsewhere as well as parallelize all the read only checks and run sequentially the potential-write ones that might auto-fix stuff.
And the verge is covering it too:
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-...
I don't have high hopes that there exists a bulletproof solution to this.
He valuations of a bunch of AI unicorns disagree.
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 and communication barriers are things we haven't really figured out how to communicate across efficiently, and that only a handful of people are truly rockstars at it; others just aren't cut out for it. Stage 3 anyone that is competent to get another job already left, leaving a smoldering shell of company that dies by attrition at stage 5.
If I hadn't already landed a job somewhere else, I would only return with a 20% pay bump and an iron-clad contract.
You just want to make sure you have it, and not your boss using it against you.
I no longer want to make connection with any coworkers.
So maybe the key is firing everyone and then rehiring the good guys after you implement automated systems.
Though I’m somewhat surprised. I didn’t expect Porsches to top a reliability measure. I thought they were in the “fancy but unreliable” bin. Interesting.
An expensive process.
"Welcome back, you are now two levels down"
The short sighted gains (and I’ll assume that they are chasing quarterlies as usual) are to be had by firing most of the junior engineers, keeping the seniors because with AI they can n* their productivity.
Basically you can fire 2x junior engineers for every senior engineer you keep. But the senior engineers are the keystone here, and without juniors eventually becoming senior engineers you’ll eventually be screwed.
But, that’s a problem for the -next- c-suite gang… so…
won’t someone think of the lightcone!
I would rephrase it as it’s only as good as you know what you are doing. Even if the trained input is good, keeping it to scope and making sure it delivers without workarounds requires a human brain who have the past experience.
The editorialized headline is also misleading: "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors" - there is nothing in the original story that suggests Ford were expecting AI to "train juniors".
And since the Bloomberg headline is behind a paywall the editorialized headline is most of what we have to go on.
This Verge story would be a better link: "Ford had to hire back former engineers to fix mistakes made by its automated systems" https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-...
It's just so strange any other profession have unions or bodies that protect their job against this sort of practice.
if software devs were lawyers then AI would've been banned
If the company tries to layoff 10% "due to AI" the remaining 90% can strike.
History is full of union solidarity vs idiotic management.
It's OK to just say that the plan was to rehire back the engineers for far less compensation.
It’s a disease that has spread throughout all of capitalism.
Outsourcing, cheaper labor, layoffs.
This place is not anywhere close to a dream anymore because upper management pay needs to be higher. No wonder people are leaving the USA.
Avoid buying a house. Be one of them homeless living out of your car because it’s too hard to get ahead.
Really. You need to be in the investor class or else you are dependent on a w2 where that company gives zero fucks who you are. When you are moved to a new manager who decides he doesn’t like you it’s lights out and you were already paycheck to paycheck.
Don’t even mention the food or health systems in place here.