Thread regarding Ford layoffs

There is a false sense of security in GDIA because the management repeatedly says "we are safe because we have so much work to do". What they dont tell you is how misaligned the work is to being aligned with real results. In the first round of SRD they let go several of the best managers who actually helped data scientists understand the business in favor of managers who rarely interface with the teams and will not challenge upper management on the overuse of data scientists on pet projects that have not been vetted to produce value.

@5zjr+164lVH8D Similar experience.
When questioned the copy all data to Hadoop strategy, was told it was a directive from CIO at the time, who became CTO later before “retiring”. The rational provided was Ford was so far behind in the data analytics space that they would spend 2-3 years copyIng all company data to Hadoop and then figure out what to do with the data. This of course caused all sorts of issues as the data in Hadoop was very stale. So then they tried to replicate the data to Hadoop real time, which was expensive and crippled the processing power for business critical applications,,, so the replication was turned off. At present they are still seeking a solution for this and the data in Hadoop is mostly stale data.

Common sense would say, identify the data that is important and focus on that data first. Then build from on that. .Another example of Ford Sense Common Sense.

I also worked with them a few years ago and saw the same thing. They wanted all the data and had no interest in understanding the business or what was represented in the data. They’d work their “magic” and produce all sorts of attractive charts and graphs. We ran into issues because they made inaccurate assumptions about the data, wouldn’t/couldn’t explain how the metrics were derived and couldn’t provide any details about the data behind the metrics. Management would see something questionable in the metrics and demand an explanation from the team members supporting the upstream systems. Since GDIA refused to participate in the explanation it was a nightmare as we could never get the source system metrics to match GDIA metrics. At one point we were told to change the source system metrics to match GDIA metrics in spite of proving their metrics were not accurate. Management had already seen GDIA metrics and no one was willing to explain the differences. That’s the new Ford culture... don’t give me the facts, tell me what I want to hear.

I dealt with them about 3-4 years ago. They seemed unorganized, didn't know the business of manufacturing/building vehicles, didn't seem to care to learn the business just wanted to copy the database without any context to what the data could be useful for. Some of that data would have been useless but they wanted it anyway. More Data in real time the higher chance of taking out a very mission critical application.

There was a GDIA advocate who took it upon himself to teach all comers how to use the data analysis and visualization tools and allowed anyone who had taken his training to have access to the tools.
This was abnormal behavior for Ford employees, but welcome behavior by all the worker bees.
The normal Ford behavior is to not share knowledge and tools and to build an empire on being the only team with access to the tools.

Guess what happened to the GDIA advocate? Yep SRDed. A lesson in thou shall not try to change the Ford Status quo.

soon, the most empathatic (design thinking) guy will be less empathatic towards GDIA, as he was towards the Ballew.......empathy towards customers not employees i guess!

4bjb that is hilarious, but sadly, true.

If you want a preview of life at GDIA, look up the Dilbert comic strip dated 7/26/2020.....

IMHO GDIA is WAY over-staffed

I'm so glad I left too. That company is like a high school popularity contest. Doesn't matter what you contribute or how hard you work, it's all about s—ing up. I will work for a company that values my skills and contributions.

So glad I left Ford.

Currently at Ford, there are only two safe jobs: CEO and COO.

I would say the job is not all that safe for the following reasons
GDIA is over staffed
GDIA depends upon other teams to “create” and spec projects, provide data, provide business knowledge, and “blue dollar” fund their work. GDIA in itself has no knowledge of the business needs or data.
Most business teams can easily do their own data analysis and visualization with Alteryx and Qlik. They find it a waste of time to spend months trying to get another team to do something they can do in a few hours.
Yes, Senior management has a vested interest in promoting GDIA to the business teams, and the business teams made up a bunch of non-value add projects for GDIA to please senior management.
At some point in time senior management will realize they can do with 1/4 the number of people in GDIA.

I think as part a decision-support role the job would be safer than most. There is a lot risk-adverse behavior among many of our leaders

if the chief data officers job was not safe, i dont know whose is!

I would speculate the life in GDIA will be rather safe. I don’t understand it but upper management seems to love GDIA and views anything they produce as gospel. That kind of support doesn’t hurt your chances for survival.