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VW Says China To Become Global Software Development Hub For Autonomous Tech (reuters.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the all-about-jobs dept.

Volkswagen will use Chinese software developers to help design a global autonomous vehicle architecture thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere, senior executives said on Monday. Reuters reports: As carmakers scramble to develop advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving functions, carmakers are struggling to find qualified engineers to build the software algorithms needed to teach cars the right reflexes. Volkswagen has 4,000 engineers in China, with an average age of 29, spread over five research and development sites and a rapidly growing number of software engineers. "In a short period from now they will be able to do 15 to 20 million lines of programming code on an annual basis," Volkswagen China's passenger cars chief Stephan Woellenstein said in Shanghai on Monday.

The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said. As a result, Chinese suppliers will help Volkswagen Group to design a global autonomous vehicle architecture, he said.

9 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Don't think I'd trust the software by melted · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Don't think I'd trust the software developed under a sweatshop-like 12 hours a day 6 days a week regime, sorry VW. Software made in the us by foremost experts in the field is bad enough to run into firetrucks as it is, this shit will explode when you press the engine start button.

    1. Re:Don't think I'd trust the software by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'd never trust yank software developed under sweatshop-like 12 hours a day 6 days a week regime, with no universal healthcare or workers rights, sorry Boeing.

      Also your "engineers" crashed that Mars orbiter because you couldn't tell inches in cm.

    2. Re:Don't think I'd trust the software by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Don't think I'd trust the software developed under a sweatshop-like 12 hours a day 6 days a week regime, sorry VW.

      Are you talking about China or a Silicon Valley startup?

      Besides, that ship sales long ago. Geely and Tata software is already in millions of cars, many of them old Western brands that they bought up.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    3. Re:Don't think I'd trust the software by Freischutz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      " thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere" is the key phrase.

      This shortage is thanks to a long sequence of governments in the US and Europe who have put in tireless work over several decades to disassemble their education systems and stultify their populations so that they'll cheer when the money previously spent on educating them is spent to tax breaks to finance stock buybacks and CEO bonuses. You get what you vote for, especially if you allow yourself to be distracted from what really matters by non issues like immigrant caravans/flotillas supposedly coming to destroy your christian conservative civilisation. Meanwhile the Chinese put tons of money into universities and incentives for young people to go there. Is anybody surprised that their method worked better than the asinine political circus we are currently obsessing over at the expense of everything else except tax breaks for the fabulously rich?

    4. Re:Don't think I'd trust the software by e3m4n · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are delusional if you think this is a right wing problem. The vast majority of the kids I see going to private schools come from right wing families. I’m not even talking about super rich elite private schools. I am sure that they could find better ways to spend that $15,000 per year on tuition if they thought they had a choice. They are doing it so that their children have a decent shot at succeeding later in life. Three of the four largest and most successful private schools in my city (not even tier 3 in size) are religious in some sort of charter. Lexington Catholic, Lexington Christian Academy, Christ the King, etc. their academic program is far from substandard. They have the highest percentage of high school graduates qualifying for and in rolling into college.

        So I do not think they are anti-education. Some do not like the anti-religious aspect of school, but a vast majority are doing it because of the substandard education that’s being offered up in public school that’s now deemed “good enough“. My daughter goes to public school. She’s finishing up her sophomore year. For the last four years I have been telling her that her writing skills are shit. I am constantly complaining about the quality of homework she hands him. Sometime she answers questions and doesn’t even use a complete sentence. Of course, she would argue back that the teacher said she doesn’t have to. Thinking I’m being lied to I reach out and ask the teachers. Guess what? She didn’t fucking have to! I am far from religious, but I’m starting to develop an anti-public education attitude based on these shitty reduced standards. In the early 80s, when I was in junior high, they didn’t call it middle school back then, you are not allowed to turn in any work that did not contain complete sentences. I do believe that the damn Scan-tron Machines that instantly graded those fill in the circle multiple choice test were the beginning of the stupidity. Sure it made it easy for the teachers, but recognizing the correct answer when told is not the same thing is actually knowing the correct answer.

    5. Re: Don't think I'd trust the software by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      @Freischutz, I'm pretty sure the populists in your country have little in common with conservatives in the US, connecting the two is a non-sequitur. Don't make that mistake like so many of the ignorant, angry masses.
      In the US, conservatives generally support school choice programs to allow children to get out of underperforming schools, charter schools which bring STEM education to underserved urban populations, and accountability for teachers and curricula that underperform.
      Liberals, on the other hand, support whatever teachers' unions deem to be in their best interests; want to insert Art studies into the STEM- further siphoning away resources from a curriculum that would give us top-shelf coders, engineers, and scientists; and support teaching revisionist history so as not to offend or make any ethnic group uncomfortable.
      Can you imagine if, say in Europe, they decided to never cover Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin in school because it made people "uncomfortable"? How long would it be before the world made those mistakes again?
      How many more hours per week should each student put into social pseudo-science classes, knowing they will come at the expense of math, science and technology since unions will not allow for the expansion of the school day or year?
      How do we force underperforming educators out of critical roles to give new, better-equipped STEM teachers a proper role and a livable wage when union-backed tenure arrangements prohibit chronic underperformers from being fired?
      Thanks for playing, please do come back again sometime.

    6. Re:Don't think I'd trust the software by Freischutz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are delusional if you think this is a right wing problem. The vast majority of the kids I see going to private schools come from right wing families. I’m not even talking about super rich elite private schools. I am sure that they could find better ways to spend that $15,000 per year on tuition if they thought they had a choice. They are doing it so that their children have a decent shot at succeeding later in life. Three of the four largest and most successful private schools in my city (not even tier 3 in size) are religious in some sort of charter. Lexington Catholic, Lexington Christian Academy, Christ the King, etc. their academic program is far from substandard. They have the highest percentage of high school graduates qualifying for and in rolling into college.

      So I do not think they are anti-education. Some do not like the anti-religious aspect of school, but a vast majority are doing it because of the substandard education that’s being offered up in public school that’s now deemed “good enough“. My daughter goes to public school. She’s finishing up her sophomore year. For the last four years I have been telling her that her writing skills are shit. I am constantly complaining about the quality of homework she hands him. Sometime she answers questions and doesn’t even use a complete sentence. Of course, she would argue back that the teacher said she doesn’t have to. Thinking I’m being lied to I reach out and ask the teachers. Guess what? She didn’t fucking have to! I am far from religious, but I’m starting to develop an anti-public education attitude based on these shitty reduced standards. In the early 80s, when I was in junior high, they didn’t call it middle school back then, you are not allowed to turn in any work that did not contain complete sentences. I do believe that the damn Scan-tron Machines that instantly graded those fill in the circle multiple choice test were the beginning of the stupidity. Sure it made it easy for the teachers, but recognizing the correct answer when told is not the same thing is actually knowing the correct answer.

      The right-wing elite is not completely anti-education, they just encourage it in their political followers. It is the right-wing that energetically courts the evangelical movement that agitates against provable scientific facts like evolution. I have never seen a modern mainstream left wing movement in the US or EU declare a multi front war on science. The most impressive thing that the right wing has accomplished in the last 30 years is to convince about a third of America's working poor that their best friends looking out for the interests of the working poor are a bunch of trust fund babies who shit into golden toilets. They go to Trump rallies, give speeches about how you should hate and scorn the 'intellectual elite' ... "We golden toilet shitting billionaires who pay no taxes aren't the Elite!!! the college professors are the elite and must be destroyed!!! .... then they turn around and spend $2.5 million to get their idiot son (Jared Kushner in this example) into a university. It is a quite interesting hypocrisy but for some reason they feel they'll benefit from turning the broad masses of the poor into a bunch of illiterates by defunding education. Ill give the Chinese quite a lot of credit for spending large amounts of money to do the opposite.

  2. Still counting lines of code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    After all these years, nay, decades of writing software, after all the evidence to the fact that the number of lines of code have absolutely no positive correlation to the software's quality (on the contrary) they still use it as a metric. metric of what? their ability to hit the keyboard?

  3. Small wonder by nospam007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere, "

    VW's software developer were (are?) busy developing cheating software to get around the emission laws, thereby accepting willingly the death of additional thousands of people just for greed.