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TomTom To Cut 500 Jobs Because of Automation Advancements (tomtom.com) 62

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The Dutch consumer technology firm TomTom announced on Wednesday that it is "resetting" the organization as a result of improvements in its mapmaking technology. The firm said: Engineering investments have resulted in an advanced automated mapmaking platform, which leads to a material change in mapmaking activities. [...] The improvement in our mapmaking technology will lead to material efficiency gains. Combined with a better map, this will strengthen our competitive position. Regrettably, this will have an intended impact on approximately 500 employees in our Maps unit, equivalent to around 10% of our total global headcount.
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TomTom To Cut 500 Jobs Because of Automation Advancements More

TomTom To Cut 500 Jobs Because of Automation Advancements

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  • ...that'd be my guess.
  • I have that on good authority from random /. posters. No idea what those jobs are, but they're always created thanks to magic pixy dust. And we certainly didn't have decades of unemployment, poverty and social strife following both industrial revolutions until technology caught up and created new industries.

    Nope, nothing needs to be changed in our society. If anything we can roll things back to whatever timeframe you personally think had the best representation in Television. Just don't go reading books

    • Your rant is out of date.

      "Full Time Employment in the United States averaged 99846.02 Thousand from 1968 until 2022, reaching an all time high of 132718 Thousand in March of 2022"

      https://tradingeconomics.com/u... [tradingeconomics.com]

    • There is a shortage of workers in many sectors in the Netherlands at the moment. So while losing their current job can be unpleasant for these individuals, there is no shortage of jobs in general and we need efficiency gains to get all the work done.

      I do agree though that in the long term, expecting everyone to hold a 40 hours per week job is unrealistic. As automation progresses, we'll need to reduce the average work week and make work more flexible by introducing for example UBI.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by RobinH ( 124750 )
      What is your proposed solution? Don't automate anything? Don't be more productive? I suppose you think it's just a zero sum game, and you think the pie should be divided evenly. It's most definitely not a zero sum game. Automation makes the pie bigger. It's really hard work to automate stuff. Inequality is necessary unless everybody's work is equally valuable, and it's most certainly not equally valuable. You're not providing any value by sitting at home collecting your welfare check.

      • What is your proposed solution?

        To complain, evidently.

      • You can read a few of my old posts and pretty easy figure out what I would do, so how about you? You're clearly a right winger. Maybe one of those "libertarians" I hear about.

        We're a "if you don't work you don't eat" kind of society. And we're armed to the TEETH. Unless you got enough money for private security detail (one well enough paid they don't just kill you and take your stuff) you better find a solution.

        So, we've got a recipe for mass violence brewing. What are you gonna do about it? Remembe

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by RobinH ( 124750 )
          I don't live in the US. Have fun with your civil war, buckeroo. Maybe creating a culture centered around violence and firearms wasn't the best idea. But that said, if you think a centralized dictatorship is a great idea... have fun with that too. Hope you come out on top!
          • Right before they fall, right? We attempt to expand militarily in order to make up for economic shortfalls caused by our collapse. What I'm saying is we're going to invade your country. I don't care how strong you are militarily I don't care how many nukes you have we are insane. If you want to launch your nukes go ahead we genuinely believe Jesus will protect us.

            Do not taunt happy fun ball.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by RobinH ( 124750 )

              The US isn't going to collapse economically. Both geographically and demographically the US is in a very strong and secure position. The US is now energy balanced (shale gas exports now balance out oil imports) so energy price swings no longer dominate the US economy like they did. The US is very food secure, exporting about 30% of what it produces, and it has an extremely efficient transportation system for bringing that good to market, thanks to the Mississippi river network and adjoining waterways. T

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      I have that on good authority from random /. posters.

      Pick any opinion, and you can find some poster who believes it. That doesn't make it a common opinion, though.

      The goal of technology is 100% unemployment. We may never reach that ideal, but it's what we strive for. While your robot slave "hand"-feeds you grapes, sit back on your couch and let the AI fly the starship. It'll get you to your green-skinned hookup faster than you ever could have flown yourself.

    • Efficiencies including automation do actually create jobs. However it will do so in the long term, and there is a cost in the short term.
      As there is a period of time after implementing the automation to a point where it is paying off and the company is growing. When the company grows and starts hiring more people, it is now often for different types of jobs, which the local community hiring pool may not have skills in. Thus needing to bring in "Out Siders" to their local community and changing their culture

      • Efficiencies including automation do actually create jobs.

        If you think about it, this is not true - especially long term. Consider: humans themselves can be measured by their efficiency, and their efficiency has a built in upper cap, due to the fact that humans are biological engines, with inherent limitations. This upper cap doesn't (theoretically) exist for automation.

        On the whole, humans are altogether quite inefficient - they can only work in special environments tailored to their needs, they can only work a percent of their time, they need food, sleep, other

      • we had decades of mass unemployment and strife following the industrial revolutions. Those people suffered. A lot. They also did a *LOT* of violence and did it with much less capable weapons.

        It's only positive on the grand scale if we survive. To somebody who gets their head caved in by an angry, hungry bandit with nothing to lose looking to enough food to make it through the week that's not even cold comfort. And a lots changed. Back then we could take land from the Indians and expand. There's nowhere

  • The Agile middle managers I hope. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bettersheep ( 6768408 ) on Wednesday June 01, 2022 @10:28AM (#62583298)

    All organisations can benefit from cutting 10% at the Agile middle manager, gant-chart-waving, penpushing, sticky sticking level.

    I hope that's what TomTom have done.

    • Every organization could save a ton of money by firing a handful of VPs, they usually cost more than a few dozen productive people.

    • The myth of cutting middle management got started by IBM because they wanted to fire older workers without getting in trouble for age discrimination. So they classified a bunch of old engineers as middle managers and fire them and brought on younger, cheaper employees. At the time the computer boom was going on so nobody cared. But once a precedent like that is set and fixed in people's minds they can get away with it indefinitely. It'll happen to you sooner or later.
      • You need people to run a company and people to do the work. Middle managers are simply clever - or quota-filling - enough to get promoted so they can stop doing the work.
        Sack em all.

      • That situation with IBM really has little to nothing to do with the overall sentiment.

        IBM's interest in cycling out the older workers to hire younger replacements (at lower pay rates) happens from time to time across the whole industry. It stinks, but it's a different problem than excessive middle management.

        All you have to do is work in I.T. at a mid-sized or larger company to see, first-hand, the inefficiencies of too many middle managers in the mix! I'd say a given department certainly needs ONE manage

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Are the positions gone? Or just the employees filling them? It's possible that this is a reorganization where the people moved out are the low performers. But if these are management positions, they may have to be filled by promotion from the work force [wikipedia.org]. Anyone identified for such an "opportunity" needs to be afraid. Very afraid.

      I don't know about EU labor law, but I suspect that it's easier to get rid of people in management than (represented) employees.

  • TomTom is apparently still around. Who knew?

  • End of the many available dev jobs on the horizon? (Score:3)

    by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Wednesday June 01, 2022 @11:07AM (#62583410)

    For a considerable amount of years - easily a decade - companies have found it difficult to find software developer talent.

    There's obvious reasons for this, just two:

    * It's a demanding high skilled career choice.
    * The move of "everything to digital" has accelerated at breakneck pace

    However, as with most things, the sheer volume of positions open to software developers is not going to last forever. Again, there's many complicated reasons for this, some obvious, some ... contentious and opinionated.

    * Economic downturn - we're seeing it happen, with startups not getting the capital they once got, out of fears of another "bubble" and the general economic outlook itself. Getting a role at a startup now is highly risky. It always was, but now ... even more so
    * Automation - many programming tasks are inherently about automation, it's baked into the discipline. There's no such term "automation as a service", but a lot of third party services that modern software relies upon, are in many ways related to automating the flow of data and doing "grunt work"
    * Devops - infrastructure as code. Many of us have seen the outcome of "infrastructure as code" play out in our own careers. We've seen mostly older sysadmins fail to move with the times. Like those times or loathe them, it's a moot point, because they are happening. The days of sysadmins poking about with almost manual deployments (e.g. generating rpm packages etc.), clicking about in GUI's to set infrastructure up or even using fairly basic terminal commands and scripts ... they are over, for the most part.
    * Machine Learning - this has killed off a lot of lesser development roles and will continue at pace, eventually challenging more advanced skill sets that developers have. Effectively, coders pushing other coders out of jobs if they can't keep up.

    20 years ago, it was possible to land a job with just some basic HTML and CSS knowledge, those days have long gone.
    Again, like it or loathe it, the complexity and the thrust toward more and more automation, requires a skill set so much more advanced, it has pushed many out of the industry.

    Tomtom is just one of many companies laying off staff as they advance toward automation, third party services etc. - much driven by machine learning.
    I'm loathe to use the term "AI", because in the vast majority of cases, it's a massively overloaded term.
    It won't always be though.

    Assuming our civilisation doesn't get wiped - which these days seems more likely each passing year - software developer roles will require greater and greater skill, as automation, machine learning and indeed AI, simply eat into the "lesser tasks".

    We are already seeing auto-generated code that doesn't _completely_ suck - sure, it still sucks a lot, but continues to improve.

    Software development roles and extreme availability of work will continue in the short term, but I think many of us are reading the signs - it sure ain't forever.
    As a "grey beard", I've got maybe 12 years left before I can retire, so I'm just hunkering down at a big corporate to ride it out.

    I'm grabbing my popcorn and will watch this all slowly play out, it's coming - those "safe" development roles will soon be a thing of the past ...

    • What they've been having a hard time finding is dirt cheap high skilled labor they can work for 80 hours a week. I've got a friend who is is a perfectly competent programmer who didn't finish college and can't get a job because no company will touch him. He periodically gets a job from a contractor for temp work but the corporations won't hire him because no college degree. And it's not so easy to go back to college in your mid-40s when you're also working full-time to support yourself.

      • What they've been having a hard time finding is dirt cheap high skilled labor they can work for 80 hours a week. I've got a friend who is is a perfectly competent programmer who didn't finish college and can't get a job because no company will touch him. He periodically gets a job from a contractor for temp work but the corporations won't hire him because no college degree. And it's not so easy to go back to college in your mid-40s when you're also working full-time to support yourself.

        Your story is very anecdotal, but I am interested to know whether this is getting more common, as it does point out a potential slow down.

        Sure, there's _plenty_ of "hiring the cheapest" going down, but that's the same in any market place - no surprises there.

        didn't finish college

        Yeah, that's still a thing - sadly. It's a catch-22 - you _can_ land jobs if you didn't finish college (university) or even attend in the first place, but you need the experience. However, if you can't land a job, you can't get the experience.

        Like I sai

    • Devops - infrastructure as code. Many of us have seen the outcome of "infrastructure as code" play out in our own careers. We've seen mostly older sysadmins fail to move with the times. Like those times or loathe them, it's a moot point, because they are happening. The days of sysadmins poking about with almost manual deployments (e.g. generating rpm packages etc.), clicking about in GUI's to set infrastructure up or even using fairly basic terminal commands and scripts ... they are over, for the most part.

      This made me lol, devops is running with the same create more work baton as every other hyped up IT innovation before it. It's literally inflating salaries, creating jobs not killing them. You've even got the ivory tower tech priesthood superiority thing down pretty well, nice touch. The cycle continues.

      Also it's funny you associate rpm with manual deployment, but generating containers is what, automatic? Why weren't you designing stateless, zero configuration, self contained micro service apps before c

    • I don't even work in I.T. on the development side, but I'm not seeing anything resembling an eventual slowdown of hiring for it? Instead, I've seen it become so universal for industries to need some custom software development, there's simply more demand for people who will do the coding for less money. (When it was a "big deal" for a company to build their own in-house application, it often had a multi million dollar budget assigned to the project and was planned as one of the cornerstones of the busines

  • I'm honestly surprised TomTom was still operating and a viable company given how many people these days have capable GPS devices with turn-by-turn directions in their pocket at all times.

    Were they more diversified than I imagined, or are they still just GPS devices?
  • No one I know uses Tom Tom or Garmin for that matter. Garmin is atleast diversifying into smart watches, fitness things and assistance for private small planes. GPS, + weather + squawk codes and runway beacon etc. Not sure what Tom Tom is selling now a days.
    • Yes Garmin has survived in fitness watches. Runners and cyclists still use them because smart watches like the Apple Watch are not quite enough battery. I have an older, used Garmin that that requires a weekly charge if run for 3 or 4 hours of active tracking and I'm sure newer models/batteries last longer. A smart watch has a day or so ? When smart watches match my older Garmin, then Garmin will have to worry.

    • I use a Tomtom Rider on my Motorcycle and in my Car.
      I plan the routes in 'MyRoute-app" and import them to the TomTom. In the car, I use the car SatNav for side trips on longer journeys.

      That way, I can have my phone turned off while riding/driving as it is illegal to even pick up a phone while in control of a motor vehicle.

  • "...this will have an intended impact..."

    How many typical US companies would say anything CLOSE to this clear and succinct about what they're doing?

    A real drag about those 500 people, of course.

    Good thing they'll all keep their healthcare while they look for work!

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