Thread regarding General Motors layoffs

So many ignorant folks are quoting 737 Max situation without even understanding how we landed there!?! Ignorance is bliss! Seeking truth is what takes time, efforts and energy. Look up 737 Max documentary on Netflix.

Engineering had nothing to do with it. Engineers did their job and produced more efficient machine. Problem was:

1. Top management at Boeing lied to airlines (including Pilot Union) saying existing trained Pilots on 737 can use new aircraft with a simple iPad based training. No simulators or HW required.
2. Marketing propagated this message so loudly.
3. FAA do not have ba--s to question Boeing and call their bluff!!
4. Boeing needed 737 Max to compete with Airbus A321 NEO which was way more efficient than 737-800!!

It is Corporate leadership and lies along with regulatory oversight failures that led to Boeing 737 max issue. Had Pilots given proper training on Simulators, this would have never happened. That would had made airline hesitant to place orders though.

https://www.netflix.com/title/81272421

Getting rid of experienced engineers and replacing them with half price ones is always tempting to accountants and managers.

Saving money is easy to measure, but lower quality can be harder to see, until a 737MAX crashes.

Management seems to forget "lessons learned" after just a few years.

They'll try something, it'll be a big failure, then in a few years management will forget about the failure and come up with the "new" idea of trying it again.

And it'll fail again, and they'll claim "no one could have predicted it would fail."

Then they'll collect big bonuses for "leading the company through tough times" that they created themselves.

Who knew this thread would have commercials :-) ?

It's difficult to predict exactly how this situation will affect contractors, but one option to consider is custom dedicated teams services - https://omisoft.net/service/dedicated-software-development-team/. These services can provide highly skilled and specialized contractors who work exclusively for your organization, which could potentially provide greater job security and stability for those contractors. However, it's important to do your own research and evaluate all options before making any decisions.

But their goal is to save $2 billion, so any kind of back filling, even with contractors, works against that.

Contractors may be safer than GM employees. If a Department needs to reduce headcount they fire GM employees. If they have budget they can hire contractors (not headcount).

Totally agree. Too many contractors hired in the "corona" binge.
Artificially created demand for GM cars not lining with reality.
Who wants an expensive HV vehicle when I can comfortably fix my existing gas engine vehicle and run it another 35k miles?.

Plus wfh....so much fun. IPL, TV serials, up-north working without nobody knowing, Instant costco visits during working hours, mow the lawn.

Time to cut fat...Go mary go...Electrify-cute GM

Post from TheLayoff.com
Yes. This was demonstrated below with two great examples.
Thank you, come again.

So this makes all the W ones smart?

https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/boeings-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9anhour-engineers

Link to article?

Boeing american engineers blame cheap Indian garabge software for 737 Max problems

Boeing engineers say 737 Max software outsourced from India’s linked to troubles of 737 Max, two of which crashed. It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid indian contractors.

The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.

Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on indian temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.

In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent Indian college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.

The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”

Boeing’s cultivation of Indian companies appeared to pay other dividends. In recent years, it has won several orders for Indian military and commercial aircraft, such as a $22 billion one in January 2017 to supply SpiceJet Ltd. That order included 100 737-Max 8 jets and represented Boeing’s largest order ever from an Indian airline, a coup in a country dominated by Airbus.

Based on resumes posted on social media, HCL engineers helped develop and test the Max’s flight-display software, while employees from another Indian company, Cyient Ltd., handled software for flight-test equipment.

Costly Delay

In one post, an HCL employee summarized his duties with a reference to the now-infamous model, which started flight tests in January 2016: “Provided quick workaround to resolve production issue which resulted in not delaying flight test of 737-Max (delay in each flight test will cost very big amount for Boeing).”

Boeing said the company did not rely on engineers from HCL and Cyient for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which has been linked to the Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn’t rely on either firm for another software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that wasn’t working for most buyers.

“Boeing has many decades of experience working with supplier/partners around the world,” a company spokesman said. “Our primary focus is on always ensuring that our products and services are safe, of the highest quality and comply with all applicable regulations.”

Lion Air Boeing Max 8 Aircraft Grounded At Jakarta International Airport
The cockpit of a grounded Lion Air Boeing Co. 737 Max 8 aircraft is seen at terminal 1 of Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Cenkareng, Indonesia, on Tuesday, March 15, 2019. Sunday’s loss of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737, in which 157 people died, bore similarities to the Oct. 29 crash of another Boeing 737 Max plane, operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air, stoking concern that a feature meant to make the upgraded Max safer than earlier planes has actually made it harder to fly.
In a statement, HCL said it “has a strong and long-standing business relationship with The Boeing Company, and we take pride in the work we do for all our customers. However, HCL does not comment on specific work we do for our customers. HCL is not associated with any ongoing issues with 737 Max.”

Recent simulator tests by the Federal Aviation Administration suggest the indian written software has major issues on Boeing’s best-selling model run deeper. The company’s shares fell this week after the regulator found a further problem with a computer chip that experienced a lag in emergency response when it was overwhelmed with data.

Engineers who worked on the Max, which Boeing began developing eight years ago to match a rival Airbus SE plane, have complained of pressure from managers to limit changes that might introduce extra time or cost.

“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.”

Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed,” said Rabin, who was laid off in 2015.

The typical jetliner has millions of parts — and millions of lines of code — and Boeing has long turned over large portions of the work to suppliers who follow its detailed design blueprints.

Starting with the 787 Dreamliner, launched in 2004, it sought to increase profits by instead providing high-level specifications and then asking suppliers to design more parts themselves. The thinking was “they’re the experts, you see, and they will take care of all of this stuff for us,” said Frank McCormick, a former Boeing flight-controls software engineer who later worked as a consultant to regulators and manufacturers. “This was just nonsense.”

Sales are another reason to send the work overseas. In exchange for an $11 billion order in 2005 from Air India, Boeing promised to invest $1.7 billion in Indian companies. That was a boon for HCL and other software developers from India, such as Cyient, whose engineers were widely used in computer-services industries but not yet prominent in aerospace.

Rockwell Collins, which makes cockpit electronics, had been among the first aerospace companies to source significant work in India in 2000, when HCL began testing software there for the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based company. By 2010, HCL employed more than 400 people at design, development and verification centers for Rockwell Collins in Chennai and Bangalore.

That same year, Boeing opened what it called a “center of excellence” with HCL in Chennai, saying the companies would partner “to create software critical for flight test.” In 2011, Boeing named Cyient, then known as Infotech, to a list of its “suppliers of the year” for design, stress analysis and software engineering on the 787 and the 747-8 at another center in Hyderabad.

The Boeing rival also relies in part on offshore engineers. In addition to supporting sales, the planemakers say global design teams add efficiency as they work around the clock. But outsourcing has long been a sore point for some Boeing engineers, who, in addition to fearing job losses say it has led to communications issues and mistakes.

During the last "great" recession, managers over Engineering departments around America had the brilliant idea of firing their staff and replacing it without outsourced labor from India. I have significant experience in this area, as I was staffed as a PM with training these people and running the projects. Here's what I learned:

1. Indian staff made promises again and again with dates and never met them. Random, endless excuses (Rajesh is on vacation. Mansukh is sick, etc) were used and the work did not get done.
2. After escalating the situation with the managers with the bright idea, pressure was put on the outsourced group for results.
3. When I actually received the data for the project, it was beyond bad. Mind you, about 5x the time the Americans would have had it done, the Indian staff produced about 10% completion and it was all inaccurate and not usable data.
4. The Indian work needed to be re-worked by American contract designers, who typically did it correctly and in short order!!!
5. It was obvious the team with 'Master Degrees in Engineering' were no more talented than a group of American Junior High School Students. No creativity, no follow-through, endless excuses.
6. There's no auto culture or manufacturing culture in India. In America, most auto industry workers/professionals (engineers, marketing, sales, IT, you name it) have fathers, uncles, grandfathers, etc that have worked in the industry and have heard it about their entire lives and they are PASSIONATE about it. You don't see this with Indian paper-mill degrees.

The result: After a couple years of abysmal results from Indian outsourcing, almost no company in America is willing to make this mistake again. I haven't seen Indian outsourcing of Engineering in at least 10 years. Perhaps IT is learning this lesson? Perhaps a new generation of "brilliant" managers in American Engineering departments will make the same mistake during this recession?
What I did find out was that the Indian "engineers" were good at menial tasks like virtual part testing.
Flame me, down-vote me, do what you wish but this is the truth.

@2tgq+1lzEhoef why are we criticizing each other while we are under the axe for corporate strategy failure.

@2xdu+1lzEhoef: lol! I read your post 3 times and still was not able to make sense out of it. Try again please. Looking at how well you comprehend and explain things, no wonder company like GM need to hire better workforce! Keep up the good work.

You people are lazy and just want a paycheck. That is the reason company depends of immigrants on H1B and who got MASTERS degree in the first place.

(So lazy people get Masters degree and active people get GED and BS? That is why company hires Masters. And company hires us because we are lazy and just want paycheck? Why would anyone hire lazy people? You work for charity, right?)

Some of you are also not ashamed to steal their contribution and show it off as yours.
(Whose contributions? Masters contributions? But they are H1? So we steal our own work??)

Did you forget your meds? Get well soon bruh!

Seems logical no one is safe. Unless you are on a specific EV project, there's every reason to expect a bare bones layoff. Historically there are early retirement packages first. Since the salary expectations for people who started in 21' or 22' were at peak market prices, GM now knows they need to get people to leave, not just the aging set. First will be voluntary, then will be contractors, then will be the expensive IT people. Level 8 without any direct reports, Scrum, Project, RTE that don't 'produce'. Quarterly rankings are going into place in an announcement next week. The original question, are contractors safe? He-l no. No one is. They are panicked.

@1jxw+1lzEhoef did you get a million dollar patent for the company?
You people are lazy and just want a paycheck. That is the reason company depends of immigrants on H1B and who got MASTERS degree in the first place. Some of you are also not ashamed to steal their contribution and show it off as yours.

Seriously doubt India orders trillions of anything from any country.
Show your numbers and sources!

@1jxw+1lzEhoef: of course! Most of the H1s come from 1 country (~80%). As we try to throw these imports from that country out, that country should also throw out/cancel trillions dollars worth of high end services and products that would support millions of jobs here.

What about H1-B's will they be layed-off before GM directs and Contractors? There are a lot of x-ambulance chasing lawyers who won't hesitate on bending visa rules to help H1-B's from being deported after they been layed-off and not finding a new equivalent job. These lawyers should be disbarred.

A lot of contractors in hourly positions work circles around the GM hourly. They soon get “educated” by the UAW, and their productivity falls.

Contractors are safe.
GM is still hiring for contract positions..
simple reason.. They can be laid off by a phone call... no paperwork.

Last time every contractor was let go, it won’t be different this go around.

you are next when they obviously wont get enough "salaried" employees to leave. Who in the right mind will leave GM ?..wfh, fun