4 ms·
GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills
- skywhopper 5mo agoThis will never stop being the stupid approach. Destroy morale, lose institutional knowledge, waste months or years getting new folks up to speed, all for skills that could be developed in house and with targeted hiring by a functioning organization.
- forgetfreeman 5mo agoThis is only stupid if you value quality of outcome. If your sole metric is make stock price go up long enough to cash out this shit is brilliant.
- pixl97 5mo agoYa, we burned the planet to the ground, but for a few short moments we created a lot of shareholder value.
- cosmotic 5mo agoThey couldn't be bothered to train their staff?
- jagged-chisel 5mo agoThey hire anew to lower salaries, while also gaining staff with "stronger AI skills."
- asdfman123 5mo agoThen they hire people with even higher salaries than the original devs to clean up the God awful mess.
- pixl97 5mo agoThat's the neat part, they don't. Maybe they'll contract some group at some point, maybe not. Then later they'll ask the .gov for a big Ole bailout.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoLaid off ai workers are cheaper. I saw a job posting for a vibe coder, 20 bucks an hour.
- darth_avocado 5mo agoI don’t believe anyone trying to hire 20 bucks an hour for vibe coders is a serious employer. You’d make more money being a barista in some cities or a substitute teacher.
- xboxnolifes 5mo agoSure, but they probably aren't living in those cities. In-person $20/hr in expensive city vs remote $20/hr in cheap cost-of-living area.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoIt's out there. Maybe it's not serious but it is kind of a weird thing to post on multiple job boards.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- scorpioxy 5mo agoI found that sort of thinking is no longer a part of corporate culture(in AU at least). As in, investing in your staff and planning for the future. Resources are meant to be used and abused for benefit and that's it, consequences be damned.
- thegreatpeter 5mo agoperhaps they tried that and the staff wasn't willing to be trained. have you ever worked at a company like that of that size?
- AngryData 5mo agoTheir tech positions were really the only common path to get continued raises and promotions starting from the bottom in GM for the past few decades. Most other positions only ever got hired from outside the company because internal hires expected raises for it, so to me this just looks like gm putting their tech department under the same self destructive hiring policies as the rest of the company.
- pixl97 5mo agoIt really is time for them to die as a company.
- afgrant 5mo agoI haven’t heard of a single software job in the last decade that offers anything resembling “training”. You sink or swim based on your previous knowledge, what you can glean from the codebase and coworkers, and how skilled you are at self-teaching.
- analogpixel 5mo agoA lot of people are un-trainable. I've worked with people who got angry when the Instructor showed up and the instructor wouldn't just give them the completed exercises, while most of the other people just sat on their laptops checking emails ignore the training all together. I've worked with people that want training on how to use Claude because they can't figure out "just type what you want in the box, and it does it for you." I've worked with people who were amazed when I googled for answers and were like "I should do that to!" (but didn't) People will demand training, ignore it, and continue to be a drain on the company. There will be those people out there that have one very very very specific skill and that's all they want to do; "I remove people from Active directory that have names that start with A,B or C" or "I run this Ansible Playbook someone else wrote, and that's my entire job."
- scorpioxy 5mo ago> agent development, model engineering, AI-native workflows -- point directly at where large-enterprise demand is heading. I don't understand these words. Does "AI-native workflow" mean vibe coding? I am now seeing a lot of roles asking for "AI-enabled engineers". And I am not sure what that means either. I am sort of afraid to ask because the answer will probably confuse me even more. Maybe it's my understanding of what LLMs are and how they work that makes these words mean very little to me.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoYea it's vibe/agentic coding. That's what about half of the current jobs are right now. It's really sad. Saw a vibe coder job today, 20bucks an hour
- scorpioxy 5mo agoInteresting. I saw contractor rates dropping here too. The ones I saw recently were at pre-pandemic levels so from 6 years ago. The large increase in cost of living from that time makes it even worse. The funny part is that the skills and experience that are being asked for are at a senior level. So I guess that would be senior level vibe coder at junior rates?
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoManagement literally doesn't realize that you can't exactly vibe code a serious project? Maybe they just don't care and it's an experiment. Super low risk I guess, depending on the city they might pay the floor cleaner more than that.
- AIorNot 5mo agoYup thats exactly what they want Cheaper younger people who dont think vibe coding is bad Is this a good idea - probably not
- asdfman123 5mo ago
- Loudergood 5mo agoShameless investor signalling.
- goalieca 5mo agoGM needs to focus on making better, safer, cheaper cars.
- jagged-chisel 5mo ago"Cheaper" is indeed what you get when you reduce payroll.
- folkrav 5mo agoUnless they plan on scooping up AI researchers, I legitimately don't understand what "stronger AI skills" is even supposed to mean.
- cosmicgadget 5mo agoPeople who can use Claude and its peers effectively. AI skills = prompting and slop troubleshooting.
- nh43215rgb 5mo agoNo AI No Life...
- xvxvx 5mo agoGet a low paid entry level job at a company. Do a good job over many years, or decades. Raises, promotions etc brings your salary up to a decent level. The company can’t have that. They use AI to cut you and start over with another low paid noob. Man, the only advice I can give people is do not sacrifice time with your loved ones for a company that doesn’t give a shit. Your kid is only going to graduate once. Those family vacations are priceless in the long run. Hell, I take time off to hang out with my dogs now and then. The job can wait.
- torben-friis 5mo agoThat's the neat part, many don't need to worry about missing their kid's graduation because they can't afford neither kids nor the safety to have them (home ownership, etc).
- jongjong 5mo agoIt really seems like that doesn't it? I've been down quite a few rabbit holes like that which made me think that a lot of major 'issues' appear to be meticulously engineered to protect a certain set of interests at the expense of others. It's like; "Damm, houses are expensive, I'm going to live in a caravan" then you realize you can't park it on your own land without council approval... Then you find out that council will never approve due to it "negatively impacting the charm of the area." Then you become homeless and realize that you can't legally put your tent anywhere and all the camping sites in the wilderness which you used to go to as a child now charge you fees to stay there and have rangers patrolling constantly (paid for by your own tax money you used to pay). Also, you can't get a job without an address and it's a literal catch-22... Then if you lose hope and start doing drugs, bad actors (possibly sponsored by foreign states) put fentanyl in the drug supply to finish you off. Then the media fully covers it up by distracting people with slop. People are dying and it is covered up in the most targeted, effective way imaginable... They are not only killed, they are blamed for what is system failure on the way out. "Should have gotten a job," or "Shouldn't have done drugs." And the people doing the most blaming and defending the system are passive-income shareholders who have a lot of time on their hands and sit at home all day and further rig the politics in their favour. It's cooked all the way down. It's like the dystopian book "Brave New World" is looking pretty good by comparison to where we're heading. At least in BNW, the "savages" had a designated reserve they could escape to.
- porphyra 5mo agoAI is a godsend for automotive coding. It's really annoying how at some ASIL levels you need 100% code coverage of unit tests. With AI, all you have to do is to get your agent to generate the tests! Likewise with all the MISRA C requirements. Need your cyclomatic complexity to be less than 10? It's just one prompt away! Now your spaghetti code can easily satisfy the safety requirements with much less effort.
- thot_experiment 5mo agoI can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but it seems insane to let the AI write the tests. AI can't be held accountable, it shouldn't be writing the tests that determine whether car systems function correctly.
- Insanity 5mo agoIf you wouldn’t let AI run your nuclear power plant, you need to drink more of the AI kool-aid.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoAll these luddites out here. The cats out of the bag. Get with the program. Give the AI nukes already.
- xigoi 5mo agoYou’re absolutely right! I shouldn’t have launched the nukes. Would you like to learn more about nuclear safety?
- anonym29 5mo ago>AI can't be held accountable I hear this all the time. Why does it matter? Punishing a human for making a mistake does not prevent mistakes, nor does it undo the harm of the mistake. A human saying "my bad, I messed up" and an AI saying "my bad, I messed up" are equally worthless, in a functional sense.
- AngryData 5mo agoBest excuse they got to fire well paid and experienced proffessionals that have worked for them for decades and replace them with low paid new hires. But GM isn't in a great spot to be weathering any negative downstream effects. And after seeing how they treat employees for decades ill have zero sympathy for them when things go downhill.
- elwebmaster 5mo agoYou won't be asked, your tax dollars will just be used to bail them out, either directly or through tariffs. Because democracy.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoYou see we socialize the losses and capitalize the profits. Works great for everyone
- j-bos 5mo ago> And after seeing how they treat employees for decades To say nothing of their cars.
- cyberax 5mo agoWell, the US auto execs visited China and realized that their days are numbered. So why not extract as much profit as possible? Firing people with institutional knowledge? So what? It's going to improve profits short-term.
- drivebyhooting 5mo agoWhy can’t US auto makers automate like China did?
- rdevilla 5mo agoIsn't it obvious? They aren't using AI to automate their business. That's why GM is doing this.
- WarmWash 5mo agoProbably should just replace their software engineers too. I don't mean to throw shade, but automotive software is so bad I'd bet my life that Claude could do better. Nevermind that the update cycle seems to be 6-10 months for changes like "You can now reset your radio presets directly from the radio settings menu", while bugs like temperature control resetting to max cool every start-up never get fixed.
- IKnowThatIdk 5mo agoI used to have issues, I picked up an AA wireless dongle and adjusted the settings a little bit, and have had a pretty solid experience. YMMV
- pixl97 5mo agoUS car software, ya, I've never seen such trash in my life. This said I don't really have any complaints about my Hyundai software. It works, doesn't crash, and does what I want it too.
- lowmagnet 5mo agowe have a 2017 and 2020 ioniq hybrid and the android auto has been flawless since we got them. except for updates from google on the phone temporarily breaking things, that is.
- dghlsakjg 5mo agoMy - admittedly 8 year old - Mitsubishi has atrocious UX. State resets itself at odd times (cruise control disables EV mode, and resets regenerative braking settings, eg.), preferences are forgotten, if I want to listen to the radio I have to cycle through AM before FM every time, the touchscreen is slow to respond, the WiFi password for connecting to the app can only be gotten from a dealer, buttons do different things depending on context, etc. CarPlay works great though. It’s not just American cars
- lr1970 5mo agoUX in my Audi Q5 (2024) is terrible. With two phones in the car you never know which one is connected and whose google maps is being currently displayed. And then come the buttons designed with a contempt for a driver. I recently had to change a flat tire which is a story in itself. German engineering is soooo different these days.
- lofaszvanitt 5mo agoSeems like there will be a small elite that wants to go up to a space station and shit on top of all the citizens below :D.
- Havoc 5mo agoI would like one vibecoded airbag please
- i_love_retros 5mo agoOpens 50% of the time everytime
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mattas 5mo agoCan't wait to see the JDs asking for 10 years of LLM experience.
- markboo 5mo ago"We laid off engineers to hire engineers with stronger AI skills" is what 2026 sounds like when a company means "we laid off engineers to pay less." The AI wrapper doesn't change the trade, it just makes the wage cut quotable in the press release.
- deadbolt 5mo agoIt's crazy that this still works for the companies. Anyone with any experience here knows whats happening. But the reporters can still just parrot whatever these companies say. Who cares if it's more lies, right?
- spwa4 5mo ago"not all" permanent headcount reductions ... Tells you everything you need to know.
- zombot 5mo agoI would say: Great, let them crash and burn. But when (not if) their cars do the same, it will cost a toll of human victims.
- hugomurray 5mo ago[dead]