GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/11/gm-just-laid-off-hundreds-of-it-workers-to-hire-those-with-stronger-ai-skills/

by jnord • 2 months ago

67 88 2 months ago

skywhopper• 2 months ago

This will never stop being the stupid approach. Destroy morale, lose institutional knowledge, waste months or years getting new folks up to speed, all for skills that could be developed in house and with targeted hiring by a functioning organization.

forgetfreeman3• 2 months ago

This is only stupid if you value quality of outcome. If your sole metric is make stock price go up long enough to cash out this shit is brilliant.

pixl974• 2 months ago

Ya, we burned the planet to the ground, but for a few short moments we created a lot of shareholder value.

cosmotic• 2 months ago

They couldn't be bothered to train their staff?

jagged-chisel2• 2 months ago

They hire anew to lower salaries, while also gaining staff with "stronger AI skills."

asdfman1232• 2 months ago

Then they hire people with even higher salaries than the original devs to clean up the God awful mess.

2ndorderthought6• 2 months ago

Laid off ai workers are cheaper. I saw a job posting for a vibe coder, 20 bucks an hour.

darth_avocado• 2 months ago

I don’t believe anyone trying to hire 20 bucks an hour for vibe coders is a serious employer. You’d make more money being a barista in some cities or a substitute teacher.

scorpioxy5• 2 months ago

I found that sort of thinking is no longer a part of corporate culture(in AU at least). As in, investing in your staff and planning for the future. Resources are meant to be used and abused for benefit and that's it, consequences be damned.

thegreatpeter• 2 months ago

perhaps they tried that and the staff wasn't willing to be trained. have you ever worked at a company like that of that size?

AngryData2• 2 months ago

Their tech positions were really the only common path to get continued raises and promotions starting from the bottom in GM for the past few decades. Most other positions only ever got hired from outside the company because internal hires expected raises for it, so to me this just looks like gm putting their tech department under the same self destructive hiring policies as the rest of the company.

pixl974• 2 months ago

It really is time for them to die as a company.

afgrant2• 2 months ago

I haven’t heard of a single software job in the last decade that offers anything resembling “training”. You sink or swim based on your previous knowledge, what you can glean from the codebase and coworkers, and how skilled you are at self-teaching.

analogpixel• 2 months ago

A lot of people are un-trainable. I've worked with people who got angry when the Instructor showed up and the instructor wouldn't just give them the completed exercises, while most of the other people just sat on their laptops checking emails ignore the training all together. I've worked with people that want training on how to use Claude because they can't figure out "just type what you want in the box, and it does it for you." I've worked with people who were amazed when I googled for answers and were like "I should do that to!" (but didn't)

People will demand training, ignore it, and continue to be a drain on the company. There will be those people out there that have one very very very specific skill and that's all they want to do; "I remove people from Active directory that have names that start with A,B or C" or "I run this Ansible Playbook someone else wrote, and that's my entire job."

scorpioxy5• 2 months ago

agent development, model engineering, AI-native workflows -- point directly at where large-enterprise demand is heading.

I don't understand these words. Does "AI-native workflow" mean vibe coding?

I am now seeing a lot of roles asking for "AI-enabled engineers". And I am not sure what that means either. I am sort of afraid to ask because the answer will probably confuse me even more. Maybe it's my understanding of what LLMs are and how they work that makes these words mean very little to me.

AIorNot• 2 months ago

Yup thats exactly what they want

Cheaper younger people who dont think vibe coding is bad

Is this a good idea - probably not

asdfman1232• 2 months ago

It's a mistake. What you really want is senior engineers vibe coding.

It would be like hiring a junior to lead a team. They're the worst choice for that role.

scorpioxy5• 2 months ago

Vibe coded self driving cars sounds very interesting.

2ndorderthought6• 2 months ago

Yea it's vibe/agentic coding. That's what about half of the current jobs are right now. It's really sad. Saw a vibe coder job today, 20bucks an hour

scorpioxy5• 2 months ago

Interesting. I saw contractor rates dropping here too. The ones I saw recently were at pre-pandemic levels so from 6 years ago. The large increase in cost of living from that time makes it even worse. The funny part is that the skills and experience that are being asked for are at a senior level. So I guess that would be senior level vibe coder at junior rates?

johanneskanybal• 2 months ago

I mean agentic coding is a thing but anyone could learn that in a day or week. So the idea of throwing away people that could be the most productive with ai of course make no sense. But it's big corporations, not everything has to make sense. It's most likely a dressed up pure cost saving framed in 2026-lingo.

scorpioxy5• 2 months ago

I was going to say that sounds like short term gain for long term pain. But I'm guessing if there are any issues in the future, the government would just bail them out.

derbOac• 2 months ago

FWIW, I interpreted the article as saying they're not looking for vibe coding, but AI model development per se:

"...In practical terms, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up — designing the systems, training the models, and engineering the pipelines — not just use AI as a productivity tool."

drivebyhooting2• 2 months ago

I can guarantee you GM is not training any of their own models.

renyicircle2• 2 months ago

You can just check any of the vacancies on their website to see what they're looking for.

Example: AI Agent Engineer (https://search-careers.gm.com/en/jobs/jr-202606937/ai-agent-...)

We are seeking an AI Agent Engineer to design, build, and operationalize AI-powered agents that enhance employee productivity and decision-making in a complex enterprise environment. The ideal candidate combines strong AI/ML foundations, hands-on experience with agent frameworks, and a pragmatic approach to delivering business value in partnership with cross-functional teams.

Does not look like pure vibe-coding to me. More like developing wrappers over LLMs.

prewett• 2 months ago

Based on that description, we still have no idea what they are looking for, since it the only meaningful words in the first sentence are "design", "build", and "AI-powered agents". "Operationalize" isn't even a word, and "enhance employee productivity and decision-making" communicates nothing, except maybe that this is tools- or HR-oriented and not product-oriented. "Complex enterprise environment" can be omitted.

I would definitely pass on this job.

salawat• 2 months ago

AI-ensbled engineers == any engineer without sufficient life experience to inherently tell that delegating huge swathes of implementation to a stochastic parrot is a dangerous and fundamentally unsafe idea. It's spun around "knowing how to use the tools" but somehow the whole part around "knowing when not to use them and refusing to use them in those contexts" is conveniently written out of the definition of AI enabled. I personally sed s_AI/ enabled/ engineers_engineers/ with/ unreasonable/ risk/ tolerance_g.

When the business field turns you into a pariah because you refuse to bow to the uninitiated's desires tends to be my red line for an exit. I will not do reasonably foreseeable net harmful work for an industry that won't take no for an answer. My definition for reasonably foreseeable sets the minimum bar for analysis of consequence at enumerating 3rd and 4th degree consequences minimum.

They don't want engineers. They want Operators for whom thinking isn't in the job description.

Loudergood• 2 months ago

Shameless investor signalling.

goalieca• 2 months ago

GM needs to focus on making better, safer, cheaper cars.

jagged-chisel2• 2 months ago

"Cheaper" is indeed what you get when you reduce payroll.

folkrav• 2 months ago

Unless they plan on scooping up AI researchers, I legitimately don't understand what "stronger AI skills" is even supposed to mean.

cosmicgadget• 2 months ago

People who can use Claude and its peers effectively. AI skills = prompting and slop troubleshooting.

nh43215rgb• 2 months ago

No AI No Life...

xvxvx• 2 months ago

Get a low paid entry level job at a company. Do a good job over many years, or decades. Raises, promotions etc brings your salary up to a decent level. The company can’t have that. They use AI to cut you and start over with another low paid noob.

Man, the only advice I can give people is do not sacrifice time with your loved ones for a company that doesn’t give a shit. Your kid is only going to graduate once. Those family vacations are priceless in the long run. Hell, I take time off to hang out with my dogs now and then. The job can wait.

torben-friis• 2 months ago

That's the neat part, many don't need to worry about missing their kid's graduation because they can't afford neither kids nor the safety to have them (home ownership, etc).

jongjong• 2 months ago

It really seems like that doesn't it?

I've been down quite a few rabbit holes like that which made me think that a lot of major 'issues' appear to be meticulously engineered to protect a certain set of interests at the expense of others.

It's like; "Damm, houses are expensive, I'm going to live in a caravan" then you realize you can't park it on your own land without council approval... Then you find out that council will never approve due to it "negatively impacting the charm of the area."

Then you become homeless and realize that you can't legally put your tent anywhere and all the camping sites in the wilderness which you used to go to as a child now charge you fees to stay there and have rangers patrolling constantly (paid for by your own tax money you used to pay). Also, you can't get a job without an address and it's a literal catch-22... Then if you lose hope and start doing drugs, bad actors (possibly sponsored by foreign states) put fentanyl in the drug supply to finish you off. Then the media fully covers it up by distracting people with slop.

People are dying and it is covered up in the most targeted, effective way imaginable... They are not only killed, they are blamed for what is system failure on the way out. "Should have gotten a job," or "Shouldn't have done drugs." And the people doing the most blaming and defending the system are passive-income shareholders who have a lot of time on their hands and sit at home all day and further rig the politics in their favour. It's cooked all the way down.

It's like the dystopian book "Brave New World" is looking pretty good by comparison to where we're heading. At least in BNW, the "savages" had a designated reserve they could escape to.

porphyra• 2 months ago

AI is a godsend for automotive coding.

It's really annoying how at some ASIL levels you need 100% code coverage of unit tests. With AI, all you have to do is to get your agent to generate the tests! Likewise with all the MISRA C requirements. Need your cyclomatic complexity to be less than 10? It's just one prompt away! Now your spaghetti code can easily satisfy the safety requirements with much less effort.

thot_experiment• 2 months ago

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but it seems insane to let the AI write the tests.

AI can't be held accountable, it shouldn't be writing the tests that determine whether car systems function correctly.

Insanity• 2 months ago

If you wouldn’t let AI run your nuclear power plant, you need to drink more of the AI kool-aid.

anonym295• 2 months ago

AI can't be held accountable

I hear this all the time. Why does it matter? Punishing a human for making a mistake does not prevent mistakes, nor does it undo the harm of the mistake. A human saying "my bad, I messed up" and an AI saying "my bad, I messed up" are equally worthless, in a functional sense.

AlotOfReading• 2 months ago

As someone who's worked on this kind of stuff at GM, I don't really get the exuberance in this particular space (not just the comment I'm responding to).

If you want 100% coverage, you just autogenerate the test cases. LLMs can't properly check MISRA requirements, so they're really just a layer on top existing automated checkers. Same for complexity metrics, it doesn't get merged if it violates that (or it's a vendor dependency you won't touch anyway).

If you care about the spirit of the rules, they're not that big a difference. If you don't care, there are already ways to do this. In either case they're an incremental change, not what I'd call a godsend.

naruhodo• 2 months ago

Irony detected, but it's 2026, so nobody can be sure.

AngryData2• 2 months ago

Best excuse they got to fire well paid and experienced proffessionals that have worked for them for decades and replace them with low paid new hires. But GM isn't in a great spot to be weathering any negative downstream effects. And after seeing how they treat employees for decades ill have zero sympathy for them when things go downhill.

elwebmaster• 2 months ago

You won't be asked, your tax dollars will just be used to bail them out, either directly or through tariffs. Because democracy.

2ndorderthought6• 2 months ago

You see we socialize the losses and capitalize the profits. Works great for everyone

j-bos• 2 months ago

And after seeing how they treat employees for decades

To say nothing of their cars.

cyberax• 2 months ago

Well, the US auto execs visited China and realized that their days are numbered. So why not extract as much profit as possible?

Firing people with institutional knowledge? So what? It's going to improve profits short-term.

drivebyhooting2• 2 months ago

Why can’t US auto makers automate like China did?

rdevilla• 2 months ago

Isn't it obvious? They aren't using AI to automate their business. That's why GM is doing this.

WarmWash• 2 months ago

Probably should just replace their software engineers too. I don't mean to throw shade, but automotive software is so bad I'd bet my life that Claude could do better.

Nevermind that the update cycle seems to be 6-10 months for changes like "You can now reset your radio presets directly from the radio settings menu", while bugs like temperature control resetting to max cool every start-up never get fixed.

pixl974• 2 months ago

US car software, ya, I've never seen such trash in my life. This said I don't really have any complaints about my Hyundai software. It works, doesn't crash, and does what I want it too.

lowmagnet• 2 months ago

we have a 2017 and 2020 ioniq hybrid and the android auto has been flawless since we got them. except for updates from google on the phone temporarily breaking things, that is.

dghlsakjg2• 2 months ago

My - admittedly 8 year old - Mitsubishi has atrocious UX. State resets itself at odd times (cruise control disables EV mode, and resets regenerative braking settings, eg.), preferences are forgotten, if I want to listen to the radio I have to cycle through AM before FM every time, the touchscreen is slow to respond, the WiFi password for connecting to the app can only be gotten from a dealer, buttons do different things depending on context, etc.

CarPlay works great though.

It’s not just American cars

kami23• 2 months ago

I kept reading about how bad Android Auto was for years but we finally bought a more modern used car and I can't believe they would ship that experience to customers. I had a week where I just had to unpair and re-pair Everytime I got in the car.

I would love to read about why that stuff is the way it is from the engineers, hmm that might be a good spelunking. I really must be missing something that makes it harder than I think it really should be.

afgrant2• 2 months ago

Maybe they prioritized it low, assigned it to a group of 3 devs, and it functioned the first time they demoed it to management, so it shipped. All other devs would’ve been working on their in-house software.

binarymax• 2 months ago

Well, if all the training data for auto software was trash anyway, then you know what they say:

Carbage in, carbage out.

IKnowThatIdk• 2 months ago

I used to have issues, I picked up an AA wireless dongle and adjusted the settings a little bit, and have had a pretty solid experience. YMMV

BobaFloutist• 2 months ago

automotive software is so bad I'd bet my life that Claude could do better

and they are!

hulitu• 2 months ago

automotive software is so bad I'd bet my life that Claude could do better.

Leave it to Claude and you will.

The quality of software has overall decreased in the last decade. Testing is avoided, fixing bugs is done through redesigns.

lofaszvanitt• 2 months ago

Seems like there will be a small elite that wants to go up to a space station and shit on top of all the citizens below :D.

Havoc• 2 months ago

I would like one vibecoded airbag please

i_love_retros• 2 months ago

Opens 50% of the time everytime

mattas• 2 months ago

Can't wait to see the JDs asking for 10 years of LLM experience.

markboo• 2 months ago

"We laid off engineers to hire engineers with stronger AI skills" is what 2026 sounds like when a company means "we laid off engineers to pay less." The AI wrapper doesn't change the trade, it just makes the wage cut quotable in the press release.

deadbolt• 2 months ago

It's crazy that this still works for the companies. Anyone with any experience here knows whats happening. But the reporters can still just parrot whatever these companies say. Who cares if it's more lies, right?

spwa4• 2 months ago

"not all" permanent headcount reductions ...

Tells you everything you need to know.

zombot• 2 months ago

I would say: Great, let them crash and burn. But when (not if) their cars do the same, it will cost a toll of human victims.

GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

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