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VW Says China To Become Global Software Development Hub For Autonomous Tech (reuters.com)
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.
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.
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.
be for use in cars in China.
Then for use in cars that China will export.
German brands are tolerated for the crypto keys to EU academic support.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Who'd want to live there :| Sry
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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?
Beware chinaman bearing gifts. He clean out IP while you no looking.
Ya they haven't got that yet :/
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I wonder why. Speaking as someone who keeps getting turned down for embedded dev jobs despite having PIC and arduino programming experience along with my 20+ years of system level C,C++ and x86 assembler programming, I suspect its the usual case of a company wanting high grade skills but only wanting to pay low grade wages.
Is that the worrying part? This has been reality of life for most people in the entire world outside Africa for quite a few years now, now that smartphones running Android have become ubiquitous.
accident statistics prove that humans can't be trusted to steer cars.
Yep. More than a thousand times as many fatal auto accidents so far this year** as nuclear power has killed in all of history....
** number of automobile fatalities estimated from last year's number. But last year's numbers would have hit that 1000x figure by the beginning of March, so it's a pretty safe bet....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
As an engineer this stuff makes me a bit concerned. I don't really see any reason why China is not going to take the bulk of the engineering jobs from western countries over the next ten years in the same way they took all the manufacturing jobs. I work a lot with Chinese suppliers. Over the last 10 years there has been a real shift. Sure you can still get your 'classic chinese experience' in Shenzhen, where you rock on up, expect to beat every supplier into the ground with cheap prices, then struggle with quality issues for the next 12 months. But if you go there and pay reasonable prices for stuff, then you get great service, great quality and good support. This part of the market seems to be growing rapidly over there.
The chinese understand quality as well as most western people. It is just that many companies only go to china for cost reasons, so the chinese attempt to meet those cost expectations by cutting corners. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you go to the cheapest car repair shop you should expect that it is more likely they will try to rip you off.
The trouble is that the Chinese have all the supply chain at the moment and this gives them a foot in the door of western companies. I know of a number of companies here in the UK where manufacturing was moved to china, and the chinese contractor offered to do the mech design on the company's next product for free. They did a good job and soon enough management was downsizing the engineering department and shipping that work offshore.
They can do good mech engineering now, and electronics design, so why does anyone believe they won't be able to do software as well? I think it is just a matter of time.
The problem for western countries is that their governments still believe they have some sort of inherent superiority; that just because they are 'developed' they will always be rich. So rather than taking china head on by investing in modern manufacturing and STEMS they invest in financial innovations that will apparently make us all rich despite producing no real value. It is a dangerous game, and in my opinion, at some point all this financial innovation will be show to be the fraud that it is, and the west will quickly discover that a bunch of engineers (or construction grunts for that matter) in a room is much more useful that a stadium full of lawyers when the real world infrastructure that supports western standards of living has fallen apart.
Realistically the best hope for the west is that China gets taken over by lawyers and bean counters as well. What a sad state of affairs.
VW owners have been complaining that when they are in their car and make negative comments about various members of government, the vehicle abruptly changes course and drives them to the nearest police station while requesting intervention by the assigned political officer.
US schools have long been a destination for international students. Those students don't come here because our universities stink.
I have a CS degree and have been involved in IT/Technology for over 20 years. During that 20 years, IT jobs have become far less desirable than they used to be. Long hours and the fear of being replaced by foreign labor has made a new generation of kids look elsewhere for career paths.
During my time in school, anyone with a brain went into STEM. Now that I have kids, I see the different education choices being made by them. Kids with a brain are once again considering the trades instead of a career in a cubicle.
You can blame government and the school system if it makes you feel better, but it won't change the fact that the industry and employers made this line of work less desirable - and now there is a shortage of qualified software professionals.
If you want to fix this problem - let the market do its thing. Limit guest worker labor to only very high-end specialized positions. Allow wages to rise - and eventually smart people will again go into those fields.
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.
Also, China's blatant disregard for individual well-being will help with the roll out. If a few people get killed during testing, no biggie.
Human life in China is cheap, and there is lots of it too. So safety won't be a priority.
No translation needed "Now that we in the United States have killed off all the natives and passed the thirteenth amendment and a minimum wage, we are pleased to announce the outsourcing of our corporate slave labor to the lowest bidder of a wide variety of developing Nations"
Right, because immigration and outsourcing have done nothing to assault wages and the incentive structure for the working and middle classes. You are a racist who hates aspiring potential True Americans if you notice that adding a few million workers in a few year period goes a long way to ensure that supply always meets or exceeds demand. You are practically Hitler if you notice that the explosion in immigration over the last 30 years is probably the main reason why we've seen only about 14% real wage growth over two generations.
"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.
It ended with West Germany.
The generation that gave people in West Germany the "economic miracle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is long past.
Now its just another nation in the EU looking for the lowest cost of workers globally.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
First GLOBAL cellular infrastructure development (Huawei's 5G), and now GLOBAL autonomous vehicle architecture development. In all seriousness, China is making some very scary moves. This is the first point in history where the US has a serious contender to the "global superpower" throne... the next decade will undoubtedly decide the fate of this title.
"The cause of fear is ignorance."
I didn't want to have anything to do with so-called 'autonomous cars' before, and I sure as fuck won't want to have anything to do with it if one of the biggest enemies of the West is going to have this much to do with it. I sure hope for Volkswagens' sake they audit every single line of code that comes out of China.
One would think that the German's would know better.
There was a German engineering firm that outsourced the manufacturing of a revolutionary new type of lathe design to a company in the PRC to try and cut costs.
At a manufacturing convention attendees from the same company noticed at least a dozen Chinese copies of their new lathe.
Soon after that the same company was out of business, unable to compete with cheap copies of their products flowing into the EU from the PRC.
Corporations in the PRC are extensions of the CPC.
The potential economic damage that could be caused by a trade war was secondary to the CPC.
The loss of access to IP was considered far more critical to them.
It actually makes sense to develop these cars in China. It's not that there are more qualified software developers in China, more than say in India, the US, or Europe. Part of the reason is that the wages are lower, although not lower than in other countries. The main reason is that China will be the largest market for autonomous vehicles due to several reasons. There is a push to electrify cars, which means new a lot of new cars bought in the future. There are huge emerging classes of workers will have or will soon have the money to buy these cars. The government is pushing these new cars and autonomous vehicles for economic, environmental, and competitive reasons. And China has the governmental structure to ensure that laws and lawsuits do not derail autonomous vehicle adoption. It's this last reason that is perhaps the most important.