2 ms·

it's a lot cheaper to pay one exec a couple million than to staff a medium-sized software engineering org: even 500 people at an average fully burdened cost of

• christophilus 1y ago
  Cheaper, sure. But it’s been ineffective. That’s the point.
• cosmicgadget 1y ago
  Yeah I get this is their calculus and am suggesting it's exactly why they are failing.
  • x0x0 1y ago
    I wasn't disagreeing with you; I idly did the mental math, was surprised at how high it was, then thought through how I'd probably finger-in-the-air that it would take a couple thousand eng years to build a whole car OS. You're building safety critical software, so you're going to start with a very serious test effort, etc. So finger in the air a good chunk of a billion dollars a year for many years.
• AlotOfReading 1y ago
  One major issue has been that paying a developer market rates is practically unthinkable to traditional automakers. If you were to apply to a mid/senior job in Michigan, you might get offered $125k. The typical workaround has been to establish "software offices" on the west coast with separate pay scales and separate corporate structures that largely function as internal "external" vendors. The C suite are able to pretend they're not overpaying, and the teams getting work done are able to attract people closer to market rate.
  • ghaff 1y ago
    Well, it’s not just about pay scales. The developers just don’t want to live in Detroit (or even Ann Arbor) for the most part. And coastal East isn’t really that much cheaper for the most part. I’d probably add that the pay scale for software vs. electrical/mechanical people probably wasn’t notably different in the 90s or so. And California rates didn’t compensate for CoL in general. Very different.