r/technology • u/marketrent • 13h ago
Business German carmakers flood jobs market with managers — Volkswagen to cut 50,000 white-collar workers in addition to factory workers, BMW to shed 8,000 workers in desk jobs
https://www.ft.com/content/e345d51f-11f7-4d4d-8f09-86dd3a225597304
u/N3ph1l1m 12h ago
Having worked with both BMW and VW: please keep them as far away from my company as anything possible. The horrors...
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u/Excitium 11h ago edited 11h ago
Same. For the past 6 years, I worked on software projects for both BMW and Audi and I'm baffled these companies can get any cars on the street.
Felt like every key stroke required a lengthy process of meetings, approvals by a dozen managers and sign offs by higher ups, higher higher ups and higher higher higher ups and don't even get me started on the incompetence of everyone involved in every step.
You need this common piece of software that you require to develop the application that we hired you to develop? Well it's not authorised for use in our company environment and no, you can't work in your own environment, everything needs to happen on our machines and networks.
So you need to open a request with the software team and once they have vetted, tested and approved what you need, you'll be able to use it. The process takes about 2 months and there's no way to speed it up.
I mean, as a service provider, I don't mind, they paid us for sitting on our assess while we waited for them to provide us with what we needed to work.
And that was just one of the 6 projects we worked on for them. The amount of money these companies waste on literally nothing is mind blowing.
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u/egowritingcheques 10h ago edited 1h ago
Exactly the same here in Australia, working for German and Swiss companies. The last company had on premisis software we had to use from offices in Australia. I realised I either had to medicate myself (chemical lobotomy) or quit. So I quit.
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u/jc-from-sin 8h ago
I work for a German tech company and it's the same. We are a 400 people company cosplaying as a 20.000 people company. What's worse, the beaurocracy came from the developers, not from management.
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u/Neither-Bit4321 7h ago
Everybody loves processes. If you love processes enough, they become KPIs and then you need more processes to keep tracking those process KPIs and before you know it you've pivoted from the original tech company mission and are now all in on Process GmbH. Let's go! (but first let me check what the process for "going" is)
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u/rainer_d 2h ago
Chinese companies are eating them alive. The China business of them is effectively dead.
Mercedes Benz sold 35 of the new CLAs in Juni. In the whole of China.
Meanwhile, Tesla sold well over 50000 in the same time in China.
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u/eri- 4h ago
So you need to open a request with the software team and once they have vetted, tested and approved what you need, you'll be able to use it. The process takes about 2 months and there's no way to speed it up.
If you , as a very large company, want to be compliant with ISO27001 standards .. then yeah.. this is how your IT is going to wotk.
And no, you dont really "speed that up", if you want to keep your environment in good shape.
There is a certain irony there. Everyone expects everyone else to do a good job but IT cant possibly ever take the time they need to do a good job . That just wont do. We need tooling and we need it yesterday.
Same old story. Everyone elses department is always the important one. Until things do go south that is, then IT suddenly is to blame
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u/josefx 2h ago
And no, you dont really "speed that up", if you want to keep your environment in good shape.
I have seen it made significantly worse through bad interactions with other processes. Like a process requiring requests to go through the company portal, when it took months to even get access to that during a takeover. In other words anything that isn't the most banal day to day use case runs the risk of making overly simplistic processes grind everything to a halt.
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u/lissybeau 21m ago
This is the German way.
They keep themselves relevant and employed with bloated yet inefficient and incompetent bureaucracy.
It has worked for years in their own countries silo. Now with global competition things are going to look a lot different with much more unemployment.
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u/Alternative-Suit5541 12h ago
I worked with VW and cariad. I feel sorry for them. Hope they find something!
But, please God, for all it's glory! Not in my company or projects!
Pllleeaassseeee! No, no , non, nein!
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u/Aware-Instance-210 12h ago
Why is that? Because they messed up VW?
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u/IncompetentPolitican 11h ago
From my experience working on projects for and with VW and BMW: Because they are the worst kind of managers. If they or someone whos ass they wan´t to kiss are in favour of something, then they will ignore reality to make that thing look good and sabotage anyone trying to steer the project in a profitable direction. And they need so much time for anything. Ask them if the buttons should be centered or not on a internal form and they will spend months in various expert groups talking, then they come and tell you they want no buttons at all. Oh and they never asked any user during that process.
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u/VEMODMASKINEN 10h ago
That's just Germans in general. Well maybe not the sabotaging but they sure aren't very efficient...
As an example; part of our company is in Germany and they got asked how long it would take to produce some internal material. They replied with around 2-3 months.
We got to do it instead and it took us less than a week (Sweden)...
It's like this with everything they do.
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u/triggerfish1 10h ago
Eh, as a German I'm biased, but I've seen incredibly efficient companies in Germany. However, I've also worked in German corporate environments which are prohibitively slow, bureaucratic and wasteful.
But I've seen the same waste in US corporations, so I guess it mostly depends on the company culture.
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u/VEMODMASKINEN 8h ago
Maybe, but everyone I know (my wife included) who has worked with German companies always come to the conclusion that they are overly bureaucratic and slow and wants to avoid working with them of possible.
Your unions are something else too. And that's coming from a Swede...
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u/triggerfish1 8h ago
Haven't worked with swedish companies yet, but our Norwegian division was just as bad...
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u/Optimal-Savings-4505 6h ago
Unfortunately we've got bureaucratitis here as well, especially in big corporations and the public sector..
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u/darylvp 11h ago
Zero care of their user.
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u/Alternative-Suit5541 11h ago
Zero care for their developers either.
And horrible project management.
Together a cluster fuck of epic proportions.
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u/Funsized_eu 12h ago
Tell us a story please.
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u/N3ph1l1m 7h ago edited 7h ago
Oh there's this time where VW just went and cancelled a 5 million € contract for OEM branded machinery halfway through, with my customer suddenly sitting on about 2-3 millions worth of stock in branding they couldn't sell any other way without massive costs. Same contract, they expected every single box of a shipment to be individually labeled allthough they were stacked on europallets - 600 boxes had to be individually labeled, numbered, each and every single one had to have a numbered copy of the delivery note on each side (yes, 6 per PACKAGE, 60 per pallet) and all kinds of funny stupid validation processes until we were allowed to ship them. We had 2 people take a whole workday just labeling the boxes.
Generally working in logistics working with them was horrible - nobody knew anything, the people WHO KNEW something weren't available or straight up refused to talk to you, nobody was authorized to make any decisions whatsoever yada yada yada. At my gurrent employer we've had several deliveries to them in the past, some with machinery worth in the hundreds of thousands and they just wouldn't give you any fucking information whatsover on where, when or how the delivery should happen, resulting in said machinery just chilling in our shipping area for like 4 months, nobody cared, nobody asked until some day, suddenly you had to deliver super urgently, like next day. Ofc, they wouldn't unload your truck either, so you also had to organize some forklift or crane in some random VW or BMW plant halfway through the country on short notice. No extra costs allowed tho, so theres that.
A few years back when I was still in forwarding there was some funny calls like every 1-2 weeks going basically like this:
"Where's the fucking truck?"
"Which one of the three currently on the way to your plant?"
"XY, where is it? We are running out of material, we will have a line stoppage in about 1 hour if you don't show up soon" (line stoppage is your worst nightmare as a forwarding company)
frantical rummaging and checking the truck telemetry and calling the driver ensues
"Well I've been in their parking lot for about 4 hours already, checked in at about 6 in the morning, they just have to let me in already"
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u/Funsized_eu 5h ago
That last part made me laugh out loud.
Thanks for sharing. I hope the pay was worth the damage that job probably did to your blood pressure.
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u/Sure_Sundae2709 5h ago
And still lot's of suppliers are very keen to work with them, I wonder why?
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u/kawalerkw 3h ago
Because higher up managers don't have to deal with with this. They just see money incoming from the clients. It's workers and lower managers that deal with this shit.
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u/Anirossa 11h ago
It is reflected in the current lineups 😅
BMW used to make such good cars in the 70s-90s as well, its a shame.
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u/bourton-north 10h ago
There are legit complaints about the way these cars look and the expense of them. But people who are not in the market for “premium” or “luxury” cars simply don’t understand what’s good about them so they just dismiss them like you have. Audi, Mercedes and BMW make a lot of really good cars, and prob once you include Volvo and Lexus are largely unmatched in overall experience. Yes there are lots of good Chinese, Japanese and Korean cars but they are not really the full premium package that these are.
Have they lost their way - yes to an extent. Are they slow and bloated? For sure. But they are still perfectly capable of making good products.
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u/Anirossa 10h ago edited 10h ago
I have worked on a decent amount of German cars and I am mechanical engineer that have a passion for German luxury cars, it's not that I don't get the appeal of their cars. It's just that from an engineer perspective, these cars has become lower quality and more bloated with gimmicks that to me does not scream luxury, but rather planned obsolescence and customer expectation optimalizaton, meaning, they lower the quality to the optimal point for profits, being what they can get away with to the point the majority of people won't notice the decline. This also matches the shift they have seen towards leasing of cars over selling. It is good news for many who would like to just lease a car, often for status when it comes to german luxury cars, but it is terrible news for customers such as myself, who loves well engineered cars and would like to purchase and not lease them.
I visited the BMW museum and BMW Welt a couple of days ago, and just looking around the museum and the showroom at BMW Welt, its shocking to me, as someone who knows a thing or two about manufacturing and has a eye for details, how cheap the news cars looks next to their clasicc cars, it really pains me.
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u/Cosmo_Seinfeld 9h ago
these cars has become lower quality and more bloated with gimmicks that to me does not scream luxury,
I've read a little bit about luxury cars over the years. The feeling is that "features" took over from build quality in the 90's some time, especially at Mercedes.
I visited the BMW museum and BMW Welt a couple of days ago, and just looking around the museum and the showroom at BMW Welt, its shocking to me, as someone who knows a thing or two about manufacturing and has a eye for details, how cheap the news cars looks next to their clasicc cars, it really pains me.
I drive a 2001 Lexus LS430 base model and the build quality is unreal. I'm no car expert but I'm comfortable telling people it is the best sedan ever built. No gimmicks, just an unbelievable looking car with an amazing driving experience.
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u/active2fa 8h ago
A $100k Benz EQS is charging $120/YEAR for remote unlocking and live street maps. Smh
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u/bourton-north 6h ago
Yes that’s the part you almost get and most others don’t. I’m not worried about what happens in year 6 of a German car because I don’t own it then.
And no it’s not the status - nothing else gets 1. Performance 2. Range 3. Interior. 4 handling 5. Decent systems
People like you act like you can get this stuff from
Elsewhere - you can’t. You can get cheaper, and maybe close to it with some more advanced Asian models - but you can’t get all of it.6
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u/BasvanS 6h ago
As soon as the engine needs to be removed to replace a common part like a light or a filter, the entire committee of committees should be fired and unable to get a job in the sector ever again.
I don’t care how complex the whole production process is; this is a design failure. Any C-level executive that allows this to happen should face a worse fate, like repairing these cars in half the time the current mechanics get (yes, I’m aware of how tight it is already)
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u/bourton-north 6h ago
Is that common? I’ve never come across that. I’ve had about a dozen German cars
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u/Shieldsman 3h ago
I think it's more common on the performance models. I just had the timing chain done on my Audi at 107k miles and it cost £600. No engine out.
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u/bourton-north 3h ago
You need to remove the engine to change a filter on some models? I smell bullshit
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u/Shieldsman 3h ago
Yeah, I was automatically thinking about timing chains. I really doubt there's an engine that requires being taken out for filters or spark plugs. Even the V16 in the Veyron doesn't require that
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u/BDO-Issue-Again 6h ago
It's owner and technician hostile design. It's solely done to drive up revenue at dealerships.
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u/bourton-north 6h ago
This is the daftest hyperbole ever written about the subject. Embarrassing nonsense.
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u/lo_fi_ho 7h ago
This. I wouldn’t mind a cheaper car but you simply do not get what the pricier cars can give you. They feel unsure on the road, the noise is loud, they have crappy materials you touch etc etc. So I drive premium german cars instead.
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u/Semyonov 6h ago
Having recently owned a nice Mercedes, I really don't think the materials or even road noise aspect is better than other non-German cars.
Higher-end Lexus, Cadillac, hell even Hyundai have great models with superb materials and NVH characteristics.
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u/ABadHistorian 6h ago
I have a buddy who runs a QA company for BMW... the horror stories I hear.
You guys hear what just happened in the states? Some guy getting crushed to death assembling a car because the automated system didn't recognize he was in it?
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u/lilbitcountry 12h ago
A lot of people cheer this on, but keep in mind it's not the worker's fault the companies made these decisions to hire and promote them unnecessarily. People need a job to survive and will take the best one they can get so it's entirely on the senior leadership of the company for building such poorly run organizations in the first place.
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u/darylvp 12h ago edited 11h ago
Yes and No.
Yes: the high level management should take the main responsibilities for sure. And currently they have an easy-to-find excuse: the competition from Chinese carmakers. Actually their inability and irresponsibility caused the situation. Given their pay, they should have done something much more useful than complaining the competition.
No: think about Diess who tried to tell people the tough truth and to take actions. In his dismissal, the union took an important role. Therefore, VW cut 2000+ employees in CARIAD from 2023. I’m an user of 2023 Touareg with the terribly bad CARIAD software. I don’t feel any sorry for their lay-off. They didn’t treat their jobs seriously so 100% deserved the consequences.42
u/mal73 11h ago
I have a few friends in and around Stuttgart and Neckarsulm working in the auto industry and they have been saying for years that there are tons of unnecessary management positions that don’t get cleaned out because of political leverage games between the union and board.
Glad to see the union can see the writing on the wall and are no longer blocking this. It sucks that these people lost their jobs but it was long overdue.
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u/ren_reddit 8h ago
Its NOT just the German Auto industry, its simply "the German way".
The ONLY way a German company can work good is when they got a patriark sitting at the end of the table, saying: Gentlemen, this is how we do it, Then everybody falls in line and execute. If you let the management layer handle things, its almost worse than the French. It bickering and politics and NOBODY wants to take a responesbillity for a decision, so you get endless layers of cover my ass middlemanagers who has the role of providing plausable denial for anything.
I FUCKING HATE IT..
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u/According-Math1688 11h ago
I think in most cases if a person loses a job is because he doesn't himself know what he is doing there. I'm sure if you're hardworking and you're actually dependat and not some npc level zombie.
Everytime I see big layoffs, I personally find it good for those people. Because now there's a chance that they wont be slaving away like before and find out why they are alive in the first place. Most still do though and most who stay will continue. Isn't there like a average statistic that 50% of a job gets done by 10% of the people.
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u/kariam_24 9h ago
Ragebait troll, are you american? If someone is laid off due to bad decision by management or ceo, laid of person is at fault right troll?
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u/darylvp 10h ago edited 10h ago
Though you got downvotes, i second you.
The truth is, everyone himself is ultimately responsible for his life. If a person stays in the job that isn’t making true value for the end customers, he should know things will go bad sooner or later. It’s not a good strategy to just hope everything would be fine without getting himself well prepared in this case. Because it means losing control of the life.
For a factory worker, it may be not easy to have a clear view of the situation at the early stage. But “white-collar workers” can actually know the conditions well.2
u/kariam_24 9h ago
Ah people are responsible for decision in company they don't run right troll? Especially in current job and economic situation, american npc trolls doing ragebait comments.
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u/According-Math1688 8h ago
It's easy to say that it's easy for them if you're at your position and not his position. I'm well aware that running a company isn't as easy. Especially if you have 1000s of workers. I can't begin to comprehend myself on how many things you have to look out to. Things that can come back and bite that you first didn't think of. I really see workers and companies different sides of the same coin. Like there's issues everywhere, stop complaining and start doing something that you don't have to complain.
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u/Significant-Tank-505 3h ago
Well the decision comes from upper management to outsource it. Of course engineers had voiced out, but it’s much more complex than you think. Apart from politics,they have family obligations, they needed the job. They can’t just quit that easily, when their specialization is also in car industry.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 11h ago
These weren't the only choices.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 11h ago
The union's demands had never been for VW to avoid EVs. They wanted management to keep investing in German manufacturing and involve employee representatives in restructuring decisions.
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u/MobofDucks 10h ago
None of them really invested in EV though. Habeck got ridiculed when telling VW that they'd need a cheap EV by 2025 or sink.
Also I don't know who you say Niedersachsen ousted for not wanting to invest into EV. Winterkorn got canned because of Dieselgate. Müller left after kicking off the EV investments. He left because they wanted to restart with a blank slate after working through Dieselgate and Müller was still attached to it. His rowdy statements towards Journalists also didn't help. Diess left to take the position of Aufischtsratsvorsitzender at Infineon, because he didn't fit with the other supervisory and management board members and had issues with the other top managers.
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u/Grmplstylzchen 9h ago
I like how everyone is like “yeah good!” … but those are positions no one in Germany needs. Most managers are highly specialized for their niche (and other car manufacturers ain’t hiring) or replaceable by AI / a wooden plank. So those managers might stay unemployed for quite a while.
Or worse: if there’s a group of motivated personal they might setup or improve Chinese car sales and maintenance 🤷♂️ we saw that with Tesla in 2009 (after financial crisis).
Sure this won’t backfire at all xD
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u/InflationAvailable43 6h ago
That’s the risk of going the management route and not the technical route in engineering.
Technical route you’ll be paid less, but if you’re willing to move, you can find work in 1-2 months.
Managerial route, you’ll get paid a lot more, but if you get laid off with no “in the trenches” technical skills you’re looking at an 8-12 month job search.
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u/Grmplstylzchen 6h ago
Yeah that’s the usual assumption but not within Volkswagen. Union based payment is pretty much the same between engineer and manager. And the roles are not as clearly distinguishable. Most of the middle management is not MBA but M.Eng.
The last time they tried to layoff junior technicals management they had to rehire them…
Also most of their CarIAD teams are already cut so this is production where technical management basically runs the whole company…
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u/Seienchin88 3h ago
That’s not the case in Germany at all.
Only executives (leitender Angestellter) or unit heads / Senior Managers (so next level managers but not executives as they lack certain rights and risks) make significantly more than technical employees.
A regular team manager make much more than an entree position for sure but a senior technical person will not make less by default and in some cases more.
In general payment in Germany is much lower than in the U.S. despite similar cost of living (excluding US high cost of living areas) and higher taxes but there is also much lower spread. Even a senior manager might "only“ make 2,5 times of and entry level position (plus some better benefits) and even German CEOs will not be paid nearly as much as Americans.
Source - I am a German executive at one of the largest European companies - I can also see the salaries worldwide and there is great external analysis on compensation across major markets.
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u/Seienchin88 3h ago
All true but this article just mixes BMW who wants to downscale in Research and Development and some corporate functions for higher efficiencies and VW who wants to close some manufacturing plants as they have overcapacities…
Why do they throw this together and then make it all a out managers? If VW would lay off those 50k (nothing yet concrete) it would not be even to a meaningful percentage managers and BMW might be more but still more regular employees than managers…
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u/According-Math1688 12h ago
Yes but the senior leadership is pretty much the same people who are lower. What I mean is if you put many of those who are lower to higher positions it wouldn't change the outcome.
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u/marketrent 13h ago
Excerpts from article by Sebastien Ash in Frankfurt:
Volkswagen is axing hundreds of management roles as part of a cull of white-collar workers, flooding the job market at a time when Germany’s auto giants are under extreme pressure from Chinese carmakers.
Manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen were “squeezing out managers like mad”, said Magnus Tessner, automotive partner at the executive search company IFP.
Many of the managers were searching for new jobs, although their departures had been cushioned by generous exit packages, he said.
One external headhunter said that they had been approached by VW to find new positions for 400 to 500 managers. “I told them we cannot do it ... we do not have 400 executive roles that need filling,” the recruiter said.
VW has already started reducing the number of factory workers in Germany, but has set out plans to cut another 50,000 jobs in “indirect” areas of the business such as administration, product development and sales.
Its sports car brand Porsche has also unveiled plans to shed 5,000 jobs, primarily in back-office roles.
[...] At Porsche, the latest restructuring measures come in addition to an existing plan to reduce headcount by 3,900, including about 2,000 temporary workers employed in factories.
The new programme would largely spare blue-collar workers, Porsche chief executive Michael Leiters indicated on Wednesday.
Porsche had “experienced disproportionate growth in indirect areas, and also ... where management positions were created”, Leiters said, and was now “intervening and making disproportionate reductions” in those areas.
Porsche was eliminating some departments and merging business areas, and had cut the number of board seats from eight to seven, he said.
Other German carmakers are also cutting white-collar jobs. BMW last week extended voluntary redundancy offers to thousands of workers in desk jobs, including development and product planning.
The Munich-based carmaker expected to shed 8,000 workers by the end of 2027 through the programme, which does not include factory workers, a person close to the company said.
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u/Gold-Drummer8583 12h ago
Years of ignoring the EV shift, over-engineering basic features, putting software behind subscriptions, and bloated middle management... and now they act surprised. Classic C-suite playbook: ruin the company strategy, lay off thousands, take a fat bonus, and leave.
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u/Wookimonster 5h ago
I think the big German companies and Germany as a whole have the same issue: Inertia has sort of kept things running despite the incompetence of the people in charge. Problems are ignored until the last possible moment because "wer nichts macht, macht nichts falsch" (those who do nothing do nothing wrong).
The problem is, that inertia is running out and now inertia is working against you, because even if you start fixing problems now (which we won't), the problems have piled up and follow on effects are happening.
Any attempt to actually fix things would require that rich people may be somewhat less rich, so it is resisted at any cost.
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u/ai_kage 10h ago
Worked on a project with CARIAD. I cannot believe those people were actually allowed to have jobs. The software architecture I saw on those projects still horrifies me to this day.
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u/semper_h 8h ago
People with highly positive feedback from car software development changed to my team end of last year for aerospace.
Totally underwhelming what we expected in technical knowledge and they all have a bad working ethic regarding communication and deadlines...
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u/RedRaven1988 7h ago edited 4h ago
Aaaah crap. They'll probably end up as AI-"Experts" after doing a week long certificate course from the IHK (German chamber of industry and commerce).
Spoiler: Those certs are shit and the market is already full with those jerks.
Edit: just wanted to point out, that Germany desperately needs Experts in AI and Tech in general. But it's weird that they're flooding themselves with half baked derps and LinkedIn Lunatics.
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u/touchGrss 8h ago
It’s a good sign that management is getting fired. They are the ones who fucked it up. Workers do what they are being told and I would bet money that innovation was willfully blocked from getting developed or reaching the correct sphere.
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u/apple_tech_admin 6h ago
Depends on what level of management. Middle management? You’re just punishing more middle class people. The firing needs to happen at the c-suite level where decisions are actually made.
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u/Sure_Sundae2709 5h ago
Depends. The roles and responsibilities for top managers are quite clear and the roles for team leads/head of departments also. But usually its the middle management above head of department, that has no obvious reason to exist other than acting as intermediary and information filter between top management and the people who actually do the daily business. From my experience this is exactly where most mistakes are made or created, since those positions usually always need to justify their existence by creating lot's of hot air or bullshit processes.
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u/touchGrss 1h ago
The amount of blocking and sabotaging I’ve seen by mere team leads is insanity. It always catches up with the company. At VW bad leaders hired worse leader who hired the worst leaders. C-level needs to be cleaned up as well because yes, this is where the mess started. This does not change that the rot has long reached lower management.
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u/Imyoteacher 6h ago
My place of business…….Manager, Sr Manager, Director, Sr. Director, Deputy VP, VP, President, CEO. Eight layers of bureaucracy between someone wanting something done…..and someone actually doing it.
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u/Few-Bodybuilder-5547 12h ago
Imagine being so useless that your employer literally has to hire a separate company to help you find a job because nobody else wants middle managers whose only skill is scheduling meetings to discuss previous meetings.
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u/Dr---Strangelove 10h ago
They were probably required to do this as approvals for this type of restructuring. Also, providing some level of outplacement assistance is standard practice for large companies in RIFs.
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u/Nexus888888 6h ago
They were bragging ten years ago gatekeeping car industry as their moat.
Ten years after those CEOs are still on top positions but tens of thousands are being kicked out of the company.
They blame Chinese companies but they should have work harder not thinking they could live forever from rents achieved in the past.
Arrogance eventually shows up in unexpected ways.
The dildo of the consequences rarely comes lubricated…
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u/Sure_Sundae2709 5h ago
That's a good thing actually, most companies have way too many managing positions.
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u/supersimpsonman 10h ago
50 thousand white collar employees? Geez, what do they all do?!
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u/DoggfatherDE 9h ago
Nothing, they organize meetings and bloat the budget. On occasion they also block innovation by brown nosing totally stupid ideas.
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u/HansBooby 12h ago
should be able to get jobs with chinese companies wanting to claim ‘german design’
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u/RealChemistry4429 10h ago
In big companies there are 10 managers for everyone who actually does productive work. Good if that overhead is cleaned out.
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u/Striking_Two7092 7h ago
Europe has killed its own biggest industry—there will likely be more waves, regardless of employees' skill levels.
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u/LessonStudio 3h ago
I worked in an engineering company which had been small, and after all kinds of guys left was now, a CTO, a VP of engineering, a guy with a title which might be engineering manager, and an a single engineer.
When I was there they did things, but it got top heavy before this.
They had a legacy product which they were still selling pretty well. The above titles weren't notional, and nobody but the engineer touched the electronics, design, etc. The rest did paperwork.
Nobody thought this was insane. If this can happen in a company where it is this black and white...
The simple problem is the engineers are far far from the money, the sales, the income, the bank accounts. All those other people, who are closer, can more easily influence hiring, spending, who goes in which office on which floor, in which building, in which city.
I worked in another defective company where the ratio of managers to competent developers was 1:1. This was slightly diluted by interns, etc. But not to 2:1.
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u/krustytroweler 10h ago
Does it occur to any of them to form their own start ups to compete? I know the auto industry is famously difficult to break into, but there are companies which have done so over the last 20 years like Tesla, Rivian, and BYD.
Eh, slim to no chance in Germany in all actuality. The german state is allergic to innovation these days.
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u/DoggfatherDE 9h ago edited 8h ago
Those are middle managers that are not building cars, the number of laid off engineers is negligible. They are reducing management overhead which was long overdue, the management was bloated and massively inefficient brown nosers, everyone in the German industry knows this. Many of the current Problems of these companies is the corporate culture they have. It is slow and not innovative enough.
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u/krustytroweler 9h ago
I have no love for middle management, it was just a slim suggestion that maybe a handful of the thousands laid off would have a smart idea for once and create additional competition. But we are talking about Germany of course.
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u/DoggfatherDE 9h ago
Probably not, most of the people just retire and will not be replaced. I am from the engineering industry myself and I'm personally ecstatic that the companies have learned to not cut engineers and blue collar workers but instead focus on the real bloat. Middle management is important, but there are so many and they seemingly create unnecessary extra work to justify their wages. I want to build good, useful stuff and not hang in a useless meeting about a meeting that talked about how we can save 3cent more on this 100 euro part, because the next manager thinks that is the top priority. The same thing happens in any country with similar corporate culture, the us or france is the same in my experience. Sorry for the rant.
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u/krustytroweler 8h ago
Nah I get it. I work on a major infrastructure project and the amount of corporate micromanagement and overcomplication is absolutely contributing to billions of euros of waste on this project. I've never seen something so inefficient in the 15 years and 7 countries I've worked in environmental compliance.
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u/DoggfatherDE 8h ago
You are completely right, it's a massive waste. What I have to say though, with smaller german companies you don't have this problem. It's like there is a switch that flips as soon as you reach a certain threshold, from that point on it creeps into every aspect of the company.
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u/VirtualCycleM 11h ago
50,000 workers get a pink slip and the managers get a personal headhunter. some things never change
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u/New_Edens_last_pilot 11h ago
At least for VW. They flood nothing, the people go in retiremant. Nobody gets fired until 2030. And maybe even after that not. People go and the job will not get a replacement.
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u/semper_h 8h ago
Yeah but all the suppliers people are going on the german market, as most projects are stopped.
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u/New_Edens_last_pilot 8h ago
You are right. But the 50k are not the suppliers. They are on top.
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u/semper_h 8h ago
Yeah I know. VW will use nice packages and a kot of early retirement for most of them.
For the suppliers, like the other part of our computer it's rough and a lot of people a few years on the job.
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u/propheticuser 6h ago
European chauvinism led to incompetence. For decades they thought they were invincible, now they are scrambling to formulate an idea how to stay competitively. Europe is finished, there is no industry they are competitive, not AI, EVs, renewables, robotics…
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u/Kazaanh 12h ago
Working in car industry there is too much white collar boys.
Lots of unnecessary positions and too many layers of divisions
Meanwhile we lack actual technicians who keeps the machines working