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.
I don't think it's right to categorize "no consequences".
Leadership made a decision and that decision was bad. This happens all the time, including allocating budget for staff. Any effective organization is going to judge the outcomes of these types of decisions and it's going to come up in performance and hiring. If this was an isolated situation then possibly they won't fire anyone over it. But you really need the context to judge whether the response was correct.
Wasting company resources and making the company look bad in the press won't be rewarded, and that includes at the board level to the CEO.
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 then we can fix it. I’m not going to fire someone for the result when the process was sound.
That said, this application of AI was profoundly stupid from the outset. You don’t necessarily fire people for a bad result from a reasonable decision making process, but you do fire them for poor judgment and reasoning. There’s nothing that can fix that except for not letting those people make decisions anymore.
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.
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?”
> 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??"
Why do u even bother about lost productivity. Come on dude how many firings need to happen before one has to see the reality. Just do the minimum job required for the position and move on. Loyalty should be both ways. But that's not the case
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consequences for American car executives, are you crazy? Have you seen Stellantis cars recently? Large parts of the US (and European most likely) car industry is driving straight into irrelevance
On the topic of Stellantis, I rented one recently (through no fault of my own) and when I returned it the guy asked me how it was. I told him I wouldn't drive one of those things again if they paid me. The guy said "yeah we get that a lot, let me get you the discount".
It sounded like they had a "Stellantis discount" for people who said something.
> Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know.
Because we've been alive in America long enough to see this cycle thousands of times. The execs rarely face the music for bad decisions. A round of layoffs looks like a failure to us, but to the investors it was a good idea that didn't work out so there's no punishment for trying to save money.
Conversely, why do you jump to their defence? Large companies treat employees as a cost centre, and if a cheaper alternative becomes available then they're let go. It's not a huge leap of faith to assume so in this case.
I imagine our current hyper-corporate landscape would have us making that assumption.
Are there any documented instances of executives being punished in some level of career-affecting way for bad performance?
Even when they get fired they get golden parachutes.
Example: Sam Altman founded a complete failure of a location-based social network, where the board tried to remove him twice, lied about being chairman of the YCombinator board, and now gets to be CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world where the board tried to remove him as CEO once.
Failing up is very common in our corporate system.
Seems like this is a theme in our culture, maybe it's a world wide trend. The underlying theme I notice is unaccountability and selective application of rules, laws, norms to some people and not others. It seems to me like people with power, and in leadership positions like executives, get to create an environment where they are able to continually extract from a mass of people.
It reminds me of the conspiracy theories I would hear as a child along the lines of powerful people running the world in shadows. I certainly feel like the ways people like executives keep getting away with unethical and in some cases illegal behavior is there's forces in the shadows supporting their behavior. I was told in history class that throughout history when such types of people arose such as kings in France or massive dictators who conquer countries, that the "good" or "masses" of humans eventually over throw them - well here we are and why isn't that happening?
I see instead a class of people weak, afraid, and defeated and continually asking others "why aren't you doing anything" without the awareness to see "You are the one who is supposed to do something"
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.
> Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'
The article makes no such claim. What is your source? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or, are you just making things up that you believe are likely, like an AI would?
If they didn’t get canned, the slap on the wrist is the cost of doing business. If we all agree to investigate ourselves and we’re all very disappointed in what happened, what a shame!
If you say something is illegal and costs $X as a fine, you don’t curb behavior, they just bake the fine into their business model.
> 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.
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.
Layoffs aren’t “playing with people’s lives”. Employment is only by mutual consent and everyone knows that. Consent can be revoked at any time which is why anyone prudent (especially in a software engineering role) isn’t living paycheck to paycheck.
Don’t blame a customer for the vendor’s irresponsibility.
Unfortunately for this perspective, one side of the equation very much plans their lives around this mutual arrangement. When the other party experiments with the arrangement without deep consideration, I think "playing with people's lives" is very much an apt description.
Just because I would not be destitute tomorrow does not mean that my life (and those of my family) would not be deeply impacted.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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..)
Well for grandma on the street I can accept that, but shouldn't at least the tech community be more precise in terminology? "AI" is also a misnomer. So many things in our industry are that it always takes some layers of digging in a new area to understand what they actually mean because the words have shifted their meaning.
And for people focusing too much on AI, Xiaomi kicked their first vehicle into production with a fully automated factory three years ago [0]. That's where the industry is going and has tried to go for decades now.
They might want to also reduced head out on the designing side, but it's also an ongoing trend that started before the AI boom.
That's not an industry that will keep hiring as much as they did in the past, however it turns out.
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?
> 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.
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.
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 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.
AI is particularly infectious among C suites, because AI is great at spewing words. A substantial portion of folks in those positions are there because of family connections, existing wealth, etc., and their only contribution to the business is similarly spewing words. They went to good colleges where they excelled at spewing words. They worked cushy / hard jobs where they had to spew the just the right normal predictable words for this context, perhaps at a large volume and with little notice... and the words were hard words... not known to those outside the industry.
For those that lack initiative, strategy, a real understanding of their business, engineering, etc., the spewing words is the whole thing. It overshadows their entire understanding.
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.
The idea is there’s a rush of irrational exuberance when an “innovation trigger” makes a new toy looks promising, and everybody rushes to use it for everything, regardless of whether its suitability-for-purpose is proven. Inevitably many of those pioneers find that it’s not good for their particular problems after all; usage reaches a “peak of inflated expectations,” and crashes into a “trough of disillusionment.”
Then the tech enters a quieter and more gradual “slope of enlightenment” as people work out use cases where the tech actually adds value; then adoption reaches a “plateau of productivity.”
Worth a glance at the way they map this to prior waves of technological exuberance.
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”
> 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. Top leadership's friendship with the country's leadership equals access to cheap debt financing since money is all fake and generated out of thin air
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And that tacit knowledge doesn't have easily quantifiable value, it doesn't show up on the P&L so most execs don't consider it. I've seen it time and time again over my career, someone leaves or layoffs happen without considering this and then the company is scrambling to figure out processes that someone was quietly running or maintaining for years that no one else even thought of.
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.
This is still going on, just that they try to keep a few internal tech people. The problem is the incentive for the internal people to stay as they, in theory, should not be making any changes just help out.
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.
"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?
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is going to happen more and more. AI is a tool that should make your employees more efficient not replace them outright. And if it doesn't make your employees better? I guess AI isn't applicable to your business then.
I can see a lot of companies coming to this realization over the coming months and years.
(shooting from the hip)
What if the 350 engineers had built a company instead?
Union-like efforts could focus on creating new companies (having the "union" is about ensuring a certain level of organizational knowledge, like YCombinator creates a structure around startups)
I think companies would more careful about how fast and lose they operate, if firing may mean having to contract with a 3rd party.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, but they are short-term re-hires. Once they "get encoded" it will be bye Felica: "Ford just wants to first seasoned engineers walked out before their decades of knowledge could be encoded into automated workflows." https://www.gadgetreview.com/ford-fired-its-best-engineers-l...
Over-hiring during the bygone era of free money is now seeing an overcorrection. AI is a true if small part of it, but mainly it’s an excuse that doubles as posturing to the investor hive-mind.
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)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
It's not like those consultants recommended something the CEO and Board didn't want to hear. They are paid to be the shield that blocks the arrows from shareholders. If they can get paid twice, once to recommend laying off 350 engineers and again to later recommend refilling 350 engineers all the better.
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.
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.
And the crucial detail: nothing indicates Ford laid off the 350 people who were re-hired. It looks to me like it could be bringing back people who retired.
The headline gives the impression that Ford fired 350 engineers and tried to get AI to train the replacements and then re-hired them when that didn't work.
That impression is false, which means we're wasting time having conversations about it.
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…
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don't think it's right to categorize "no consequences".
Leadership made a decision and that decision was bad. This happens all the time, including allocating budget for staff. Any effective organization is going to judge the outcomes of these types of decisions and it's going to come up in performance and hiring. If this was an isolated situation then possibly they won't fire anyone over it. But you really need the context to judge whether the response was correct.
Wasting company resources and making the company look bad in the press won't be rewarded, and that includes at the board level to the CEO.
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 then we can fix it. I’m not going to fire someone for the result when the process was sound.
That said, this application of AI was profoundly stupid from the outset. You don’t necessarily fire people for a bad result from a reasonable decision making process, but you do fire them for poor judgment and reasoning. There’s nothing that can fix that except for not letting those people make decisions anymore.
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.
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?”
> 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??"
Boards are usually filled with ex-CEOs who also thought these dumb bets were good
There's the added cost that the best people are the least likely to return after a layoff.
Why do u even bother about lost productivity. Come on dude how many firings need to happen before one has to see the reality. Just do the minimum job required for the position and move on. Loyalty should be both ways. But that's not the case
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.
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.
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.
Im not calling for any action, but that kid doing something about Healthcare CEO - that did help.
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.
They could always be hired as contractors at x5 the cost for a fixed contract over 2 years to train the ai.
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.
Sounds like meta would be just the company for you!
If they take the job they likely need to give back some or all of the severance package.
Not really those execs paying that stupidity tax though. They still get their bonuses. Pretty much zero consequences.
“Consequences for mistakes” is generally not a good way of operating. Kind of the whole idea behind a blameless retro for example.
Consequences for American car executives, are you crazy? Have you seen Stellantis cars recently? Large parts of the US (and European most likely) car industry is driving straight into irrelevance
On the topic of Stellantis, I rented one recently (through no fault of my own) and when I returned it the guy asked me how it was. I told him I wouldn't drive one of those things again if they paid me. The guy said "yeah we get that a lot, let me get you the discount".
It sounded like they had a "Stellantis discount" for people who said something.
Nice guy, actually.
This is how it has always been? C-suite is incentivized to make big speculative changes; if it goes well, they get credit. If not, oh well.
Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know.
> Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know.
Because we've been alive in America long enough to see this cycle thousands of times. The execs rarely face the music for bad decisions. A round of layoffs looks like a failure to us, but to the investors it was a good idea that didn't work out so there's no punishment for trying to save money.
If you allow a likely guess with no evidence to play the role of fact, you're just as bad as the AIs
Conversely, why do you jump to their defence? Large companies treat employees as a cost centre, and if a cheaper alternative becomes available then they're let go. It's not a huge leap of faith to assume so in this case.
Agreed, but what they’ve done isn’t illegal (IANAL). A performance review doesn’t address the irreparable harm these actions may cause.
It is reasonable to assume, that this could be walked back in such a way that no one is held accountable.
I imagine our current hyper-corporate landscape would have us making that assumption.
Are there any documented instances of executives being punished in some level of career-affecting way for bad performance?
Even when they get fired they get golden parachutes.
Example: Sam Altman founded a complete failure of a location-based social network, where the board tried to remove him twice, lied about being chairman of the YCombinator board, and now gets to be CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world where the board tried to remove him as CEO once.
Failing up is very common in our corporate system.
bad performance review and a layoff are completely different worlds.
It seems that you don't understand governance in corporate America. For some education, read "Barbarians at the Gate".
Seems like this is a theme in our culture, maybe it's a world wide trend. The underlying theme I notice is unaccountability and selective application of rules, laws, norms to some people and not others. It seems to me like people with power, and in leadership positions like executives, get to create an environment where they are able to continually extract from a mass of people.
It reminds me of the conspiracy theories I would hear as a child along the lines of powerful people running the world in shadows. I certainly feel like the ways people like executives keep getting away with unethical and in some cases illegal behavior is there's forces in the shadows supporting their behavior. I was told in history class that throughout history when such types of people arose such as kings in France or massive dictators who conquer countries, that the "good" or "masses" of humans eventually over throw them - well here we are and why isn't that happening?
I see instead a class of people weak, afraid, and defeated and continually asking others "why aren't you doing anything" without the awareness to see "You are the one who is supposed to do something"
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.
Plus you can't say it's because Trump's terrible economics so safer to blame AI.
That's how it works for every rich/powerful person in every aspect of their lives; maybe to a slightly lesser degree with health.
> Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'
The article makes no such claim. What is your source? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or, are you just making things up that you believe are likely, like an AI would?
If they didn’t get canned, the slap on the wrist is the cost of doing business. If we all agree to investigate ourselves and we’re all very disappointed in what happened, what a shame!
If you say something is illegal and costs $X as a fine, you don’t curb behavior, they just bake the fine into their business model.
The probably got bonus and promoted since they saved company costs!
> 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.
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.
Welcome to the Era of the Business Idiot. People who manage stuff without having even the remotest inkling of what the work is.
Their entire management skill involve the application of one of the following options:
1 - Fire People
2 - Spend Money
3 - Call a meeting
corporatism is on equal footing with prosperity gospel.
Yep.
I'm prosperous because god/market deems me worthy.
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.
Layoffs aren’t “playing with people’s lives”. Employment is only by mutual consent and everyone knows that. Consent can be revoked at any time which is why anyone prudent (especially in a software engineering role) isn’t living paycheck to paycheck.
Don’t blame a customer for the vendor’s irresponsibility.
Unfortunately for this perspective, one side of the equation very much plans their lives around this mutual arrangement. When the other party experiments with the arrangement without deep consideration, I think "playing with people's lives" is very much an apt description.
Just because I would not be destitute tomorrow does not mean that my life (and those of my family) would not be deeply impacted.
That’s true in the US but not in most other rich countries, where there are legal constraints on terminating an employment contract.
Punishing leadership for perceived strategy mistakes is a great way to scare good leadership away from working for you.
Babying bad leaders who don't take responsibility for their actions is a good way to scare away good employees.
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.
I am not sure engineers in say, Europe have any lower career flexibility. It's a false narrative to claim otherwise.
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)
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.
This would be true if the government didn’t have ridiculous outdated requirements for starting new companies.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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..)
We all know what you mean. But doing what is necessary to make the overall automated system more autonomous = training, at this 30,000 foot altitude.
Well for grandma on the street I can accept that, but shouldn't at least the tech community be more precise in terminology? "AI" is also a misnomer. So many things in our industry are that it always takes some layers of digging in a new area to understand what they actually mean because the words have shifted their meaning.
Yes.
And for people focusing too much on AI, Xiaomi kicked their first vehicle into production with a fully automated factory three years ago [0]. That's where the industry is going and has tried to go for decades now.
They might want to also reduced head out on the designing side, but it's also an ongoing trend that started before the AI boom.
That's not an industry that will keep hiring as much as they did in the past, however it turns out.
[0] https://youtu.be/v6jb6PP4APc
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?
> 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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
AI is particularly infectious among C suites, because AI is great at spewing words. A substantial portion of folks in those positions are there because of family connections, existing wealth, etc., and their only contribution to the business is similarly spewing words. They went to good colleges where they excelled at spewing words. They worked cushy / hard jobs where they had to spew the just the right normal predictable words for this context, perhaps at a large volume and with little notice... and the words were hard words... not known to those outside the industry.
For those that lack initiative, strategy, a real understanding of their business, engineering, etc., the spewing words is the whole thing. It overshadows their entire understanding.
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.
“Hype Cycle” is a Gartner term of art, which they use to describe the way waves of technological innovation penetrate the business world:
https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...
The idea is there’s a rush of irrational exuberance when an “innovation trigger” makes a new toy looks promising, and everybody rushes to use it for everything, regardless of whether its suitability-for-purpose is proven. Inevitably many of those pioneers find that it’s not good for their particular problems after all; usage reaches a “peak of inflated expectations,” and crashes into a “trough of disillusionment.”
Then the tech enters a quieter and more gradual “slope of enlightenment” as people work out use cases where the tech actually adds value; then adoption reaches a “plateau of productivity.”
Worth a glance at the way they map this to prior waves of technological exuberance.
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”
> 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. Top leadership's 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 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.
They also don’t seem to realize the AI might take over highly paid executive positions before skilled work.
Knowledge or skilled workers can be used by the AI for swarm training data generation; what value do the execs have to AI?
I think the most beautiful part of capitalism is selling elites rope to hang themselves.
Step 1: fire everyone. Step 2: figure out how to use AI.
In that order, apparently.
I don't understand why Ford did not just put the LLM on a PiP.
Alternatively:
Step 1: 30 minute conversation with AI on how to use AI. Step 2: fire everyone.
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.
Ford invested heavily in reliability in the late 2000s - see e.g. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-apr-15-la-fi-bo...
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.
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.
If I had a nickel for every broken focus door handle I've fixed... (There's a weak pin that always breaks.)
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.
Yeah, the engine and drivetrains are immortal, everything else is constantly dying though.
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
Well, the business plan came out of this mysterious box, after we fed in the payroll reduction requirement...
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.
Yeah, it looks like this wasn't AI related. I hope yours grows to be the top comment!
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.
And that tacit knowledge doesn't have easily quantifiable value, it doesn't show up on the P&L so most execs don't consider it. I've seen it time and time again over my career, someone leaves or layoffs happen without considering this and then the company is scrambling to figure out processes that someone was quietly running or maintaining for years that no one else even thought of.
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!
One of my favorite pieces of writing on this topic
https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...
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.
This is still going on, just that they try to keep a few internal tech people. The problem is the incentive for the internal people to stay as they, in theory, should not be making any changes just help out.
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.
Who says Ford fired any employees? The article doesn't.
"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?
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.
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.
https://archive.is/DI4Cq
And the verge is covering it too:
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-...
We need every outlet to cover this more
Who is we? Are you mistaking this for an activist platform?
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)
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
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Fast but stochastic has no value.
He valuations of a bunch of AI unicorns disagree.
Its all about a longshot gamble to replace workers and wages.
Not sure if this was ironic. I guess it mainly fails because a lot of knowledge and experience is intuitive and not codified.
This is going to happen more and more. AI is a tool that should make your employees more efficient not replace them outright. And if it doesn't make your employees better? I guess AI isn't applicable to your business then.
I can see a lot of companies coming to this realization over the coming months and years.
(shooting from the hip) What if the 350 engineers had built a company instead? Union-like efforts could focus on creating new companies (having the "union" is about ensuring a certain level of organizational knowledge, like YCombinator creates a structure around startups)
I think companies would more careful about how fast and lose they operate, if firing may mean having to contract with a 3rd party.
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.
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.
The first attempt failed, so they caved in, but they’ll try again after a while and lay those people off again.
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.
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.
Yeah, but they are short-term re-hires. Once they "get encoded" it will be bye Felica: "Ford just wants to first seasoned engineers walked out before their decades of knowledge could be encoded into automated workflows." https://www.gadgetreview.com/ford-fired-its-best-engineers-l...
Oh how the wheels have turned.
Over-hiring during the bygone era of free money is now seeing an overcorrection. AI is a true if small part of it, but mainly it’s an excuse that doubles as posturing to the investor hive-mind.
Ford Authority also covered this story: https://fordauthority.com/2026/06/ford-unified-operations-hi...
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)
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.
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.
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.
This is a boom and bust industry. Projects come and go and only to a lesser extent if you work at a software company.
I would recommend IT/server administration as that is a constant business need, if you prefer stability with more limited upside.
This should be way higher.
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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
And the engine is behind the rear axle.
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.
Maybe... but the re-hiring probably involved very substantial salary raises for the re-hirees.
An expensive process.
I hope those engineers demanded 2x higher salaries this time.
They should charge at least 30% more because now they know that they can't keep production going
I've lost my ability to believe that things will feel 'normal' at work.
I no longer want to make connection with any coworkers.
I do wonder if the rehiring was just at a lower compensation level.
"Welcome back, you are now two levels down"
They will try it again next year, after they slap an AI camera on the rehired people.
I wonder which of the management consulting companies caused this fire/rehire experiment.
It's not like those consultants recommended something the CEO and Board didn't want to hear. They are paid to be the shield that blocks the arrows from shareholders. If they can get paid twice, once to recommend laying off 350 engineers and again to later recommend refilling 350 engineers all the better.
So...don't buy any Ford vehicles designed and/or manufactured in the last 8 months or so?
What does it mean to “train the AI”?
Were these engineers fired and replaced with AI? Article implies they brought back retired engineers.
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.
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.
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-...
And the crucial detail: nothing indicates Ford laid off the 350 people who were re-hired. It looks to me like it could be bringing back people who retired.
Cope
What exactly am I coping with here?
The headline gives the impression that Ford fired 350 engineers and tried to get AI to train the replacements and then re-hired them when that didn't work.
That impression is false, which means we're wasting time having conversations about it.
(The top comment thread on here right now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446#48675092 - starts with the assumption that Ford execs made the mistake of laying off 350 people and then discusses if they got good severance packages etc. - here's the best comment I've seen calling that out so far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446#48675486)
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…
The folks who make the decision to throw away these engineers in the first place are the ones who should be laid off.
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.
And this is why the C-suite is the single best target for replacement by AI.
The only job AI's are capable are doing is the role of executive. I think we should replace every C-Suiter with AI.
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.
And they just go back to work like nothing happened?
That's the interesting question. Are expert engineers willing to go back after being treated that way or knowing what happened to others?
amazing, the same company that says people should not be allowed to repair their own vehicles. henry ford is rolling in his grave.
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...
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.
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...
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.
Were you ever homeless and starving?
I doubt it :)
How about if they doubled your previous salary?
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.
There's no guarantee in any job that you won't be laid off.
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.
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.
For how long?
As a homeless person, do not wish homelessness on yourself.
Doesn't seem bad to me. Come back for a pay bump and get paid while you search for a new job.
I hope those engineers made Ford pay out the nose.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
If AI thinks so much faster than humans. does it age fater than humans? and in that case, does AI have dementia already?
All the people happy about this are just holding back the progress of our species smh.
won’t someone think of the lightcone!
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.
foot, meet gun
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.
Management at these USA companies could give zero fucks about you.
It’s a disease that has spread throughout all of capitalism.
But that’s USA 250 years.
Quite frankly I’m enjoying the schadenfreude on this one.