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Ford had to hire back former engineers to fix mistakes made by its automated systems
(www.theverge.com)
So they fired the executives responsible, right?
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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Lol. Probably got bonuses then celebrated for identifying the issue and fixing it.
No matter what, the parasites in the big club always fail upwards.
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.
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Can we start replacing executives with AI? Big money savings there, and you don't even need a particularly good model
I'd settle for regular old I
All CEOs do is mindlessly follow trends; perfect use case for AI.
Could probably get the job done with a half-decent flowchart, really.
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Seems like we’re entering the “find out” phase…
If only...
Firing a large group of people and re-hiring a subset at reduced rates is a standard business practice used to keep wages down. This wasn't a mistake in policy, it was a clumsy execution.
Or perhaps a little bit of both: an inelegant way to handle a mistake.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I've been using an LLM for programming for last 6mo and it needs constant babysitting. It's basically something that just does the most straightforward thing without consideration of nuance, maintainability or whether to actually split into a module. This is very much not surprising.
Yeah, I use it for some programming tasks as well. I’m sick and tired of telling it that it did something wrong or simply omitted something, only to have it apologize and offer to fix its own mistakes.
The major problem is that the work of an LLM has a massive number of hidden 'assumptions' that you need to be aware of. If you don't already have a good working knowledge of the task you wont have an intuition about those assumptions. It's annoying.
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The active dev I know who uses it daily says it drastically reduces the time he spends on routine tasks and sometimes comes up with novel approaches, but he definitely has to check everything. The problem is inexperienced or non-experienced people thinking it's a magic lamp you can rub and it poofs out an expert programmer.
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So the VP quit or was right fired, right? Right?
AI is a tool not an employee.
The Broligarch's are reading the wrong philosophers. If they read Polanyi they would know that you can't build a tacit knowledge system based on explicit knowledge. Its summed up in the pithy "we know more than we can tell". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polanyi%27s_paradox
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- Yes sir I can fix those, I only charge 10.000 euros / hour.
“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.
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.
I hope they negotiated their new salary very strongly
I assume someone got a big bonus for that decision and now someone (maybe even the same person) gets a big bonus for the decision to rehire.
Well he's being honest in admitting his mistake. In 20 years in the corporate world I've never seen an exec do that.
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"Mistakenly"? More like delusionally. The shortcomings of current AI systems are hardly a secret. Anyone who spent a few minutes getting informed would be aware of those.
In addition, the automaker underestimated the value of the institutional knowledge accumulated by its more veteran engineers who had worked through multiple vehicle-development cycles. And this combination of phenomena led to a drop in quality in Ford’s vehicles.
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.
Executives fail upwards.
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