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GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
- thoraway1010 6y ago"doubling down on our engineering work and engineering talent,” Cruise spokesperson Milin Mehta told Reuters. Do these folks even try to hide their lies? Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay off in their lidar team. Can companies be sued for these types of basically false claims or are we just stuck commenting on what lies they seem come up with. Can you imagine if your day to day life involved interacting with folks this dishonest?
- tschwimmer 6y agoThe first amendment protects this type of speech.
- majormajor 6y agoOne should question what interests we're protecting by allowing lying in various contexts vs having just a blanket "say whatever you want" default privilege.
- runawaybottle 6y agoI don’t know if anyone is consciously protecting their right to lie, but we are via inaction allowing them to construct the language of lying. If I made a programming language that got rid a basic object maps for example, I’d eliminate the scenarios where one would use a lookup map. These people construct their own language, and so long as we speak their language, we can’t really speak against them. The words don’t exist by design.
- three_seagrass 6y agoFirst amendment only protects from government censorship, and SCOTUS has said that if the expression of the speech causes harm then first amendment doesn't apply. Also there are plenty of individuals and private organizations who can sue if they can prove damages.
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- cactus2093 6y agoI never hear the phrase "doubling down" used to mean "doubling", except maybe in the original usage in gambling. But colloquially it just means "increasing focus on". In that use there is no inherent contradiction in downsizing + attempting to increasing focus. In fact that seems to be what almost all companies who downsize are attempting to do. Edit: In fact come to think of it, even in blackjack when you double down, it's as much about committing as it is the doubling of the bet. You have to take one and only one card and that ends your turn, so you're turning down all other options to do this one thing, and in exchange for taking that risky move you get to double your bet.
- thoraway1010 6y agodoubling down is not about increasing focus. It is about increasing risk by making a BIGGER (not smaller) bet on something. This is in the original meaning in gambling (you are convinced you are right and so double your bet) and elsewhere. Only in PR land is a cash flow pullback and risk reduction step such as a headcount reduction called a doubling down. It goes to show how pernicious these types of intentional miswordings are.
- ABeeSea 6y agoAmazon launched Fire Phone and Alexa months apart. They shit-canned the phone and doubled down on Alexa. It’s not just PR speak. Many of the phone people either left the company or went to work on Alexa. They also did a massive inventory write down for the phone in their quarterly report.
- vaidhy 6y agoIt seems to me like you are agreeing with the parent. Amazon increased their risk by closing the phone side and increasing the resources allocated to Alexa and hence the double down.
- 8note 6y agoMissing information: are they downsizing elsewhere as well, and the lidar folks are being downsized by less?
- tehjoker 6y agoThey mean they're increasing the workload of the remaining engineers, not that they're doing something to benefit or other wise honor them.
- linuxftw 6y agoThere's no better time to exploit your employees than when the job market is in the toilet.
- thoraway1010 6y agoyep - the idea that they are doubling down on their engineering talent (2x headcount or 2x salaries or 2x resources) or whatever big bet they claim to be making seems like it might be a lie. The PR guy (Milin Mehta) used to work at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange. They are known for suing to identify ten reviewers on Glassdoor, claiming they are former employees in breach of their severance contract. Why work at companies like this?
- hckr_news 6y agoThat’s quite incredible.
- wutbrodo 6y agoLeaving aside your apparently poor reading comprehension skills ("doubling down" does not mean doubling), this explicitly contradicts an internal memo leaked to TC: > The company will “continue to hire aggressively in the most critical areas within engineering, which right now means doubling down on senior leadership and senior IC roles to further support out improving core tech objective,” Ammann wrote in the memo. “From here we expect to recruit and grow across our engineering teams for the balance of the year.” The worst I can say about this is that Cruise is bad at PR: the fact that people are dumb enough to so badly and confidently misread a message is something that comms people are supposed to plan for and mitigate. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/cruise-lays-off-8-of-workforce-to-cut-costs-and-put-resources-towards-engineering/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/cruise-lays-off-8-of-workf...
- deminature 6y agoThey obviously don't mean it literally in terms of headcount, but more likely in terms of focus and determination.
- runawaybottle 6y agoProof is in the pudding right? First to go.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThen it is mostly kumbaya.
- wutbrodo 6y ago> They obviously don't mean it literally in terms of headcount In what way is this obvious? Per Techcrunch[1], they moved their Pasadena lidar team to SF[2], presumably parting ways with those not willing to relocate. The linked article has a quote from the CEO saying: > The company will “continue to hire aggressively in the most critical areas within engineering, which right now means doubling down on senior leadership and senior IC roles to further support out improving core tech objective,” Ammann wrote in the memo. “From here we expect to recruit and grow across our engineering teams for the balance of the year.” That seems pretty definitively contradictory to the claim that they're not hiring or expanding engineering. This is from probably thirty seconds of Googling, but apparently that's far above the effort bar for topmost top-level comments on HN... (this is in reference to GP's moronic comment, not you). [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/cruise-lays-off-8-of-workforce-to-cut-costs-and-put-resources-towards-engineering/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/cruise-lays-off-8-of-workf... [2] I wondered why they had a team in Pasadena while headquartered in SF... it was an acquisition that they hadn't consolidated.
- runawaybottle 6y agoThis is the kind of stuff I always advise people in long term careers to be privy of. First to go always means least cared about. Nothing wrong with it, but always know your place in a company. Don’t ever be lulled into rhetoric such as ‘doubling down on engineering’. ‘We care about code quality’ - code quality sucks at the company, ‘we care about work life balance’ - there is none at the company, ‘we value innovation’ - can’t even suggest anything to product, stay on spec.... ‘We care about future tech’ — lay off r&d at the first sight of a downturn. Just shut the fuck up already.
- thoraway1010 6y agoSomewhat true. My favorite: "We adhere to the highest ethical principles" - as they give you a 500 page ethics doc that no one reads or follows. But I've actually found it's a good / reliable tell. You just stay away from companies like this that can't talk straight and you end up a LOT happier. I don't mean they need to be nice - but just clear relatively honest normal English language communication. ie, "we're cutting back to reduce our burn rate." vs "we are doubling down on engineering talent." Some PR people actually get it I think and can basically be honest while adding some things you may not have thought of. Not in this case though!
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> My favorite: "We adhere to the highest ethical principles" - as they give you a 500 page ethics doc that no one reads or follows. That's just a translation error. "To adhere" means "to stick"; while the formalized version sounds like they stick to high ethical princilples, what they meant is they stick it to them.
- runawaybottle 6y agoThe new-speak of hypocrisy is utterly cemented in corporate and pseudo corporate businesses. Sadly, a requisite skillet now days is having to navigate all the bullshit.
- thoraway1010 6y ago
- monadic2 6y agoThis could just mean they aren’t developing lidar further. Because there is no retraining culture it’s difficult to tell.
- aphextron 6y ago>Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay off in their lidar team. Self driving will be solved with computer vision. Lidar is an unnecessary technology even for full level 5 autonomy. Most self driving companies have come to this conclusion by now.
- AsyncAwait 6y agoAny data to back this up besides Musk saying his approach's the best?
- aphextron 6y agohttps://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344 https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344
- toomuchtodo 6y agohttps://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/07/elon-musk-calls-lidar-a-fools-errand-other-autonomous-driving-experts-starting-to-agree/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/07/elon-musk-calls-lidar-a... https://youtu.be/fNgEG5rCav4 https://youtu.be/fNgEG5rCav4 > Anthony Levandowski, former Google/Waymo engineer, now backtracks on lidar and says, ”Elon is right.”
- 8note 6y agoHe might not be the most trustworthy source with the waymo thing.
- FireBeyond 6y agoIt also, conveniently, lessens the potential value of the data he took with him, to say this.
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- three_seagrass 6y agoA quote from someone who stole trade secrets backtracking on the importance of said trade secrets is not exactly trustworthy.
- baddox 6y agoWhat tort would you claim they’ve committed? It’s not reasonable to interpret that claim as literally doubling the amount of engineering staff. No court would consider that for even a moment. And even if you could argue that a spokesperson is lying about fuzzy concepts like the amount of focus company places on engineering, who does that wrong?
- sulam 6y agoOne thing you also have to understand here (other than the replies I've read) is that you can in fact lay off people and yet increase the percentage investment you are making in something. You have to cut your budget by 30% -- you can do this as a haircut everyone takes, or you can be selective, and ask one group to take less of a cut and other groups to take more. Your overall spend will be more heavily weighted towards groups that take less of a cut, obviously. You can also leave your overall budget for one team unchanged, or even grow it, and simply change your focus by putting more emphasis (and budget) on one set of activities vs another. In the Cruise case either scenario is possible. They can have decided that 3rd party LIDAR is good enough, and not strategic enough, that they should cut there. That could be the sum of it, while other groups like HR, Marketing, etc takes bigger cuts. Alternatively they could use the same logic to cut the LIDAR team and then take the savings generated to invest more heavily in (made up example) route planning or something.
- Animats 6y agoThis is as they lay off in their lidar team. There are too many LIDAR startups chasing too little market for LIDARs. The delay in self-driving cars reaching the market means automotive LIDARs are only selling in sample quantities. GM/Cruise may not need an in-house LIDAR unit.
- primrose 6y ago“Anyone using Lidar is doomed, DOOMED!” Looks like GM is catching up to where the industry was a year ago, from A cofounder of Waymo. https://youtu.be/0w1G2GyPTUM https://youtu.be/0w1G2GyPTUM
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- renewiltord 6y agoHonestly, I'd rather work with them than with people who wilfully misinterpret statements and just flip a shit constantly. "I think it's time to double down on email marketing" -> my teammates understand that means I'm going to switch where I put most of my effort. I can just imagine you saying "Yet you're not allocating 8 hours a day instead of 4 on this. I'm going to sue you" God, that would be exhausting.
- hckr_news 6y agoIt’s just a weasel word that can mean anything. Avoid weasel words. In your situation, why not just say I’m going to put my current efforts and focus on X as you clearly meant.
- renewiltord 6y agoBecause human expression is cool, man. "You guys are killing it!" is way better than "You human beings are performing above average for this task. I appreciate this". Also it's not a weasel word. It's totally just an expression. I find it truly incredible that someone feels the way you do.
- throwawayjava 6y agoIf someone told me I were killing it, I would feel like a 22 year old engineer again and have flashbacks to that one PM who loved my work but who came to work still tripping some Mondays. Glad to be making a key stakeholder happy, but holy fuck am I glad we finally fired that tool. If someone told me I was doing above average and they appreciated my work, I would feel... appreciated and proud of my work. The world where killing and crushing are used in an unironic way is tiny and occupied mostly by people under 30. Can you retire at 30?
- smabie 6y agoIf you are killing and crushing it enough, then yeah, I guess.
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- rifflebutter 6y agoYou seem to have misunderstood what the lidar team refers to. The Lidar team laid off is not part of Cruise's essential engineering team. It belongs to a small, research/demo-focused company that Cruise bought a long time ago which claimed they would make solid-state Lidars that costs 99% less than currently available lidars, which would cut most of the cost to self-driving cars using lidars today. They function as a separate entity from Cruise and have very little to do with Cruise's core self-driving technology team on a day to day basis. As the article has made clear, within Cruise's engineering team, only the non-essential teams (i.e. not core self-driving technology) have been impacted by this layoff.
- supernova87a 6y agoFunny, as they were just a few weeks ago (even during the lockdown) certain recruiters were saying they were aggressively hiring -- and are still listed as hiring for example here: https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/ https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/ Seems like suddenly they got worried about how long they can maintain the burn rate. Doesn't help that driving and commuting fell off the map.
- aphextron 6y agoIt's not at all uncommon for companies to simultaneously perform layoffs while actively hiring.
- dragosmocrii 6y agoSell the highs, buy the lows
- sida 6y agoOr you could see it as, they know who are the low performers. This is a good way to fire low performers in bulk without getting a lot of flak
- selimthegrim 6y agoI think high and low cost was what they meant
- dragosmocrii 6y agothis
- chris11 6y agoFull self-driving is a long way off, but GM can use Cruise to develop new active safety systems for their current cars. I don't think GM is doing as well there as Toyota or Honda, let alone Tesla.
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- sdan 6y agoI've never seen a company aggressively hire as much as Cruise did in the last 3 years. Obviously this is a bad thing, but not entirely surprising they had to hold the brakes during this time.
- sanguy 6y agoCRUISE is a joke. These guys can't find their own ass with 4 hands and a flashlight. So much internal overlap and fragmentation that I would not be shocked they are hiring and firing at the same time - perhaps even the same people
- thoraway1010 6y agoMy impression was cruise was sort of the established players efforts to throw GOBS of money at a space they were worried about. Ie, a place that measures progress in part based on just expense. Ie, waymo's tech is interesting but we have cruise so we are OK. Or tesla's tech looks interesting, but we have cruise. I'd love to know what the kit they use for self driving costs. It looks monumentally expensive when you see one of their cars driving around. I'm interested in MobileEye's next version of tech - wish they'd be pushing harder or did the Intel borg swallow them? They seemed to have a practical and pretty reasonably priced approach.
- FreedomToCreate 6y agoWaymo and Tesla have been designing a lot of their own hardware and I believe Cruise has been doing the same. Nvidia and Intel have been successful with getting start-ups into their ecosystem and attracted OEMS who want hardware for ADAS, but for FSD, you have to get the costs remarkably down, and that will need custom hardware without a middle man to pay. I doubt cruise is using anyones kit.
- FreedomToCreate 6y agoJust a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to hire as well.
- xoxoy 6y agoGM is not hiring. The auto industry is being hit hard right now. And Cruise is notorious for being a toxic mess as is.
- kevindeasis 6y agoOn other forums it seems like it splits into two group. One group says that it depends on the team and that they love their current team. And the other group is how working for Cruise is the worst decision they've made in their life. My curiosity is with, how does a company totally change their culture and do a complete 180%? From having workers completely hating their current company to completely not seeing themselves in moving to a different company. As some companies used to have employees mentioning it is the worst tech company in the bay area to one of the best in the bay area
- saalweachter 6y agoI'm not sure this makes Cruise particularly unique. There are a lot of FAANG and ex-FAANG employees on this board, and you can find lots of people who love their job and feel like they are well-treated, compensated and respected and doing a meaningful impactful job, and there are plenty who felt ignored, underpaid and disrespected while working as a cog in an machine designed to sell ads.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI think you'll find most FAANG developers feel quite well paid. But cog in a machine definitely describes many of the complaints.
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- greendave 6y ago> Before the layoffs, Cruise had 1,800 full-time employees. Their hiring rate has been remarkable. Less than 3 years ago (6/2017) they had 200 employees. Just over a year ago (3/2019), they had ~1000.
- paxys 6y agoWow that is ridiculous. There is absolutely no way to have those numbers without a major compromise in the quality of hires.
- ISL 6y agoThere are 7,500,000,000 people in the world. A lot more than 800 of them are good at their jobs.
- paxys 6y ago800 hires a year means ~15 people starting every week. Every one of those 800 positions likely received hundreds of resumes, which needed to be sifted through. Then you need to have calls with each candidate, narrow down the pool further. Then all the onsite rounds. For an initial team of 200 that is an impossible task.
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoThe "initial" 200 people don't hire the next 800, they hire the next 1. Then the 201 people hire the next 1, and the 202 hire the next one, and so forth.
- gamblor956 6y agoI don't think many people on this board comprehend that there exist professionals at most companies whose sole responsibility is to identify, recruit, and onboard new employees. Or that most companies are willing to hire people who aren't perfect candidates because a fair amount of internal training is expected. Hiring only unicorn candidates who already have the perfect qualifications and don't need any training/onboarding is a peculiarly Silicon Valley phenomenon.
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- jiofih 6y agoWell, can someone explain how does a company with no product and no market get affected by the pandemic? Seems like a cop out yet again.
- jfoster 6y agoCruise is part of GM.
- rifflebutter 6y agoCorrection -- Cruise is majority-owned by GM but not really a GM subsidiary after SoftBank invested in it.
- paxys 6y agoGenerally the investors tighten their wallets and start demanding results.
- zelly 6y agoRemember (approx. 6 months ago) when we were seriously, unironically worried that all menial labor jobs would be taken by AI? Now we're worried about all the AI jobs disappearing.
- epoxyhockey 6y agothe layoff includes staff at an engineering team in Padasedna, California, that works on Lidar
- nabla9 6y agoAlmost 40 percent of those in households making less than $40,000 a year had lost a job in March. Tech sector has had it easy so far.
- rtkwe 6y agoIt's going to be a bit weird because a lot of those should come back because the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable.
- rosywoozlechan 6y ago> the underlying business didn't suddenly become nonviable They may have. We don't know when or if things will go back to the way they were before March 2020 and how consumer and employer behavior will change. For example, maybe movie theaters are completely screwed. Except as a novelty, the big business chains may not survive. Universal Studios is already pushing back on theater release windows and no live-action movies are being filmed right now, and who knows for how long that lasts. Will the public feel safe enough to go back into theaters all at once before theaters run out of money as if nothing happened? I imagine some of those jobs at least are permanently gone. Employers will probably maintain work from home and cut back on office space. All those jobs that support maintaining offices may not come back either. I don't think the restaurant business will jump back either, people can't just restart their failed restaurant as if they didn't lose all that money they needed to keep their already slim margin business open before the pandemic.
- ipsum2 6y agoSort of off topic, I've noticed news articles have been very lax with basic editing: "Thursday, the layoff includes staff at an engineering team in Padasedna, California" The article says "Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee and David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio". Two editors missed the typo.
- rifflebutter 6y agoI noticed that too :D
- kgin 6y agoPadasedna, Cafilroina: The City of Roses
- Fricken 6y agoA couple years ago Cruise acquired Strobe, a Lidar start-up. It appears these are the people getting laid-off.
- jjcon 6y agoI believe the majority of the layoffs were from recruiting and design.
- djsumdog 6y agoIt's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've worked in computer vision startups and know how powerful the tech can be, but it still can't account with even a fraction of challenging driving conditions. I don't think anything short of general purpose AI could handle it. We are some pretty big discoveries away from general AI. I also don't think they solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass transit: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...
- kylec 6y agoI think we're very far away from general-purpose self-driving that can drive in all locations, conditions, and handle all scenarios. But we don't necessarily need an all-or-nothing solution - I think we could be reasonably close to a self-driving system that can handle a whitelisted set of roads and highways, especially if those roads were augmented to accommodate that self-driving in some way.
- mikepurvis 6y agoYeah, I've always understood that to be the big initial play— get all those long-haul trucking miles autonomous, relegate human drivers to handling the in-city miles and cargo yards. I think Ottomotto (remember them?) might have even made a video years ago which pitched this exact scheme. Of course, the environmentalist in me is saddened by the thought of further driving down the cost of that shipping mode which might be most compatible with being switched to rail freight.
- etrk 6y agoRegardless of road quality, weather conditions are unpredictable. When the rain or snow or haboob kicks in, I guess your car will pull over to the side of the road and you'll need to drive manually until conditions improve. We'll need to keep the steering wheel around for the foreseeable future.
- iamleppert 6y agoI went to a recruiting event that was put on by Cruise. It was disguised as a marketing "advisory board" where they asked us questions like "What motivates you as an engineer when looking for a new job? Would changing the world help?" "Would you like to be rewarded handsomely?" "Which of these statements most resonate with you?" They paid me $500 for about an hour to sit through their sales pitch. Then I finally caved and had an interview where the hardest question was how to flatten an array. I passed on that place...
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- throwxmlphell 6y agoI've been an interviewer at Cruise, including on panels where Kyle was part of the committee. Trust me, there are many employees who want to have a decent recruiting experience, and a lot of engineers who want to ask questions that are actually worth your time. The bullshit you experienced is 100% top-down from Kyle. For years there has been tremendous pressure to hit headcount goals and to throw money at the problem versus trying to establish quality. (why? well headcount is one of the only needles Kyle can move himself that suggests to GM that there is progress). Kyle claims (explicitly) he's trying to build a strong "brand" for Cruise resumes, but the data and employee feedback just don't support that claim. It's just one of the several areas where Kyle insists on shooting his feet off year after year and won't actually listen to feedback (yes even when he asks for "direct feedback").
- brown9-2 6y agoThis comment is really confusing for anyone who doesn’t know who Kyle is
- fingerlocks 6y agoWho’s Kyle?
- sytse 6y ago
- GEBBL 6y agoI follow infosec twitter and it seemed to me some really good security folk got laid off. Pretty eye raising. Hope they get sorted soon.
- GPUboy 6y agobump? bump. https://medium.com/@rohanarun/a-better-solution-for-autonomous-cars-83f9ded6dbfb https://medium.com/@rohanarun/a-better-solution-for-autonomo... When I proposed this to nVidia engineers, fairly high up, they argued that if humans could do it with two eyes, they could do it in 3 years. It's now 5 years later.
- GCA10 6y agoSample of 1, but driving alongside a Cruise car in San Francisco last year was absolutely terrifying. It was coming up on bicyclists going the same direction, ahead of it, and kept swerving back and forth by four feet or so, depending on whether it "saw" them or not. It was unable to either pass the bicylists or lurk back far enough that they could go about their own business. Meanwhile it disrupted the flow for all the rest of us regular drivers. This is not the easiest roadway situation to "teach" an autonomous-driving system, but it's been a known issue for a long time. Not sure why Cruise couldn't get it right.
- beefalo 6y agoCruise seems to use my neighborhood as its primary testing grounds. They drive slower than the elderly and are always braking unexpectedly due to any movement near the sidewalks.
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- noobermin 6y agoHard to see this as indicative of anything other than covid19.
- barrenko 6y agoThere is no going back. Viruses are not going to disappear, we just lived in our urbanization bubble for a very long time. On the nature scale of things it's extremely short. Cheap flights and ludicrous interconnectedness are not that necessary and are barely more than disease vectors. Local food, local communities, and work in your basement on anything via the internet is a development for quite some time now. Goods can stay transported as before, but shuffling tourists around the globe via government financing said industries out from bancruptcy every ten years is dumb, corona or no corona.
- anxman 6y agoCruise cars are constantly driving and testing in my neighborhood in SF. I can assure you, I will never step foot in one of those death machines. I see them make mistakes all the time.