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Executives are not the development team, and there's no word on whether actual EV engineers have defected as well. This really isn't surprising given the amoun

Executives are not the development team, and there's no word on whether actual EV engineers have defected as well. This really isn't surprising given the amount of poaching going on in the market these days between Tesla, Faraday, various VC-backed startups, and the upcoming China/emerging market players. Given the choice to get a better salary and actually work on a product millions of people might want instead of slogging away on a product line that BMW clearly doesn't care much about, these moves really aren't unexpected.

openplatypus 11y ago
"struggling with weak sales" Translation: "our executive bonuses were in danger so we jumped the ship before anyone noticed" No word on actual engineers (you know, the thing that makes R&D) moving as well.
- dagw 11y ago
  At most (real, not software) engineering companies I've been involved with most of the executives where "actual engineers".
  - tankenmate 11y ago
    Especially in Europe, where companies are more likely to promote and train management from within rather than import freshly minted MBAs, compare to the US.
- imeron 11y ago
  BMW i models Q1 sales lower than last year by 23%. Maybe bonuses were really the cause for all this --- http://insideevs.com/bmw-sold-5128-bmw-i3i8-in-the-first-quarter-of-2016/ http://insideevs.com/bmw-sold-5128-bmw-i3i8-in-the-first-qua...
dagw 11y ago
Executives are not the development team However in many cases they are the senior engineers of the development team. In this case the defection included executives who developed the i8 plug-in hybrid sports car and the electric powertrains for the i-series.
- Zombieball 11y ago
  Did they actually help design it? This wasn't clear from the article. I ask as often in large corporations the work of many individual contributors is associated to the management.
- krzrak 11y ago
  Maybe author of the article misunderstood "they developed" the same way as he confused "developers" with "executives"...
- Matthias247 11y ago
  Not really. These big corporations have between 4-5 hierarchy levels. All people that are actually performing the engineering are on the lowest level - whether they are junior or senior engineers. And often even they are not aware of the details, because the actual engineering work is contracted. The next level are team leaders, which are only rarely involved in the development work. And the executives the article talks about are probably even 2 levels higher up. So maybe they lost some coordinators with a good vision, but not really the development team or technical knowledge.
  - fab13n 11y ago
    This is true most of the time, but it might be that the electric car projects were handled as skunkworks. That's often the only way, for a very established incumbent, to protect substantial innovation attempts from corporate managers. If that was the case, it's not unlikely that the management had genuine technical legitimacy. And that they're easy to poach, with a promise that their technical achievements won't be nullified by corporate politics. (that's pure speculation, I have no insider info from BMW)
    - ryguytilidie 11y ago
      Even in the most skunkworks of situations, losing the executive in charge of a product still doesn't really strike me as "losing the core dev team".
  - 11y ago
kriro 11y ago
Iirc it's fairly common for car manufacturers to recruit executives from the engineering ranks. In fact I'd say it's fairly common in Germany in general to recruit what would be MBAs in other countries from the pool of people with engineering backgrounds (especially in mechanical engineering).
chvid 11y ago
They all have deep technical backgrounds as far as I can google. I wonder if they continue working in Germany?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

openplatypus 11y ago

"struggling with weak sales" Translation: "our executive bonuses were in danger so we jumped the ship before anyone noticed" No word on actual engineers (you know, the thing that makes R&D) moving as well.

dagw 11y ago
At most (real, not software) engineering companies I've been involved with most of the executives where "actual engineers".
- tankenmate 11y ago
  Especially in Europe, where companies are more likely to promote and train management from within rather than import freshly minted MBAs, compare to the US.
imeron 11y ago
BMW i models Q1 sales lower than last year by 23%. Maybe bonuses were really the cause for all this --- http://insideevs.com/bmw-sold-5128-bmw-i3i8-in-the-first-quarter-of-2016/ http://insideevs.com/bmw-sold-5128-bmw-i3i8-in-the-first-qua...

dagw 11y ago

Executives are not the development team However in many cases they are the senior engineers of the development team. In this case the defection included executives who developed the i8 plug-in hybrid sports car and the electric powertrains for the i-series.

Zombieball 11y ago
Did they actually help design it? This wasn't clear from the article. I ask as often in large corporations the work of many individual contributors is associated to the management.
krzrak 11y ago
Maybe author of the article misunderstood "they developed" the same way as he confused "developers" with "executives"...
Matthias247 11y ago
Not really. These big corporations have between 4-5 hierarchy levels. All people that are actually performing the engineering are on the lowest level - whether they are junior or senior engineers. And often even they are not aware of the details, because the actual engineering work is contracted. The next level are team leaders, which are only rarely involved in the development work. And the executives the article talks about are probably even 2 levels higher up. So maybe they lost some coordinators with a good vision, but not really the development team or technical knowledge.
- fab13n 11y ago
  This is true most of the time, but it might be that the electric car projects were handled as skunkworks. That's often the only way, for a very established incumbent, to protect substantial innovation attempts from corporate managers. If that was the case, it's not unlikely that the management had genuine technical legitimacy. And that they're easy to poach, with a promise that their technical achievements won't be nullified by corporate politics. (that's pure speculation, I have no insider info from BMW)
  - ryguytilidie 11y ago
    Even in the most skunkworks of situations, losing the executive in charge of a product still doesn't really strike me as "losing the core dev team".
- 11y ago

kriro 11y ago

Iirc it's fairly common for car manufacturers to recruit executives from the engineering ranks. In fact I'd say it's fairly common in Germany in general to recruit what would be MBAs in other countries from the pool of people with engineering backgrounds (especially in mechanical engineering).

chvid 11y ago

They all have deep technical backgrounds as far as I can google. I wonder if they continue working in Germany?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]