Can Ford Turn Itself into a Tech Company?
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To wit - why would they care about most of that - or for example, version control - why would they even try to argue against version control - version control is a free problem at this point, as in it doesn't cost money to fix - and it wouldn't even rise up to a non-technical managers level.
Without technical leadership from upper management you each individual line of business standing up their own infrastructure (there's currently a war between github and gitlab for the new step forward; the resolution of which is blocking the purchase of any additional github licenses). Perhaps a domain expertise isn't strictly necessary but it helps a lot; especially in older environments trying to change.
If a company can't even understand the massive benefits with practically zero downsides of version control, they sounds like a company that is probably thoroughly screwed up.
You need to have just enough knowledge of version control to make that argument. And that’s the problem.
I trust an oldline automaker like Ford with safety-critical software engineering before I'd trust any "startup", especially one from the Valley. I'd bet consumers will feel the same. They'll feel safer climbing into a self-driving car with a Ford badge on it than one with a Snap badge, no matter how good Snap's marketing is, or if they ML software is open source.
http://www.autonews.com/article/20130923/OEM02/309239967/eij...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiji_Toyoda
One should take early Toyota stories with a grain of salt, as there may be more than a little bit of hagiography.
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Mission Statement:
You can bang out a chat app in a 2 months and call yourself a tech company, but spend 2 or more years designing and engineering a vehicle, developing both hardware and software, to strict safety and efficiency specifications, and what you're doing isn't technology?
Is Ford willing to spend $150k/year to $200k/year for a large number of senior level developers to build out and train staff for the next 10 years to build a thriving tech culture from within the company?
And will these higher-paid staff members have real power and control within the company, such that they feel that they are doing useful and fulfilling work?
If so, then yes, Ford (or anyone else really) can become a Tech Company. Money and power, that's all developers want for the most part.
Give them money but without power to pursue interesting problems... then its going to be harder to recruit. Give them power without money, and it will be possible to get college kids maybe, but probably not the senior developers needed to bootstrap a culture from the ground up.
The suburban schools are quite good. Oakland County schools are some of the best in the nation. International Academy was rated as the top public school in America for many years (it's now amongst the top 10 or so).
In my opinion, Michigan is experiencing a statewide cultural divide. The more metropolitan areas are not nearly as culturally close minded as the less metropolitan areas. Ultimately, Michigan companies don't seem to value talent enough to pay them well. There's no reason somebody should be able to make 2-3x more outside of Michigan than in the state.
Western Washington was an extractive economy that transitioned to manufacturing in the 20's and 30's - Eastern WA was and is primarily agricultural. It's a cultural divide that is usually pretty well bridged.
Why would you be afraid of Trump voters? They're Americans just like you are, and are trying to pick someone who'll solve their problems - which I'd note, are probably different than yours - a good reminder is, more people in King County voted for Trump than did in any other county, and King County accounts for 1/5th or so of the votes he got.
Do you really want anyone to answer that question on HN?
and king county was 72% for Clinton, and Seattle was even more tilted that way.
>When we reached the end of the hall, Ford welcomed me into his office, a midcentury wooden cavern with a fish tank built into one wall and a panoramic view of Dearborn along the other. The dreary vista stood in stark relief with the golden-era artifacts in Ford’s office...
http://www.autonews.com/article/20171002/OEM06/171009988/ran...
There is no good reason to pay 200k a year to a guy who can make 200k a year in Sunnyvale - in Michigan, he'll have as much disposable income at, 120-140k a year as he did at 200k a year in California.
Before you say people wont work for less - I know plenty of people who would, including myself.
Michigan doesn't have that cycle happening (or, at least to the same extent). Telling somebody to take a hypothetical pay cut to move somewhere with less appeal isn't a sound strategy for attracting talent.
This ignores two facts of wealth in the bay area.
The value of land has risen considerably, so an engineer can grow wealthy just by owning (as opposed to renting) even without any "disposable" income (although I recognize that owning/renting can involve dipping into "disposable" income).
The promise of equity growth is compelling in a small-ish company. The likelihood that Ford employee equity might appreciate is _very_ tiny, is dependent upon so many factors out of the control of the tech employees (industry competition, regulations, supply of low-interest financing, labor unions, etc) that may not affect other unions.
As someone who has spent most of my career working for old line companies, I discount equity in the company as something akin to gambling - I'd rather take cash than options with a low strike price.
GM paid $500-1,000MM dollars for Cruise Automation, an autonomous vehicle startup with 40 employees. That means that GM thinks that three years of work by these employees are worth in the neighborhood of $12.5 to $25MM each.
Meaning a $200k salary is a serious low-ball. The fact that a web-dev in California can earn that, doesn't mean that's a good benchmark for a world-class AI researcher.
So yes, there is a good reason to pay these people well. The company knows that, if they don't, they face an existential threat. These potential employees are better off creating their own startup and auctioning off the results in three years.
It's pretty obvious that Google, Facebook, et al. spend a lot of energy and money marketing themselves as fantastic places to work with great pay and benefits.
Most non-tech companies don't spend this effort. Ford might pay well, but they don't spend effort properly marketing themselves as a great place to work. Part of this is that tech culture != Ford culture and many people might not like Ford's big business culture.
An engineer earning a $250k+ salary is seen as greedy in these parts. You can witness this from Michiganders right here in this thread. There are a few posts here about how $250k is a ridiculous salary in Michigan and is completely unnecessary.
Ford will likely go bankrupt or be acquired if they fail to stay competitive in autonomous vehicle research. Since there's only a handful of people in the world capable of keeping them relevant, these people are worth literally billions of dollars to Ford and trillions to the Michigan/Ohio/Indiana economies.
Ford should have no problem paying these people millions and advertising that fact.
Now days, every large company is a technology company. If you need to manage 1000s of retail stores you are a technology company. If you manage 100,000s of SKUs you are a technology company. You cannot operate on a large scale without being really good at technology. It is an attitude.
Ironically, I recently joined a large company where senior technical leaders are of this opinion. No wonder projects take years to be completed. Next time I will ask this on interview.
I know a Ford product manager. I talked with her about this extensively and came away with the conclusion that they will be able to deliver the software required to keep up (barely) but not at the speed and quality required to become the industry front runner. Right now my eye is on GM (through cruise) and Tesla but only time will tell.
Hmm. Me thinks not.
You can't turn that kind of machine around. Whenever they're faced with a problem, the only thing they know how to do is ask someone else.
Cisco pioneered the model of outsourcing a lot of its technical research (two different teams would quit and start startups to solve problem X; one would get traction then Cisco would buy it -- bonus for the team! -- and the others get their jobs back).
Big Pharma has pretty much outsourced early stage candidate development.
In both these cases (and many others) the large company has strong development, manufacturing, distribution and sales pipelines as well as strong balance sheets, none of which a startup is likely to develop.
If Ford chooses this path I don't see it a reason to criticize.
I'm going to argue for any large scale project, the answer will be no.
(Separately they have to adapt to a different market model; I'm not talking about that).
The Ford GT was designed in secrecy in the basement of the design studio. The 3.5L EcoBoost engine was engineered in house and with Rousch including all of the engine controls. Multimatic is just assembling the vehicles in Canada, since Ford doesn't do by hand construction of cars.
I work for Ford as an engineer, but I am only speaking for myself, not for Ford.