4 ms·

What do you do instead? The VW processes for mechanical, manufacturing and mechatronics engineering seem to work reasonably well. How do you change the culture

What do you do instead? The VW processes for mechanical, manufacturing and mechatronics engineering seem to work reasonably well. How do you change the culture of such a large company, without breaking what works?

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
You recognize that software engineering is different from mechanical/electrical engineering and stop shooting yourself in the foot. This will only happen when a competent software guy is part of the top executive suite and has sufficient freedom to do what is necessary. I think the chances are slim, considering the general ineptitude regarding software development in German companies. They will get better until finally arriving at mediocre, but they will never be as great as American companies. I hope one day they manage to implement a functioning CarPlay in their VW Polos, it has been broken since years.
lucianbr 2y ago
I expect people making tens of millions per year to figure it out. Are there no auto manufacturers with ok software? Presumably it's not impossible.
- dagw 2y ago
  Are there no auto manufacturers with ok software? The only in house auto software people don't seem to completely hate is Tesla.
n_ary 2y ago
The core issues of such daughter concerns is that, despite being a separate thing, a lot of "leadership" people from core management are shipped to run the separate thing. These leadership people carry over the whole process and cultural mess into the new place while claiming to be "startup culture". Secondly, one major issue that frequently occurs but goes unnoticed is that, the pay is abysmal. Basically, the leadership expect to hire talents for the same pay(or sometimes less) of what is paid in core group but forget that core group gets plenty other benefits(union benefits are immense things, educational budgets, pursue some other stuff for a while and then come back anytime to take up where you left off, family benefits, discounts, profit sharing etc.) and get confused when people obviously don't want to work for that kind of pay minus all the benefits. So eventually, they hire a lot of expensive consultants, who create lot of busywork to induce artificial lack of manpower to hire more of them. Eventually, a lot of budget is spent, only thing left to show are a lot of irrelevant proof of concepts. Then core group finance people comes asking for massive budget cuts, when all of these consultants leave(with any domain knowledge) and suddenly a small firefighter internal people have to start cleaning up the mess and work long hours. Thanks to good social benefits, most people internally get frustrated due to such bad conditions and leave and then eventually the company folds. Sadly, it is mostly a repeat playbook of big names and I have seen it happen three times already. I don't blame the consultant firms as it is not their fault to make as much billing as possible because they know there will be budget cut anytime. I don't blame internal people leaving because, they are never paid fairly, subjected to very bad conditions and they are free to leave and care about their wellbeing.
- sveme 2y ago
  Leadership at Cariad also seems to have a background in mechanical engineering, so those processes translate. You need people with hands-on software engineering experience to create a new culture that works for software development.
  - n_ary 2y ago
    Am not sure about Cariad leadership, but the three failed projects I have been part of, the leadership was adequately technical(some mechanical, some aeronautical, some electrical, some material and many other, but they had been removed from the ground for so long that they mostly forgot how the actual engineering works and start hiring expensive consultant-management to insulate themselves from all liabilities of dealing with the actual people. I kid you not, one of the failed project had only 1/7th of actual engineers building the software(and partially hardware), 4/7th were mostly leadership and management and rest 2/7th mostly HR, finance, regulation, legal, supply chain etc. And out of that 1/7th, only 10% were inhouse engineers, rest were expensive rented consultants, who were mostly busy doing politics. The other two were slightly healthy ratio but managed to burn out the hardworking people by not understanding the actual requirements and introducing 200 steps of red-tape on everything.
kcb 2y ago
Don't treat all software development as "IT".
- constantcrying 2y ago
  What did you mean? Where did I even come close to doing that?
  - kcb 2y ago
    Sorry, I meant as a response to your question. But point is, software at European non-software companies gets grouped in with IT. Treated as a support team rather than a revenue team, with salaries to match.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      But this can't be true for VW, which set up an entire company to do software for cars, which has nothing to do with providing IT or was ever viewed as a "support team".

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

You recognize that software engineering is different from mechanical/electrical engineering and stop shooting yourself in the foot. This will only happen when a competent software guy is part of the top executive suite and has sufficient freedom to do what is necessary. I think the chances are slim, considering the general ineptitude regarding software development in German companies. They will get better until finally arriving at mediocre, but they will never be as great as American companies. I hope one day they manage to implement a functioning CarPlay in their VW Polos, it has been broken since years.

lucianbr 2y ago

I expect people making tens of millions per year to figure it out. Are there no auto manufacturers with ok software? Presumably it's not impossible.

dagw 2y ago
Are there no auto manufacturers with ok software? The only in house auto software people don't seem to completely hate is Tesla.

n_ary 2y ago

The core issues of such daughter concerns is that, despite being a separate thing, a lot of "leadership" people from core management are shipped to run the separate thing. These leadership people carry over the whole process and cultural mess into the new place while claiming to be "startup culture". Secondly, one major issue that frequently occurs but goes unnoticed is that, the pay is abysmal. Basically, the leadership expect to hire talents for the same pay(or sometimes less) of what is paid in core group but forget that core group gets plenty other benefits(union benefits are immense things, educational budgets, pursue some other stuff for a while and then come back anytime to take up where you left off, family benefits, discounts, profit sharing etc.) and get confused when people obviously don't want to work for that kind of pay minus all the benefits. So eventually, they hire a lot of expensive consultants, who create lot of busywork to induce artificial lack of manpower to hire more of them. Eventually, a lot of budget is spent, only thing left to show are a lot of irrelevant proof of concepts. Then core group finance people comes asking for massive budget cuts, when all of these consultants leave(with any domain knowledge) and suddenly a small firefighter internal people have to start cleaning up the mess and work long hours. Thanks to good social benefits, most people internally get frustrated due to such bad conditions and leave and then eventually the company folds. Sadly, it is mostly a repeat playbook of big names and I have seen it happen three times already. I don't blame the consultant firms as it is not their fault to make as much billing as possible because they know there will be budget cut anytime. I don't blame internal people leaving because, they are never paid fairly, subjected to very bad conditions and they are free to leave and care about their wellbeing.

sveme 2y ago
Leadership at Cariad also seems to have a background in mechanical engineering, so those processes translate. You need people with hands-on software engineering experience to create a new culture that works for software development.
- n_ary 2y ago
  Am not sure about Cariad leadership, but the three failed projects I have been part of, the leadership was adequately technical(some mechanical, some aeronautical, some electrical, some material and many other, but they had been removed from the ground for so long that they mostly forgot how the actual engineering works and start hiring expensive consultant-management to insulate themselves from all liabilities of dealing with the actual people. I kid you not, one of the failed project had only 1/7th of actual engineers building the software(and partially hardware), 4/7th were mostly leadership and management and rest 2/7th mostly HR, finance, regulation, legal, supply chain etc. And out of that 1/7th, only 10% were inhouse engineers, rest were expensive rented consultants, who were mostly busy doing politics. The other two were slightly healthy ratio but managed to burn out the hardworking people by not understanding the actual requirements and introducing 200 steps of red-tape on everything.

kcb 2y ago

Don't treat all software development as "IT".

constantcrying 2y ago
What did you mean? Where did I even come close to doing that?
- kcb 2y ago
  Sorry, I meant as a response to your question. But point is, software at European non-software companies gets grouped in with IT. Treated as a support team rather than a revenue team, with salaries to match.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    But this can't be true for VW, which set up an entire company to do software for cars, which has nothing to do with providing IT or was ever viewed as a "support team".