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This is still going on, just that they try to keep a few internal tech people. The problem is the incentive for the internal people to stay as they, in theory, should not be making any changes just help out.

The solution is clearly to use an AI to communicate across cultural barriers. It can do translation too so your offshore workforce does not even need to speak your language which will cut costs even more. /s

Who says Ford fired any employees? The article doesn't.

Submitted title was "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors", which is not what the article says.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(We've reverted to the article's title now)

p.s. Article titles are sometimes rotated by the publications, in which case the submitter usually followed the guidelines but it takes time for us to catch up.

Yes, it seems like many are missing the crucial aspect of the timing. The mistake was realized 3 years ago and auto design and manufacturing process lead times are long. Plus the occasion for the story was 'Ford returning to the top of the JD Power Quality Survey rankings', so that's another 6-18 months of reporting lag. That puts the original layoff mistakes being made 5 to 8 years ago.

I don't know when the "MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots" you mention were implemented but another possibility is the Ford PR team saw that 'AI Backlash' stories are currently trending and opportunistically focused on that to explain a positive news event which likely had many causes. IMHO, we should view these 'AI Backlash' themed stories as no more valid than the 'AI Downsizing' themes they previously seized on to justify layoffs they wanted to do anyway.

Yeah, it looks like this wasn't AI related. I hope yours grows to be the top comment!

We need every outlet to cover this more

Documentation driven development is your friend here. 75% of my workflow is generating documentation, at ever lower levels of abstraction, until it’s just code. The code usually comes out optimal, clean, and bug free (after passing tests) and. Suuuuuper well documented lol.

It’s human in the loop over and over again tho

A friend of mine prepared an arsenal of hooks and the like to address this and LLMs still disobey them at times.

I don't have high hopes that there exists a bulletproof solution to this.

Not sure if this was ironic. I guess it mainly fails because a lot of knowledge and experience is intuitive and not codified.

If compliance was the main issue we wouldn't have had to invent ways for computers to do something other than exactly what they were asked.

And that tacit knowledge doesn't have easily quantifiable value, it doesn't show up on the P&L so most execs don't consider it. I've seen it time and time again over my career, someone leaves or layoffs happen without considering this and then the company is scrambling to figure out processes that someone was quietly running or maintaining for years that no one else even thought of.

Maybe they could use a distillation process. Have the AI prompt the senior engineers repeatedly (don't do this). Like squeezing the oil from olives!

The dream of perpetual labor machine is something capitalists are willing to destroy the planet in order to chase their fictitious dream. Oppressors must be stopped.

My speculation is straightforward: adding “AI” to the sticker ups the share price, dropping headcount improves the balance sheets upping the share price, and doing both at once could be perfect for a CEO bonus or strategic board member sell off.

Back in dot-com, there used to be a website called f'ed company that chronicled the dot-com dead pool. This time around there needs to be a similar website that records AI walk backs so it helps the mgmt class not make stupid decisions.

This is a boom and bust industry. Projects come and go and only to a lesser extent if you work at a software company.

I would recommend IT/server administration as that is a constant business need, if you prefer stability with more limited upside.

This should be way higher.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's how it works for every rich/powerful person in every aspect of their lives; maybe to a slightly lesser degree with health.

> 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?

“Consequences for mistakes” is generally not a good way of operating. Kind of the whole idea behind a blameless retro for example.

> 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.

The probably got bonus and promoted since they saved company costs!

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.

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

corporatism is on equal footing with prosperity gospel.

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.

Is there any consequence for execs who don't layoff when they are supposed to? You have to look at the situation symmetrically.

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.

Punishing leadership for perceived strategy mistakes is a great way to scare good leadership away from working for you.

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.

It's not like those consultants recommended something the CEO and Board didn't want to hear. They are paid to be the shield that blocks the arrows from shareholders. If they can get paid twice, once to recommend laying off 350 engineers and again to later recommend refilling 350 engineers all the better.

I've had two different Porsches, a Cayman S and a Macan. Neither gave me a day of trouble. You just have to do all the maintenance, which is obviously expensive.

I wonder if Porsche is allowed to exist in point where they are not fully cost optimised so there is more spend on those slight things that keep reliability. Most other large manufacturer cars seem to be cost optimised while least amount of that is carried over to customers...

The Porsche 911 is pretty reliable, it's basically the same car they've made for over 50 years so they've got it figured out.

porsche is part of volkswagen, so it's not that surprising that they're decently reliable. i probably see 10 porsches for every ferrari, lamborghini, etc that i see, and i think a large part of that is reliability - even absurdly rich people don't want to deal with an unreliable car when there is a more reliable alternative.

Maybe... but the re-hiring probably involved very substantial salary raises for the re-hirees.

An expensive process.

Nice thing about the C-suite is that you get authority and compensation without responsibility. You just claim responsibility when things are good. And when bad, the underlings who have responsibilities but no authority take the heat.

The only job AI's are capable are doing is the role of executive. I think we should replace every C-Suiter with AI.

Cope

They did not. I been saying for decades that software devs form a union.

It's just so strange any other profession have unions or bodies that protect their job against this sort of practice.

if software devs were lawyers then AI would've been banned

That's the interesting question. Are expert engineers willing to go back after being treated that way or knowing what happened to others?

> He's saving face while almost certainly trying to figure out how to make the new systems work so that next time he won't need to rehire engineers.

Yup. They jumped the gun. Now they need to hire them back so they can loot their expertise and never hire another senior. I'm not saying this will work, but it's pretty obviously the plan.

Pre-AI version: Oops, you laid off the higher-salaried people without having them train their replacements, so bring them back, long enough to do that.

Now, that training[*] will be for both AI models and lower-salaried hires.

Perhaps a second mistake by those who thought they didn't need their most experienced people: Now they think they just need to train the AI better, and then new-grad "AI native" hires will be the most cost-effective way to operate/oversee the AI and do whatever it can't.

[*] edit: originally typed "replacement" when I meant to type "training"

Yes.

And for people focusing too much on AI, Xiaomi kicked their first vehicle into production with a fully automated factory three years ago [0]. That's where the industry is going and has tried to go for decades now.

They might want to also reduced head out on the designing side, but it's also an ongoing trend that started before the AI boom.

That's not an industry that will keep hiring as much as they did in the past, however it turns out.

[0] https://youtu.be/v6jb6PP4APc

Obviously. It was the goal of automation since its inception: reduce human involvement.

Maybe. That's one interpretation. A lot of hiring/firing decisions get read through the lens of AI, hard pro or hard con. Reality is always a mixed bag. They certainly will want to try to build up a better automated pipeline, but the question is can they, and can they cost-effectively vs hiring a few more people?

This idea is everywhere right now, that AI is some magic black box that will solve all your business problems. The sentiment is spreading through the exec team where I work now too. It's like a disease.

C-suites completely disconnected from reality and assuming we've already achieved ASI/AGI, and marketing teams & business journals are only furthering that narrative.

It's so weird. I don't know what it is about AI that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind. Its like they've been chomping at the bit for decades to get rid of those pesky humans and are so hyped up over it they can't see clearly anymore.

Step 1: fire everyone. Step 2: figure out how to use AI.

In that order, apparently.

Had a couple of Taurusii back in the day. 100% ended up having a problem where the power steering pump shit the bed because a plastic piece in the pressurized side failed. Paid to repair one, oem pump broke on drive home due to same plastic piece under pressure.

My point being, Ford's had shit for brains for decades. Its a fucking wonder any of their vehicles make it out of the parking lot.

Earlier this year I’ve been in calls with leaders from top US companies where their strategy was basically “we have to switch absolutely everything to agentic right now, otherwise we are dead”. That was the full thought.

That made reading their subsequent layoff blog posts pretty depressing

Well, the business plan came out of this mysterious box, after we fed in the payroll reduction requirement...

Or maybe people just have bills to pay and/or want to support their families. A little critical thinking and empathy goes a long way...

When you first lose everything, in the process you end up having to pawn expensive principles like that, so when other things like this happen, it's easy to seize the opportunity.

Were you ever homeless and starving?

I doubt it :)

How about if they doubled your previous salary?

As a homeless person, do not wish homelessness on yourself.

Doesn't seem bad to me. Come back for a pay bump and get paid while you search for a new job.