amazing, the same company that says people should not be allowed to repair their own vehicles. henry ford is rolling in his grave.

The folks who make the decision to throw away these engineers in the first place are the ones who should be laid off.

I hope those engineers made Ford pay out the nose.

So...don't buy any Ford vehicles designed and/or manufactured in the last 8 months or so?

I wonder which of the management consulting companies caused this fire/rehire experiment.

Were these engineers fired and replaced with AI? Article implies they brought back retired engineers.

Sorry but this reeks of marketing. To what extent was Ford actually attempting to replace these engineers with AI tools in the last three years or were they just letting them go by attrition? Was this the result of an actual AI influenced layoff? I read both the Verge and the Bloomberg piece and none of this seems to be articulated but it sure does seem to capture a vibe right now that companies are footgunning themselves all over the place with LLMs, despite no evidence of this being related to any of that...

350 of how many laid off? If 350 is a fraction of the total replaced with AI that's going to be counted as a win for AI reducing costs, they just were a little to ambitious with the initial round. That'll be counted as a learning experience because we're early in the replace people with unintelligent tools process.

I hope those engineers demanded 2x higher salaries this time.

This is exactly the idiotic use case of AI coming back to bite them.

The short sighted gains (and I’ll assume that they are chasing quarterlies as usual) are to be had by firing most of the junior engineers, keeping the seniors because with AI they can n* their productivity.

Basically you can fire 2x junior engineers for every senior engineer you keep. But the senior engineers are the keystone here, and without juniors eventually becoming senior engineers you’ll eventually be screwed.

But, that’s a problem for the -next- c-suite gang… so…