“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, in a briefing this week with reporters.
Hopefully those employees said, “Sure, I’ll come back, but my salary requirement is 50% more than you were paying me.”
I always thought it was a joke until it happened to friends of mine. Massive layoffs, they were experts in one specific technology, they came back as consultants for a few years with a doubled salary. They were fired again later, but with a lot more money so it was worth it.
It would be great if all the workers would agree on this collectively, rather than just one offs.
In the current job market, you know it was the other way round.
If the company proactively reaches back out to you, you have the upper hand, regardless of the general hiring atmosphere. It indicates that they don’t want to take the time for someone else to ramp up on institutional knowledge they know you already possess.
So they fired the executives responsible, right?
Lol. Probably got bonuses then celebrated for identifying the issue and fixing it.
Heh, a few weeks back a new project manager at my work held a meeting about an upcoming project, and half the team was able to say the timeline was workable, but the specifics the project manager laid out would lead to disaster, and we just had to adjust the strategy, but still have same time and same cost. We spelled out exactly what would go wrong and how, based on previous attempts to do it the way he said. It was scheduled to be a weeklong project, which would have been a fine timeline.
He got stubborn, insisted that based on his research his approach was right, and while he would have us on standby in the unlikely event of a problem, he would largely outsource the project to a company that agreed with his plan.
So the project started Monday, and based on past experience we expected to be called into action on Tuesday morning and have to hustle, or maybe Tuesday end of day and really get overworked to close it in time. So Friday comes along and we are shocked that it must be going ok since we hadn’t heard anything. 4pm rolls around, the project manager calls us in a panic saying it’s all gone nowhere, zero progress made, and he has escalated to make sure we take over and now we had to make the Monday morning deadline, or our asses are screwed. Everyone worked their asses off, a couple didn’t sleep the whole weekend.
So in a followup call, the project manager said “no one could have predicted it would go so badly”, and then an email came out from executive team congratulating the project manager for making the project work despite challenging circumstances.
I would literally go “Nope, no going to happen, you deal with you making promises with estimates you yourself made up instead of listening to the experts”.
In fact, I’ve already done this in the past.
This as a good example of how people fail upwards.
If he had listened to us from the onset, this would have proceeded, he would have been maybe casually acknowledged for a solid enough job, business as usual even though the money in play was abnormally astronomical, leadership would have just taken this part of the business for granted.
Because he didn’t listen, he created a disaster. Because the disaster had just unimaginably large amounts of money attached with just stupid amounts more potential money in followup business, the executives were panicked. The ability to recover it on schedule suddenly they appreciated it, and he manages to bask in the spotlight.
Ok, so what if we had left him out to dry? We probably would have been fired. He probably would have too, but declining to assist and risking millions of dollars of business screws you too.
The upside? Well, this was noteworthy because this was the first time in many years I had to lose a weekend, so it’s not super common. To the extent stuff like this happens more regularly, it usually isn’t this bad and is more annoying but on normal business hours. This also happened close to review cycles, and was fantastic relevant information to hold over management so while I didn’t get broad recognition, I did walk away with the second largest bonus of my career. Also the project manager learned the lesson and his standard game plan for this sort of thing is now consistent with what we said. He fails upward, but at least he’s an ally for the foreseeable future.
Sounds like you need a union
If you have concerns like that always express them in an email as well as verbally, not only is it good for covering your own ass if you weren’t able to pull it out the fire (tbh I think you shouldn’t have busted your ass to make it work), but its also going to make people less likely to claim that unearned credit for your heroic work if you do.
That would make me quit on the spot. No notice. No explanation. Just get up and leave and not say any word to anyone.
its probably designed to make people “constructively dimissed.”
sounds like a layoff is coming if they are doing this.
No matter what, the parasites in the big club always fail upwards.
*Underpaying someone else to fix it.
Executives make some major mistakes but never seem to be held accountable.
fire her for being caught for not OBFUSCATING THE lay offs as something else.
And they’re going to fire Charles Poon for fucking this up, right?
Mr.Poon is known for fucking things…
ROFL that was not a mistake. They all knew what would happen.
yup, they just got caught doing it.
Time for another edition of “stupid or liar”
“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering
AI is a tool not an employee.
I hope they had to double their previous salaries…
I had they hope to previous thier double saliear
Durr regard made jokesers fucks it ip halwauthit
The joke is NOT I fucked up correcting myself editing it about it, the joke is that I care so much that I make this meta comment. That’s the level of joke we’re on
Is this a part of your op too?
Literally every i ds9s a government psyop
According to Poon, some of the company’s most experienced personnel left before all of their accumulated knowledge could be fully transferred into Ford’s automated systems. That necessitated bringing back some of those employees to retrain those systems…
See this, nothing was learned by these slop-shits. Their take away wasn’t humans-with-experience > than slop-bots. It was, unfortunately, ‘we didn’t extract enough knowledge from the humans that helped build our company before tossing as many humans away as possible. Once we’ve extracted enough, we’ll try again.’
Fuck you poon and co.
Funny how the capitalist narrative is that the CEO types “deserve” all they get because they worked hard and “built the company”, but employee’s that’ve been equally there for it’s hardship and growth, actually with their hands in the mud, actually have all the practical knowledge, yet are only on an income, are tossed aside at the nearest convenience because somebody smelled a bit more money.
Some of them really can’t be arsed to give back the community and systems that allowed them to flourish in the first place can they.
Locust swarm.
Sometimes I feel so blessed working for somebody that actually values people.
even if they can “put all the knowledge” in the LLM, its unlikely the thing would even be able to use it effectively without the same engineers anyways.
“would produce a high-quality product,”
Ai couldn’t do it. Real engineers can. However C suite gonna rebute high quality in favour of service and product that fleeces the most of the buyer.
That’s such a dumb fucking quote. Imagine being a stockholder and reading that sentence spouted from someone at the helm of the company.
Kick rocks, wet socks.
Your thinking like a logical person…not a sycophant with an entitled attitude to their gains.
VP should be fired.
Very normal story at this point. Managers incompetently think AI will magically replace employees, they lay off employees, it doesn’t work, they rehire the employees.
Years ago I worked at an ISP tgat went through a merger. They decided they were going to outsource customer service to another company.
We all got nice severances and 3 months prior notice where we basically didn’t work because all calls were being routed to the new call center and we were just backup. What a great 3 months. We had card tourneys, spun up the companies old game servers and ran minecraft (alpha) on them, lots of fun.
Get laid off, fast forward a year and the outsource company has taken an 86% approval ratimg down to the low 30s.
They hired a lot of us back to completely rebuild the service department. I was tier 1 and got a 76% raise. I imagine others got better.
I bet the executives who made the decision gave themselves a bonus and are still working there despite the monumental blunder.
There can be value in having learned things the hard way. The decisions I made that resulted in melted piles of scrap really seared themselves into my memory, and help me make better decisions around those systems going forward.
Unfortunately, our corporate systems aren’t great at distinguishing people who gained valuable lessons from people who don’t recognize they screwed up.
Executives fail upwards.
So the VP quit or was right fired, right? Right?
Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product
That’s so low IQ, like saying “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing a lawn mower and adjust the landscaping requirements, that that would produce a high quality lawn.”
Exactly, it’s incompetent managers making stupid decisions in the hope of looking good by reducing headcount. People see this and think aha, one more reason to hate AI, but blaming AI is like blaming a fork for not being a spoon.
