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Can Ford Turn Itself into a Tech Company?
- dragontamer 9y agoThere's only one real question that needs to be answered. Is Ford willing to spend $150k/year to $200k/year for a large number of senior level developers to build out and train staff for the next 10 years to build a thriving tech culture from within the company? And will these higher-paid staff members have real power and control within the company, such that they feel that they are doing useful and fulfilling work? If so, then yes, Ford (or anyone else really) can become a Tech Company. Money and power, that's all developers want for the most part. Give them money but without power to pursue interesting problems... then its going to be harder to recruit. Give them power without money, and it will be possible to get college kids maybe, but probably not the senior developers needed to bootstrap a culture from the ground up.
- swagtricker 9y agoThey have another problem to address as well: Detroit. Or, culturally speaking, the high-strung midwest attitude. I say this having spent the first 15 years of my life about 30 miles outside of Detroit and then moved to the Seattle area to finish high-school, college & start a software development career. I've still got family back in Michigan, but they're so culturally closed-minded & uptight I don't know if a $200k salary and dirt cheap houses from what's left of The Great Recession would be enough put up with the rest that's broken. Oh - and if you have kids, don't forget about the mess that is the state educational system: Betsy DeVos' blueprint for destroying public education nation-wide.
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- CabSauce 9y ago"High-strung", "closed-minded"? I'm sort of offended. There's some good stuff going on in Detroit and Ann Arbor. Not to mention Grand Rapids and others.
- swagtricker 9y agoHopefully it's largely the family I left behind then;)
- Angostura 9y agoDon't worry - the poster's just being a bit closed-minded
- free_everybody 9y agoSo no one can point out close-mindedness without also being close-minded? Seems a bit close-minded.
- curiouscat321 9y agoI too grew up in the Metro Detroit area (and then moved to Seattle). The suburban schools are quite good. Oakland County schools are some of the best in the nation. International Academy was rated as the top public school in America for many years (it's now amongst the top 10 or so). In my opinion, Michigan is experiencing a statewide cultural divide. The more metropolitan areas are not nearly as culturally close minded as the less metropolitan areas. Ultimately, Michigan companies don't seem to value talent enough to pay them well. There's no reason somebody should be able to make 2-3x more outside of Michigan than in the state.
- swagtricker 9y agoGood point. Washington State is also suffering from a cultural divide. It almost felt nerve wracking and threatening to drive outside of King county last year before the election and see Trump signs literally everywhere. You're either in a technology or technology supported work in King county dealing with 18% annual housing cost increases, or you're broke in outlying counties and the other side of the Cascade mountains wondering where all the jobs went.
- Aloha 9y agoThis cultural divide has existed in Washington for a long time - but its not really a King County/not King County split - it has more to do with the Cascades. I'd also suggest that the outlying counties are not as broke as you seem to think they are. Western Washington was an extractive economy that transitioned to manufacturing in the 20's and 30's - Eastern WA was and is primarily agricultural. It's a cultural divide that is usually pretty well bridged. Why would you be afraid of Trump voters? They're Americans just like you are, and are trying to pick someone who'll solve their problems - which I'd note, are probably different than yours - a good reminder is, more people in King County voted for Trump than did in any other county, and King County accounts for 1/5th or so of the votes he got.
- rrhd 9y ago> Why would you be afraid of Trump voters? Do you really want anyone to answer that question on HN? and king county was 72% for Clinton, and Seattle was even more tilted that way.
- free_everybody 9y agoYou're not wrong. Something is off in southeast Michigan. I blame the insane legacy of racial segregation. And the dreary environment. I mean, look at the article... >When we reached the end of the hall, Ford welcomed me into his office, a midcentury wooden cavern with a fish tank built into one wall and a panoramic view of Dearborn along the other. The dreary vista stood in stark relief with the golden-era artifacts in Ford’s office...
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- fma 9y agoAnother automotive company is way ahead of Ford. http://www.autonews.com/article/20171002/OEM06/171009988/randy-mott-gm-it-architect http://www.autonews.com/article/20171002/OEM06/171009988/ran...
- Aloha 9y agoI don't think you need to replicate silicon valley culture and pay to be successful - arguable replicating it is harmful. There is no good reason to pay 200k a year to a guy who can make 200k a year in Sunnyvale - in Michigan, he'll have as much disposable income at, 120-140k a year as he did at 200k a year in California. Before you say people wont work for less - I know plenty of people who would, including myself.
- curiouscat321 9y agoYou have to attract talent to Michigan though. California is in a prosperous loop where talented people move to the state for jobs which then encourages other companies to come to California for talent. The side effect of this is rising housing prices and rising wages. Michigan doesn't have that cycle happening (or, at least to the same extent). Telling somebody to take a hypothetical pay cut to move somewhere with less appeal isn't a sound strategy for attracting talent.
- Aloha 9y agoThere are sweeteners you can use to get people to move, like signing bonuses, or a bonus after a year, or upon termination, to alienate the concern that you wont be able to go back to a more expensive place after layoff or termination.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThe sweetener is never enough compared to cash in hand from a traditional tech job (in my experience). Top dollar is top dollar, there is no substitute.
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- lotsofpulp 9y agoMore people also probably prefer California's climate, beaches, and mountains.
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- bluedino 9y agoFord has tons of engineers of other disciplines making $120-150k
- curiouscat321 9y agoFord has a serious marketing problem when it comes to hiring. It's pretty obvious that Google, Facebook, et al. spend a lot of energy and money marketing themselves as fantastic places to work with great pay and benefits. Most non-tech companies don't spend this effort. Ford might pay well, but they don't spend effort properly marketing themselves as a great place to work. Part of this is that tech culture != Ford culture and many people might not like Ford's big business culture.
- mywittyname 9y agoProbably because of this weird Midwestern attitude towards salaries. An engineer earning a $250k+ salary is seen as greedy in these parts. You can witness this from Michiganders right here in this thread. There are a few posts here about how $250k is a ridiculous salary in Michigan and is completely unnecessary. Ford will likely go bankrupt or be acquired if they fail to stay competitive in autonomous vehicle research. Since there's only a handful of people in the world capable of keeping them relevant, these people are worth literally billions of dollars to Ford and trillions to the Michigan/Ohio/Indiana economies. Ford should have no problem paying these people millions and advertising that fact.
- curiouscat321 9y agoIt's decades of unions that have led people to believe that there should be a certain sense of equality when it comes to wages. It's a ridiculous idea in the creative economy.
- zaksoup 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- jbob2000 9y agoNo chance. Ford is just a company of managers and labourers. All of the creative/R&D work is farmed out to vendors. They didn't even design their new super car, the Ford GT; it was done by a Canadian engineering firm. You can't turn that kind of machine around. Whenever they're faced with a problem, the only thing they know how to do is ask someone else.
- gumby 9y agoIs that a problem? Cisco pioneered the model of outsourcing a lot of its technical research (two different teams would quit and start startups to solve problem X; one would get traction then Cisco would buy it -- bonus for the team! -- and the others get their jobs back). Big Pharma has pretty much outsourced early stage candidate development. In both these cases (and many others) the large company has strong development, manufacturing, distribution and sales pipelines as well as strong balance sheets, none of which a startup is likely to develop. If Ford chooses this path I don't see it a reason to criticize.
- runT1ME 9y agoThe question becomes does the outsourcing firms they engage have the talent to build what they want (is top talent really applying to IBM/Accenture/etc?), and is the overhead of outsourcing (both monetary and time wise) going to allow them to be competitive with tech companies. I'm going to argue for any large scale project, the answer will be no.
- gumby 9y agoThe other parts of the car industry became vertically dis-integrated during the second half of the 20th century, so there's no reason to believe they couldn't pull this off. (Separately they have to adapt to a different market model; I'm not talking about that).
- Yeaw 9y agoThat's not really accurate. Suppliers do provide large portions of any car, but the creative design and much of the control system design including software is all in house at Ford. They also have a very large research organization. Even though Sync 3 was developed in house, Ford also earlier this year hired 400 additional developers from BlackBerry to expand to even more software and connectivity in the vehicle. The average car right now has on the order of 100 ECUs and 100's of KLOC. You just don't buy all of that from a supplier and jam it in there, cars are already far too complex for that to work. The Ford GT was designed in secrecy in the basement of the design studio. The 3.5L EcoBoost engine was engineered in house and with Rousch including all of the engine controls. Multimatic is just assembling the vehicles in Canada, since Ford doesn't do by hand construction of cars. I work for Ford as an engineer, but I am only speaking for myself, not for Ford.
- Aloha 9y agoI'd argue that Ford is already a technology company - just not one out of the Silicon Valley model.
- rectang 9y agoProbably so. The kind of technology company where selling upper management on investing in security, maintainability, testing, open source, heck even version control is going to be difficult, because the people at the top don't have the expertise to evaluate such proposals.
- Avshalom 9y agoSo they're a tech company in the silicon valley model.
- rectang 9y agoThe distinction remains: do you have advocates for technical best practices at the top? Not every SV-style tech company has such people, but lots of them do. Whereas companies which emerge from a different tradition don't have such people and don't even know what questions they should be asking.
- Aloha 9y agoI've worked in technical jobs for non-technical managers - you don't need to understand the technology to be able to manage people working on it. To wit - why would they care about most of that - or for example, version control - why would they even try to argue against version control - version control is a free problem at this point, as in it doesn't cost money to fix - and it wouldn't even rise up to a non-technical managers level.
- lordCarbonFiber 9y agoPeople don't like things they don't understand. It's funny you chose version control as your example; I work at a company currently trying to modernize and getting version control is like pulling teeth. Without technical leadership from upper management you each individual line of business standing up their own infrastructure (there's currently a war between github and gitlab for the new step forward; the resolution of which is blocking the purchase of any additional github licenses). Perhaps a domain expertise isn't strictly necessary but it helps a lot; especially in older environments trying to change.
- santaclaus 9y agoSo what is the NY Times' working definition of a 'tech company' here?
- joefourier 9y agoWhat definition of "tech company" doesn't already include a modern car company? A modern car is a vastly more complex piece of engineering than most "tech" companies' software, and even low-end ones contain dozens or more microprocessors, requiring custom software for control, diagnostics, the entertainment system, etc. You can bang out a chat app in a 2 months and call yourself a tech company, but spend 2 or more years designing and engineering a vehicle, developing both hardware and software, to strict safety and efficiency specifications, and what you're doing isn't technology?
- curiouscat321 9y agoI think the definition is more cultural. The culture of a large bureaucratic car company is a lot different than most tech companies. They also have different views on talent
- joefourier 9y agoPerhaps "IT company" or a similar term is more appropriate, then? Why is it that software and Internet companies have reserved the term "tech" to themselves, so much that their culture has infused the term itself?
- taneq 9y agoThis is just an example of the thinking inside HN's thought bubble. Like the way that a company with 10 employees and $5mil/year in revenue is a "lifestyle business" because they're not raising venture capital and manoeuvring for an "exit" or IPO.
- spikels 9y agoIn business when people talk about a "tech" company it is not about technology but an industry classification. And the reason everyone wants to be a tech company is because the trade at higher earnings multiples than most other industries (i.e. they are worth more). Usually this is because they have higher growth rates and require few inputs and assets to generate their revenue. Companies like Ford are pretty much the opposite of that.
- siculars 9y ago“Unlimited” vacation? Autonomy? Authority? RSU’s? 150-250k engineering salaries? Select your own workstations? Hmm. Me thinks not.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoIn fairness, that's not a tech company, that's an SV tech company. (I didn't downvote.)
- ryanmarsh 9y agoMaking software (as primary differentiator) is going to require a very different mindset than producing an incremental release on a truck you’ve been making since 1948. I know a Ford product manager. I talked with her about this extensively and came away with the conclusion that they will be able to deliver the software required to keep up (barely) but not at the speed and quality required to become the industry front runner. Right now my eye is on GM (through cruise) and Tesla but only time will tell.
- csours 9y ago> Instead, I heard the Ford Motor Company described as a “mobility solutions provider” that engages in “multimodal journey planning.” People spoke about “whiteboarding” and “blue-skying” big ideas. I watched a video that described Ford’s efforts to build a “holistic, organic, interconnected system powered by a transportation operating system.” "Weird Al" Yankovic - Mission Statement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
- rrhd 9y agoNo, because it got nothing to do with technology. They aren't cool enough to be a tech company.
- corpMaverick 9y agoOh my God. I love this question. I worked for Ford 25 years ago (in manufacturing). Great company. But some managers argued with a straight face that we were NOT a technology company. Which can be translated to we don't need to follow best software development practices and can get a way with doing a half assed job. Now days, every large company is a technology company. If you need to manage 1000s of retail stores you are a technology company. If you manage 100,000s of SKUs you are a technology company. You cannot operate on a large scale without being really good at technology. It is an attitude. Ironically, I recently joined a large company where senior technical leaders are of this opinion. No wonder projects take years to be completed. Next time I will ask this on interview.