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Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'. There seems to be almost unlimited cover for execs cargo culting on using AI a

• cyanydeez 4mo ago
  corporatism is on equal footing with prosperity gospel.
  • nekusar 4mo ago
    Yep. I'm prosperous because god/market deems me worthy.
• yifanl 4mo ago
  If they gave the engineers appropriate severance packages, then they're at least out that much as a stupidity tax, but that's probably the most we can expect as far as consequences for the exec suite.
  • mikepurvis 4mo ago
    Presumably they're also out the top 10-20% of talent which immediately found jobs elsewhere and would have little interest in returning to Ford to work under such incompetent management.
    • calgoo 4mo ago
      They could always be hired as contractors at x5 the cost for a fixed contract over 2 years to train the ai.
      • thewebguyd 4mo ago
        Wouldn't be a bad deal tbh depending on age and how much you have already for financial independence in retirement. If my employer offered me a deal that would allow me to retire early, comfortably, to train my AI replacement, I'd take it. If they succeed, well I'd have gotten laid off anyway. If they fail, I get to laugh all the way to the bank with my newly found free time.
        • 9dev 4mo ago
          Sounds like meta would be just the company for you!
    • Avicebron 4mo ago
      This sentiment feels like a relic of a previous age. Yes _maybe_ but it's also equally likely that the best they laid off was on the ropes for months trying to battle ghost job spam and AI filters. It's almost shaming anyone who isn't hired someone immediately as deficient and "not the best". Honestly the conversation should be focused on how the execs can he made responsible.
      • mikepurvis 4mo ago
        That's fair. My intent was not to shame the "bottom 80%" which is of course most people, but rather to make a call for accountability. Like specifically the execs should have to answer to their board not just for the wasted time and severance packages, but also for the cost of losing some staff permanently with these shenanigans.
      • pojzon 4mo ago
        Im not calling for any action, but that kid doing something about Healthcare CEO - that did help.
        • suttontom 4mo ago
          How did it help?
          • pojzon 4mo ago
            It did send a message. If the message was sent on a daily basis this world would look completely different.
        • civet_java 4mo ago
          I am quite sympathetic to your position. Seeing those who manage to evade accountability consistently paying a heavy personal price was immensely satisfying. But at the same time, I don't think it resulted in any structural changes that minimise the proportion of accountability-evaders plauging society. Ideally of course everyone, irrespective of any immutable traits they may have, gets to enjoy a healthy, satisfying, and stable life with plently of avenues for upward mobility. Short of that ideal, a society which equally burdens the rich and poor with devastating, seemingly random, unavoidable life-chaning events is decidedly better than one which only affects the poor. So for these reasons I don't advocate for the actions of "the kid" but I don't think the consequences of his actions were in any way "bad" per se.
    • jghn 4mo ago
      Or, if they're anything like me, even if I hadn't yet moved along they'd find that for them my price has gone up in the interim time period.
  • drob518 4mo ago
    There is a huge cost for this either way (severance packages, yes, but also lost productivity, reduced team coherence, etc), but that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily translate to a political cost for the managers involved in pushing the dumb idea, particularly if the CEO was pressuring everyone for cost savings. They will escape by saying, “We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?”
    • thewebguyd 4mo ago
      > We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?” And why does the board/shareholders allow a CEO to continue into their position by just following everyone else? I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is doing, I want to do the opposite." and it's worked for me so far. The area doesn't need yet another "dark and moody" photographer with boring sepia edits, blurry photos with a film preset, and the same exact font and colors on the website as everyone else. You don't become a pioneer in your industry by just cargo culting everyone else. It's low effort leadership and if I were on the board it certainly would not inspire my confidence in their ability to run a company. You're telling me not a single person at the table asked "Do we have these engineers' institutional knowledge documented somewhere before we fire them all??"
      • boredatoms 4mo ago
        Boards are usually filled with ex-CEOs who also thought these dumb bets were good
        • drob518 4mo ago
          And the board is pulling down $300k per year or more for sitting in maybe 11 meetings per year and participating in a “comp committee” where they just review data and recommendations from comp consultants and agree to whatever the consultants tell them. So, why rock the boat?
  • rootnod3 4mo ago
    Not really those execs paying that stupidity tax though. They still get their bonuses. Pretty much zero consequences.
  • freediddy 4mo ago
    If they take the job they likely need to give back some or all of the severance package.
• eunos 4mo ago
  The social contract that American society elect (including these non executive engineers) emphasize career flexibility (right-to-work) and returns of capital than job security. Especially during booming economic years.
  • failuser 4mo ago
    Career flexibility like Do Not Compete agreements?
    • stale2002 4mo ago
      Almost nobody is covered by non compete agreements. And if you think you are, you should just ignore it anyway. They are often both illegal and unenforced. Your old employer isn't going to waste time hiring a private detective to track down every former employee's new work place that you didn't include on LinkedIn.
  • khriss 4mo ago
    I am not sure engineers in say, Europe have any lower career flexibility. It's a false narrative to claim otherwise.
    • spwa4 4mo ago
      The frustration of being an engineer in Europe comes from the rules that this implies. Well, aside from the fact that this is mostly gone, but still exists in some big public or banking companies. 1) you can only get promoted if the company grows and/or someone above you leaves, or dies, or ... Btw it really requires leaving permanently. They leave for 10 years due to being in coma after a traffic accident? Nope. 2) the oldest person gets promoted (and that means ancienneté: longest in the company). No arguments, no exceptions. To the point that there are plenty of teams that have a manager (who gets the 10% pay boost) and an actual manager (who makes things work). Often not the same person. 3) No mobility (technically, yes, there's mobility, BUT your ancienneté resets in many cases. So it's really stupid to do)
• simianwords 4mo ago
  Is there any consequence for execs who don't layoff when they are supposed to? You have to look at the situation symmetrically.
  • sarchertech 4mo ago
    Why does it need to be symmetric? There’s no reason we couldn’t decide that we want to err on the side of employing too many people. We already do with legislation that requires severance packages and tax benefits for hiring. Many countries go much further.
    • simianwords 4mo ago
      If its not symmetric then you bias towards status quo which is a really bad way to act as a CEO. > There’s no reason we couldn’t decide that we want to err on the side of employing too many people. Yeah that's not how a company should run.
      • sarchertech 4mo ago
        > If its not symmetric then you bias towards status quo which is a really bad way to act as a CEO. That doesn’t follow. It could just as easily bias a CEO towards over hiring, or finding ways to retrain existing employees, or any one of a million things that’s not the status quo. It’s also possible that there currently exists pressure to push CEOs to lay off too many people and a little pressure in the opposite directions puts CEOs in a position where they are free to either layoff or hire as they see fit. > Yeah that's not how a company should run That should is attaching a moral judgement to this, and that’s not up to you. Many people think that the one of the primary purposes of a company is to provide employment. Even in the US our system makes it easier to hire someone than it is to fire them.
        • simianwords 4mo ago
          > Many people think that the one of the primary purposes of a company is to provide employment This is not good for society.
• zzzeek 4mo ago
  > execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs. reading this article I think that is not what happened in this specific case: > Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions. > “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.” That is, Ford had been slowly relying more and more on automated tools (if the "rehiring" is over three years, then this all precedes our current "AI" ecosystem) and realized that now that they want to add modern AI tools, they need experienced engineers to train the newer systems, and are hiring people from the open market, where some of these folks were former Ford employees, but nothing like "were laid off due to AI". That is this doesnt sound at all like "Ford fired 350 engineers to be replaced with AI and is now backtracking", which is certainly what the headline here implied.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  I assume AI lay offs are mostly investor crud anyway. I've never seen them provide any evidence or examples of where AI helped cut those jobs and it always feels like its easier to lie and say you were fired because of AI so that your fired former employees blame AI and not you. Plus, if AI is really making your org more efficient, why aren't you training your employees who are not using it effectively enough? It all smells. The retention rates before COVID are back, and companies have way more people than they might need, that's the real reason so many places have started to slash, but blaming AI is easier.
  • ldng 4mo ago
    Plus you can't say it's because Trump's terrible economics so safer to blame AI.
    • giancarlostoro 4mo ago
      I asked a buddy who works at one of the Big 4 and he said its the remnants of the Great Resignation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation Kind of made sense to me, I saw some of those outcomes happen in a former employer as well, they had an influx of income during 2020 that was not going to stay around forever (restaurant industry).
• lenerdenator 4mo ago
  The saying used to be "with great risk comes great reward". Risk is inconvenient to shareholders, who also happen to be the people with the most political power in the US. They're: 1) retirees living off a pension/retirement fund backed by shares of companies like Ford 2) investors who have plenty of money to ~~bribe~~ donate to political campaigns or 3) C-suiters put in place by the other two groups who are compensated primarily in shares. These groups are all incentivized to see the risk to their income streams minimized as much as possible. Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes. Thus, we got rid of the risk.
• sneak 4mo ago
  Layoffs aren’t “playing with people’s lives”. Employment is only by mutual consent and everyone knows that. Consent can be revoked at any time which is why anyone prudent (especially in a software engineering role) isn’t living paycheck to paycheck. Don’t blame a customer for the vendor’s irresponsibility.
  • ultrarunner 4mo ago
    Unfortunately for this perspective, one side of the equation very much plans their lives around this mutual arrangement. When the other party experiments with the arrangement without deep consideration, I think "playing with people's lives" is very much an apt description. Just because I would not be destitute tomorrow does not mean that my life (and those of my family) would not be deeply impacted.
  • jimbokun 4mo ago
    That’s true in the US but not in most other rich countries, where there are legal constraints on terminating an employment contract.
• pkulak 4mo ago
  That's how it works for every rich/powerful person in every aspect of their lives; maybe to a slightly lesser degree with health.
• loeg 4mo ago
  This is how it has always been? C-suite is incentivized to make big speculative changes; if it goes well, they get credit. If not, oh well.
• dsjoerg 4mo ago
  > Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake' The article makes no such claim. What is your source? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or, are you just making things up that you believe are likely, like an AI would?
  • taormina 4mo ago
    If they didn’t get canned, the slap on the wrist is the cost of doing business. If we all agree to investigate ourselves and we’re all very disappointed in what happened, what a shame! If you say something is illegal and costs $X as a fine, you don’t curb behavior, they just bake the fine into their business model.
• elzbardico 4mo ago
  Welcome to the Era of the Business Idiot. People who manage stuff without having even the remotest inkling of what the work is. Their entire management skill involve the application of one of the following options: 1 - Fire People 2 - Spend Money 3 - Call a meeting
• djha-skin 4mo ago
  Punishing leadership for perceived strategy mistakes is a great way to scare good leadership away from working for you.
  • gmd63 4mo ago
    Babying bad leaders who don't take responsibility for their actions is a good way to scare away good employees.
• baron816 4mo ago
  Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know.
  • quentindanjou 4mo ago
    bad performance review and a layoff are completely different worlds.
  • sscaryterry 4mo ago
    Agreed, but what they’ve done isn’t illegal (IANAL). A performance review doesn’t address the irreparable harm these actions may cause. It is reasonable to assume, that this could be walked back in such a way that no one is held accountable.
  • burnte 4mo ago
    > Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know. Because we've been alive in America long enough to see this cycle thousands of times. The execs rarely face the music for bad decisions. A round of layoffs looks like a failure to us, but to the investors it was a good idea that didn't work out so there's no punishment for trying to save money.
    • dsjoerg 4mo ago
      If you allow a likely guess with no evidence to play the role of fact, you're just as bad as the AIs
      • sscaryterry 4mo ago
        America has a convicted felon as president?
      • burnte 4mo ago
        That's true, but I literally mentioned the decades of experience we've all lived through, so it's not without data. When the guys who made the bad decisions are still at the company and giving interviews then that's a very strong indicator they're still there and not facing repercussions.
• suyash 4mo ago
  The probably got bonus and promoted since they saved company costs!
• thatfrenchguy 4mo ago
  Consequences for American car executives, are you crazy? Have you seen Stellantis cars recently? Large parts of the US (and European most likely) car industry is driving straight into irrelevance
  • helterskelter 4mo ago
    On the topic of Stellantis, I rented one recently (through no fault of my own) and when I returned it the guy asked me how it was. I told him I wouldn't drive one of those things again if they paid me, and the guy said "yeah we get that a lot, let me get you the discount". It sounded like they had a "Stellantis discount" for people who said something. Nice guy, actually.
    • tandr 4mo ago
      As far as I can see on Wikipedia page or homepage for Stellantis, they do not make cars under their own name. So, which brand did you rent actually?
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      • helterskelter 4mo ago
        Jeep Wagoneer, I just remember the Stellantis logo on the infotainment boot screen. I thought it was a Stellantis Wagoneer because the Jeep logo was almost completely absent, at least in memory.
        • tandr 4mo ago
          Thank you. If you don't mind me asking - which part of driving experience made you think "never again"?
          • helterskelter 4mo ago
            Okay so this was actually about a year or two ago, but I remember the infotainment system glitched out a lot for no discernible reason, which prevented me from accessing a lot of the controls, and I had some difficulty with the hardware controls which just felt poorly thought out from a UX standpoint. Some of the things an owner would obviously get used to, but it felt like you were constantly struggling with it to do simple things that you don't even really notice doing in most vehicles. The infotainment system was constantly having trouble, like freezing up or just shutting down for no apparent reason and not turning back on. I remember a lot of issues with the backup camera. Not unique for a modern car, but this one had more than its fair share of glitches. I think I had to reset it twice. It also developed an issue (sorry can't recall what it was exactly) that persisted for a day or two which spontaneously resolved itself while I was driving back to the dealership. I want to say it had hardware AC controls (which is good), but I think I had it for three days and only figured out how to adjust it the way I wanted it on day three. I don't recall if I didn't understand that something was a button, or if a button actually had several different "modes" which weren't readily apparent, like being a combo rocker/push button. Normally these sorts of things are obvious from how the dash is deaigned, but my wife and I took three days to puzzle it out. There were some other minor problems, but altogether it felt poorly thought out and kind of low quality, which clashed with some of the "luxury" accents my model was equipped with, like wood paneling and the lights which spelled out "WAGONEER" on the ground at night when you opened the door, which felt gimmicky. That money would have been better spent on refining the UX. I actually don't think it was a bad drive, if you were just driving. I was just constantly frustrated trying to do anything else with it.
• cakeface 4mo ago
  I don't think it's right to categorize "no consequences". Leadership made a decision and that decision was bad. This happens all the time, including allocating budget for staff. Any effective organization is going to judge the outcomes of these types of decisions and it's going to come up in performance and hiring. If this was an isolated situation then possibly they won't fire anyone over it. But you really need the context to judge whether the response was correct. Wasting company resources and making the company look bad in the press won't be rewarded, and that includes at the board level to the CEO.
  • luckydata 4mo ago
    oh poor babies they got sad their human sacrifices didn't work, that's surely as much punishment as losing your livelihood because a pack of morons act randomly based on feels.
    • grosswait 4mo ago
      Life is not fair and there are no guarantees. It’s a hard phase of realization to go through but life’s surprises are easier to get past once you do.
      • G0lg0thvn 4mo ago
        Just give up any moral responsibility because life is unfair; what great advice!
      • joshuahaglund 4mo ago
        So give up? By complaining together, we can create changes that make life more fair.
      • topgrain2 4mo ago
        An excellent argument for advocating to Make the Bastards Pay when they get away with some unfair bullshit.
  • pesus 4mo ago
• jm4 4mo ago
  Generally, you don’t want to punish people for making decisions. At least I don’t. I value people who are willing to try things and I generally believe any decision made in good faith is better than no decision. My litmus test is was it a reasonable decision given the information available at the time in service of a greater goal. I can live with the consequences of that. If it turns out to be a not so great decision then we can fix it. I’m not going to fire someone for the result when the process was sound. That said, this application of AI was profoundly stupid from the outset. You don’t necessarily fire people for a bad result from a reasonable decision making process, but you do fire them for poor judgment and reasoning. There’s nothing that can fix that except for not letting those people make decisions anymore.
  • asveikau 4mo ago
    Even from the selfish perspectives of these executives, it can be quite bad to isolate people from the consequences of bad decisions. It will prevent learning from mistakes, and lead to more bad decisions. Which I guess is getting at another thing. The failure was predictable. People shouldn't be rewarded for failing to avoid obvious predictable failures. Maintaining their status quo could also be seen as rewarding them.
    • toomuchtodo 4mo ago
      If you're unwilling to fall on your sword and face material consequences for decisions that cause quantifiable harm the people who work for you or your customers, you do not belong in a leadership position imho, but that isn't where we are today. The people making these decisions will face no consequences for the harm they cause. Its likely they continue to be employed and receive generous compensation. Workers get fired when they are wrong at much smaller scale, why not these people? They are not special, they are simply lucky and connected. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639566 ("Pharaoh must signal, to shareholders, to a board, and to their peers. There will be no consequences for failure to adhere to this proclamation.") Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639417 - January 2025 (390 comments) https://www.salesforce.com/company/careers/jobs/?search=software https://www.salesforce.com/company/careers/jobs/?search=soft... (724 results, as of this comment)
• daishi55 4mo ago
  “Consequences for mistakes” is generally not a good way of operating. Kind of the whole idea behind a blameless retro for example.
  • iamflimflam1 4mo ago
    Execs are paid an extraordinary amount of money because they are the ultimate decision makers and should be responsible for their decisions.
    • daishi55 4mo ago
      So they should get paid lots of money to never do anything risky? Sometimes things don’t work out. That doesn’t mean it was a punishable offense to try.
• mannanj 4mo ago
  Seems like this is a theme in our culture, maybe it's a world wide trend. The underlying theme I notice is unaccountability and selective application of rules, laws, norms to some people and not others. It seems to me like people with power, and in leadership positions like executives, get to create an environment where they are able to continually extract from a mass of people. It reminds me of the conspiracy theories I would hear as a child along the lines of powerful people running the world in shadows. I certainly feel like the ways people like executives keep getting away with unethical and in some cases illegal behavior is there's forces in the shadows supporting their behavior. I was told in history class that throughout history when such types of people arose such as kings in France or massive dictators who conquer countries, that the "good" or "masses" of humans eventually over throw them - well here we are and why isn't that happening? I see instead a class of people weak, afraid, and defeated and continually asking others "why aren't you doing anything" without the awareness to see "You are the one who is supposed to do something" edit: applying this to myself, I'm certainly trying. Before I was fired at Capital One (as an engineer) I would continue to ask tough questions of integrity to executives and my team and managers, things about integrity, things about inconsistencies in our stated values and how we were actually delivering work. I took some heat, was not very liked, and took continual abuse from my team until I was eventually kicked out. I am happy to share how little I noticed people who felt uncomfortable with team culture and executive communication were just silent and afraid, and in denial as I got attacked and abused by management.
• nnyx 4mo ago
  I don't know about you, but if I was fired to be replaced by AI and then my employer came crawling, back tail between their legs, I'm pretty sure I'd start negotiations at an extra zero at the end of my salary.
• eurekin 4mo ago
  There never are. Those are going to be viewed as two discreet successful interventions. One for lay-offs, because it was the best move at the time with the knowledge they had. Second for quick correction, ability to pivot and execute quickly. It's been always like that
• nilkn 4mo ago
  That's because the company likely doesn't view it as a mistake. The executives did their job: they tried something the company likely considered reasonable (or even strategically necessary) and pivoted based on results. At the executive level, that's not considered a blunder. What counts as a blunder would be (1) being too cautious to try a change, then falling behind your competitors if that change turned out to be critical or successful; (2) attempting at change, seeing that it didn't work, and refusing to pivot or falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy.