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I expect they don't want to pay what great software engineers cost, and even if they did, most such engineers probably wouldn't want to put up with GM's bureauc

I expect they don't want to pay what great software engineers cost, and even if they did, most such engineers probably wouldn't want to put up with GM's bureaucracy. It's probably kinda the same story with great mechanical and industrial engineers, which is why approximately nobody finds GM cars exciting.

jimmaswell 3y ago
It doesn't take much more than not going for the cheapest offshore team possible to make better car media center code than we get. I'm sure most of us could easily do it ourselves in a month or less. It seems like such a simple problem. Play songs and interface with some controls/radio receiver/etc while being at least a tiny bit conscious of efficiency.
- Rayhem 3y ago
  This is an incredibly myopic take bordering on arrogance. The infotainment system of a vehicle needs (as in, is mandated) to be as safety compliant as the rest of the vehicle's software so your steering doesn't lock out when the display crashes. Writing software for safety critical systems is not a task most developers are familiar with.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Uh, what? If my infotainment system is capable of influencing my steering or any safety-critical function then malpractice has been committed. Infotainment needs only read (one-way) capability on the vehicle.
    - sterlind 3y ago
      I do wonder about the CAN bus. there's no access control on the CAN network, there's one shared bus for the whole car, and any controller can starve the bus by spamming with a high address, unless that's changed. you'd hope that there'd be some kind of filtering to prevent the infotainment system from sending (arbitrary) CAN messages, but I recall some crazy demos of researchers pwning a car's accelerator after rooting the center console.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        The Tesla Cybertruck doesn’t use CAN for steer-by-wire. It uses Gigabit Ethernet. According to my mechanic my ABS system is using something similar. CAN isn’t the only bus in the car. According to Wikipedia the LIN bus is intended to supplement CAN with non-critical components.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Most modern cars have more than one CAN bus. (And it’s lower ID messages which have priority over higher, which is more trivia than argument against your premise.)
      - fallingknife 3y ago
        Is that really a security issue, though? If someone has access to your center console, they have access to your car. If someone has access to your car, they can cut your brake lines or do a million other things that are impossible to defend against.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        The concern is that the attack could be carried out remotely. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig... is one such example (might be the one GP is referring to).
        fallingknife 3y ago
        I agree that is a serious concern, then. I thought it sounded like voting machine hacking where the dramatic headlines are hiding the fact that the hackers had physical access to the machine.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Voting machines are scary for different reasons. 1) The general public has private physical access by design. 2) The chain of custody is unclear and hard to prove. This undermines trust in the system.
  - blcArmadillo 3y ago
    This is not correct. The main infotainment system is not considered safety critical. There are some functions such as rear view camera that are but often this is handled by a real time os that overlays the video on top of the infotainment output. The infotainment system crashing will not take down your steering or braking.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Can confirm that. My xdrive unit in my BMW died a few months after buying, and everything worked, I could even hear the parking sensors even if I couldn’t see the camera feed anymore because that was piped through the X-drive unit.
  - willvarfar 3y ago
    I have heard from industry insiders that this is true for some major manufacturers, and not for others. If the infotainment is integrated with the driving functions then every release of the infotainment system needs recertifying. Some manufacturers avoid this by having completely separate systems.
  - foobazgt 3y ago
    Dear no, rather exactly the opposite. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at this point if all new cars have the capability to reboot the display system in the middle of driving. You definitely don't want these systems intertwined. It has the side benefit of allowing you to do pretty aggressive things like using more modern hardware, software, etc. E.G. last time I checked, Tesla uses Godot for a decent amount of their UI.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Absolutely wrong. Infotainment systems in cars these days typically run on Linux, not a hard realtime OS, and are definitely not any kind of safety-critical system whatsoever. There's no need for it either; they're isolated from critical systems on the car, in case there's a problem (and there frequently is).
  - yourusername 3y ago
    I don't think that's right. VAG's software is terrible and crashes all the time. I've been locked out of adjusting my AC on a long drive because the infotainment system crashed.
- dntrkv 3y ago
  The problem is that you need to architect, build, and maintain that system for years, or decades, to come. That requires an in-house software team that knows what it's doing. Building that first version that "works" is easy. Building that first version that actually works and supports everything you need it to, is quite a bit more difficult. Building and then maintaining that software, year after year, without slowing to a crawl because of all the tech debt that's piled on (especially so since you have subpar engineers or you're contracting out to cheap workers abroad), is even harder. And if you want to provide a user experience comparable to what the top software companies in the world are capable of, that's just not gonna happen at these car companies. Tesla was born from the software industry, that's why they're the only ones that can compete.
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    Uh… cars don’t really change from year to year. Pretending that an acceptable infotainment system is hard to do, just isn’t so. The real problem is dumbass “features” (my MDX likes to show an animation of the keyboard typing out all the words a half second a letter, whenever you click autocomplete… for some reason) The real issue is that the infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought.
    - fl7305 3y ago
      > infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought. Also, cars sell in the millions. Car manufacturers will redesign a circuit board if it will save them cents on each board. So it is always a struggle to put a more powerful CPU in there.
      - jimmaswell 3y ago
        Infotainment responsiveness needs to be a NHTSA regulation. The mental load of dealing with laggy and unresponsive radios is surely causing accidents. Even if at worst it adds another $100 to the cost of the car to get a good enough cpu, so what?
      - 3y ago
mulmen 3y ago
A friend of mine has a 2022 Cadillac something. I was actually very impressed with it. Comfortable, quiet, no-nonsense self-driving capability. Seemed like a fine car. If GM can build similar no-nonsense infotainment software they will be fine.
- frumper 3y ago
  A no nonsense infotainment system doesn’t sound like the kind of thing people will spend $25billion a year on.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Good for them? Why should a good infotainment system cost $25B/year in perpetuity? Doesn't anyone solve problems anymore?
    - hgomersall 3y ago
      From the article: they want a slice of the $25 billion subscriptions.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Sure but who wants that? GM could be right that people want a car that hasn’t been enshittified. The problem with chasing $25bn in subscription fees is you don’t know the opportunity cost of alienating your customer base.
        frumper 3y ago
        > GM alone hoping to make as much as $25 billion per year just off subscriptions by 2030. They think they’ll make $25B themselves. They also want your data.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Oh, yeah, that’s worse.
shiroiuma 3y ago
>I expect they don't want to pay what great software engineers cost, and even if they did, most such engineers probably wouldn't want to put up with GM's bureaucracy. IMO, the bureaucracy isn't that big a problem; all big companies have this problem. The big problem for GM is their locations: who the heck wants to move to Detroit? Or any of the other places their suppliers tend to locate?
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Super low cost of living on a tech salary? Sounds good to me. But if that doesn't work GM has the Cruise offices in San Francisco that they'll have to find some use for. GM proper also has offices in North Hollywood and Pasadena. Cadillac famously used to have offices in New York for the prestige, but Cruise still does AFAIK. I'd bet that the problem is absolutely going to be more of a bureaucracy and salary issue than a location one. GM is a hilariously broken company and I can't imagine an enjoyable one to work for.
- foobazgt 3y ago
  I was talking to folks who did this in the southeast. Compensation was the problem, not location.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    For those folks, sure. For many others, the location could very well be. You won't know because many people probably only look at job ads filtered by location, so they just ignore any that are in "undesirable" places, whatever those may be.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  GM has many development centers, including Roswell, Georgia, but it should be pointed out that like most American metros, Metro Detroit has a wide variety of cities and towns for different lifestyles. You don't have to live in Robocop to work for GM, which has facilities spread about both the Detroit metro area and the country.
- fallingknife 3y ago
jandrewrogers 3y ago
The tragic aspect is that they spend inordinate amounts of money on this software with nothing to show for it. The money is spent so poorly and ineffectively, while trying to cut every inconsequential cost corner along the way with the output being micromanaged by people that don’t understand software, that if you directed a fraction of that money at a small team of highly paid and experienced software engineers you’d likely get a brilliant product. Automotive OEMs don’t work that way, they spray money at hundreds of the cheapest engineers they can get away with and hope something good comes out the other side. I’ve seen it over and over. Their problems could be solved by paying a small team of excellent engineers proper Silicon Valley wages. It would be cheaper and produce a better product, but they don’t think that way. The concept of a highly paid software engineer is objectionable to the executives in that industry.
foobazgt 3y ago
Many years ago, I discussed possible employment with a major head unit manufacturer. They were very excited about modernizing but basically stunned into silence when I mentioned typical senior FAANG pay. I'd be surprised if things have changed much.
- SauciestGNU 3y ago
  Sitting here in Michigan I still see auto company software positions sometimes that are mid/late career positions and pay under 100k. The legacy auto industry really doesn't get it. And now GM is forcing RTO, so I expect they'll lose more talent and have a harder time attracting engineers.

jimmaswell 3y ago

It doesn't take much more than not going for the cheapest offshore team possible to make better car media center code than we get. I'm sure most of us could easily do it ourselves in a month or less. It seems like such a simple problem. Play songs and interface with some controls/radio receiver/etc while being at least a tiny bit conscious of efficiency.

Rayhem 3y ago
This is an incredibly myopic take bordering on arrogance. The infotainment system of a vehicle needs (as in, is mandated) to be as safety compliant as the rest of the vehicle's software so your steering doesn't lock out when the display crashes. Writing software for safety critical systems is not a task most developers are familiar with.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Uh, what? If my infotainment system is capable of influencing my steering or any safety-critical function then malpractice has been committed. Infotainment needs only read (one-way) capability on the vehicle.
  - sterlind 3y ago
    I do wonder about the CAN bus. there's no access control on the CAN network, there's one shared bus for the whole car, and any controller can starve the bus by spamming with a high address, unless that's changed. you'd hope that there'd be some kind of filtering to prevent the infotainment system from sending (arbitrary) CAN messages, but I recall some crazy demos of researchers pwning a car's accelerator after rooting the center console.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      The Tesla Cybertruck doesn’t use CAN for steer-by-wire. It uses Gigabit Ethernet. According to my mechanic my ABS system is using something similar. CAN isn’t the only bus in the car. According to Wikipedia the LIN bus is intended to supplement CAN with non-critical components.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Most modern cars have more than one CAN bus. (And it’s lower ID messages which have priority over higher, which is more trivia than argument against your premise.)
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      Is that really a security issue, though? If someone has access to your center console, they have access to your car. If someone has access to your car, they can cut your brake lines or do a million other things that are impossible to defend against.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        The concern is that the attack could be carried out remotely. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig... is one such example (might be the one GP is referring to).
        fallingknife 3y ago
        I agree that is a serious concern, then. I thought it sounded like voting machine hacking where the dramatic headlines are hiding the fact that the hackers had physical access to the machine.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Voting machines are scary for different reasons. 1) The general public has private physical access by design. 2) The chain of custody is unclear and hard to prove. This undermines trust in the system.
- blcArmadillo 3y ago
  This is not correct. The main infotainment system is not considered safety critical. There are some functions such as rear view camera that are but often this is handled by a real time os that overlays the video on top of the infotainment output. The infotainment system crashing will not take down your steering or braking.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Can confirm that. My xdrive unit in my BMW died a few months after buying, and everything worked, I could even hear the parking sensors even if I couldn’t see the camera feed anymore because that was piped through the X-drive unit.
- willvarfar 3y ago
  I have heard from industry insiders that this is true for some major manufacturers, and not for others. If the infotainment is integrated with the driving functions then every release of the infotainment system needs recertifying. Some manufacturers avoid this by having completely separate systems.
- foobazgt 3y ago
  Dear no, rather exactly the opposite. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at this point if all new cars have the capability to reboot the display system in the middle of driving. You definitely don't want these systems intertwined. It has the side benefit of allowing you to do pretty aggressive things like using more modern hardware, software, etc. E.G. last time I checked, Tesla uses Godot for a decent amount of their UI.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Absolutely wrong. Infotainment systems in cars these days typically run on Linux, not a hard realtime OS, and are definitely not any kind of safety-critical system whatsoever. There's no need for it either; they're isolated from critical systems on the car, in case there's a problem (and there frequently is).
- yourusername 3y ago
  I don't think that's right. VAG's software is terrible and crashes all the time. I've been locked out of adjusting my AC on a long drive because the infotainment system crashed.
dntrkv 3y ago
The problem is that you need to architect, build, and maintain that system for years, or decades, to come. That requires an in-house software team that knows what it's doing. Building that first version that "works" is easy. Building that first version that actually works and supports everything you need it to, is quite a bit more difficult. Building and then maintaining that software, year after year, without slowing to a crawl because of all the tech debt that's piled on (especially so since you have subpar engineers or you're contracting out to cheap workers abroad), is even harder. And if you want to provide a user experience comparable to what the top software companies in the world are capable of, that's just not gonna happen at these car companies. Tesla was born from the software industry, that's why they're the only ones that can compete.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  Uh… cars don’t really change from year to year. Pretending that an acceptable infotainment system is hard to do, just isn’t so. The real problem is dumbass “features” (my MDX likes to show an animation of the keyboard typing out all the words a half second a letter, whenever you click autocomplete… for some reason) The real issue is that the infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought.
  - fl7305 3y ago
    > infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought. Also, cars sell in the millions. Car manufacturers will redesign a circuit board if it will save them cents on each board. So it is always a struggle to put a more powerful CPU in there.
    - jimmaswell 3y ago
      Infotainment responsiveness needs to be a NHTSA regulation. The mental load of dealing with laggy and unresponsive radios is surely causing accidents. Even if at worst it adds another $100 to the cost of the car to get a good enough cpu, so what?
    - 3y ago

mulmen 3y ago

A friend of mine has a 2022 Cadillac something. I was actually very impressed with it. Comfortable, quiet, no-nonsense self-driving capability. Seemed like a fine car. If GM can build similar no-nonsense infotainment software they will be fine.

frumper 3y ago
A no nonsense infotainment system doesn’t sound like the kind of thing people will spend $25billion a year on.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Good for them? Why should a good infotainment system cost $25B/year in perpetuity? Doesn't anyone solve problems anymore?
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    From the article: they want a slice of the $25 billion subscriptions.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      Sure but who wants that? GM could be right that people want a car that hasn’t been enshittified. The problem with chasing $25bn in subscription fees is you don’t know the opportunity cost of alienating your customer base.
      - frumper 3y ago
        > GM alone hoping to make as much as $25 billion per year just off subscriptions by 2030. They think they’ll make $25B themselves. They also want your data.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Oh, yeah, that’s worse.

shiroiuma 3y ago

>I expect they don't want to pay what great software engineers cost, and even if they did, most such engineers probably wouldn't want to put up with GM's bureaucracy. IMO, the bureaucracy isn't that big a problem; all big companies have this problem. The big problem for GM is their locations: who the heck wants to move to Detroit? Or any of the other places their suppliers tend to locate?

inferiorhuman 3y ago
Super low cost of living on a tech salary? Sounds good to me. But if that doesn't work GM has the Cruise offices in San Francisco that they'll have to find some use for. GM proper also has offices in North Hollywood and Pasadena. Cadillac famously used to have offices in New York for the prestige, but Cruise still does AFAIK. I'd bet that the problem is absolutely going to be more of a bureaucracy and salary issue than a location one. GM is a hilariously broken company and I can't imagine an enjoyable one to work for.
foobazgt 3y ago
I was talking to folks who did this in the southeast. Compensation was the problem, not location.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  For those folks, sure. For many others, the location could very well be. You won't know because many people probably only look at job ads filtered by location, so they just ignore any that are in "undesirable" places, whatever those may be.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
GM has many development centers, including Roswell, Georgia, but it should be pointed out that like most American metros, Metro Detroit has a wide variety of cities and towns for different lifestyles. You don't have to live in Robocop to work for GM, which has facilities spread about both the Detroit metro area and the country.
fallingknife 3y ago

jandrewrogers 3y ago

The tragic aspect is that they spend inordinate amounts of money on this software with nothing to show for it. The money is spent so poorly and ineffectively, while trying to cut every inconsequential cost corner along the way with the output being micromanaged by people that don’t understand software, that if you directed a fraction of that money at a small team of highly paid and experienced software engineers you’d likely get a brilliant product. Automotive OEMs don’t work that way, they spray money at hundreds of the cheapest engineers they can get away with and hope something good comes out the other side. I’ve seen it over and over. Their problems could be solved by paying a small team of excellent engineers proper Silicon Valley wages. It would be cheaper and produce a better product, but they don’t think that way. The concept of a highly paid software engineer is objectionable to the executives in that industry.

foobazgt 3y ago

Many years ago, I discussed possible employment with a major head unit manufacturer. They were very excited about modernizing but basically stunned into silence when I mentioned typical senior FAANG pay. I'd be surprised if things have changed much.

SauciestGNU 3y ago
Sitting here in Michigan I still see auto company software positions sometimes that are mid/late career positions and pay under 100k. The legacy auto industry really doesn't get it. And now GM is forcing RTO, so I expect they'll lose more talent and have a harder time attracting engineers.