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 as a pretext for layoffs. If it doesn't implode almost immediately, they get massive bonuses, if it blows up in their face, oh well they had the courage to 'take a bold strategic decision'

In other words, they don't really have a plan, but they are happy playing with people's lives via layoffs, since it's the 'in' thing to do. The incentives are huge on the upside and zero on the downside for them.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.