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TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
- glook 4y agoWouldn't it be cool if everyone kept their jobs but only had to work 90% of the time?
- janandonly 4y agoThat is possible, for about 90% of the pay... But do people really want to take a 10% cut just to keep some colleagues on?
- noasaservice 4y agoDamn. And instead of reinvesting and furthering R&D, product lines, and more - they're just chopping 10% (or 450 people). That's a hell of a lot of institutional knowledge just gone. It also goes to show that when I automate, I should keep it hidden. That's because I do not receive the gains of automation. Instead, I receive more work or get laid off.
- dswalter 4y agoIt's also an indicator that quality of maps isn't necessarily viewed as a differentiator by the TomTom organization. If I suddenly had a sufficiently-good automated product and hundreds of domain experts, I'd work to have the domain experts refine the automated product, hopefully turning my (just pulling numbers out of thin air) 97% quality automated solution to a 99% quality solution. Those incremental gains on the tail are often tremendously valuable for customers.
- myst1 4y agoMost company's right now want to automate all skilled labor away as quickly as possible. CEOs don't want innovation, they want a saleable product with the highest profit margin and the least risk. Removing people was always the goal. I've worked at two jobs were in the first week I was told my goal was to automate myself so I could progress my career... Yup okay then...
- ben_w 4y agoI remember hearing much the same words (cf. “My job is to make myself redundant”) in 2004. I’m fairly sure this was the goal at least as far back as when ship builders switched from high-skilled artisans to carve each pulley for the sails individually and by hand, to using jigs so that low-skilled carpenters could make a lot that were almost as good for a fraction of the price.
- jopsen 4y ago> when ship builders switched from high-skilled artisans to carve each pulley for the sails individually and by hand, to using jigs so that low-skilled carpenters could make a lot... Sounds like an interesting story, do you have a link :D
- cwilkes 4y agoIsn’t automation an innovation?
- nerdponx 4y agoIt is, but the gains to this innovation are captured almost entirely by your employer and not by you. Maybe if you're lucky you have a tiny ownership stake in the company, which if you are very lucky maybe entitles you to a tiny percentage of those gains.
- honkler 4y agoyup. This is why I never tell anyone that I use Copilot.
- Tarucho 4y agoWhat´s the difference? You are already training your replacement.
- justapassenger 4y agoThis sounds like they’re firing people who manually edit and fix maps. While it’s job that requires quite a bit of skill (my family member used to do that for other companies), those aren’t people you can redirect to R&D, at least not without heavy retraining. Real reason behind it, is IMO, preparing for recession and finding nice sounding reason for layoffs.
- racl101 4y agoYeah, they're probably keeping the people who allow them to automate and are laying off the people who, otherwise, need to do the work manually / semi-manually when there is no automation. Anytime you automate something that someone is doing manually, and you're automating it so well, there's a good chance what you build might replace the people doing it.
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoIt's not clear from the article what the 500 people are doing - they could be doing manual data entry or map validation tasks which are made redundant by the new "automated mapmaking platform" built by others (developers/engineers etc). The saving from those roles could well be going to be reinvested in R&D and product lines.
- alaricus 4y agoIt's probably better to outsource manual map updates to OpenStreetMap
- topaz0 4y agoWhat they should really do is take those productivity gains and use them to allow the same number of workers to do less work each, for the same pay.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoWhat productivity gains? The company makes less and less money every year. Revenue per employee is trending down, not up.
- madiator 4y ago> Regrettably, this will have an intended impact on approximately 500 employees in our Maps unit, equivalent to around 10% of our total global headcount. At least they are honest about it. I am currently reading the first chapter of 21 lessons for the 21st century and it fills me up with a bit of dread. People having been losing jobs for a long time, but in the future it will get harder to get new ones due to the amount of specialization you need to acquire.
- Aperocky 4y ago> due to the amount of specialization I see high amount of specialization but only after onboarding and not asked of potential candidates. All we ask are capable software engineers, who we then train to be very specialized in what we do.
- davidktr 4y agoAnd out of the entire work force, what percentage do you consider to be capable software engineers? 5%? 1%?
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago> 5%? 1%? Why would you estimate so low? There are a lot of mediocre engineers, myself included, but even they are “capable” depending upon what they are tasked to do.
- Aperocky 4y agoI don't have enough data to come to sweeping generalization of a percentage. But from my own observations, people who are genuinely interested usually become capable, anecdotally of course.
- wcunning 4y agoOn the other hand, I work in autonomy role at an automaker and we have need for a bunch of people in mapping technology, so they may be well positioned to move to technician roles in related areas. Creative destruction doesn't always have to wipe out the value of "old" skills.
- wjnc 4y agoTomTom is such an interesting story in technology and finance. Went from zero to $ 10B+ between '05 - '07 [1]. Everyone you knew had one, used one, loved one. Then the sudden boom in mobile phones and mobile internet and the financial crisis. Total crash of the stock. Pretty much subsistence without any proper profits since '09-'10. Not enough IP to get bought, a few licensing deals here and there. Always falling revenue. No profits. Pretty much a zombie corporation employing 4500 people. Perhaps I'm harsh. Reading the annual report [2]. It's a great company! High management board remuneration. Great place to work. A minister on the supervisory board. Measures CO2 and environmental impact and water usage. And still... what does it say when 4400 people generate about 2 years of salary in total market cap? And where the only positive value is free cash flow (non-GAAP). [1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/earnings/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/earnings/ [2] https://corporate.tomtom.com/static-files/8fd1d5d2-0ecb-47b6-97b7-9c8017df91c2 https://corporate.tomtom.com/static-files/8fd1d5d2-0ecb-47b6...
- dtech 4y agoThey pretty much lost because free (subsidized) alternatives like Google Maps became available, pretty much the same story as Netscape. It probably didn't help that their maps were also incredibly expensive, €100-200 for western Europe in 2005 money.
- wjnc 4y agoNetscape disbanded as a company in 2003. Why is TomTom still here? I like the questions at the end of a company since a large market I work in (insurance / life insurance) is dwindling as well. What does that do with companies? How do they communicate? What happens when the inevitable shrinking sets in and your brain drain is faster than the way you shrink? Should you ever actively terminate a company and tranfer IP / assets?
- lozenge 4y agoTransfer to who? All the people who know how to put the assets to good use... are already employed by TomTom. As long as the company provides value to shareholders and customers, why wind it down? Not everything had to be about growth, growth, growth.
- fatboy 4y agoAre announcements like this always done in this strange mixed-voice style? The first para reads like it's a third party that's reporting on the event, then in the third para they use the word "our", and it's on their website of course.
- pionar 4y agoUsually, yes. It's because "reporters" will copy-paste the press release and put it in a "story" about it that's just a parroting of the release.
- polynomial 4y agoAt my first job I found it exceptionally odd that the CEO (who was charged with properly running the company, obvi) would phrase his quarterly reports to the board as if he was just an outside auditor, eg. "you're going to have a problem here" "you're won't have revenue to cover expenses" "your company is not running well" As if to deny any responsibility for how the company was being run.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoSounds like he was trying to deny ultimate (as opposed to any) responsibility, which seems fair enough given that the board was his boss and had the power to fire him
- mtmail 4y agoRecent presentation about one of their automation tools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5fV8TVlSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5fV8TVlSo Like other map providers they record where user actually drive and adjust the map. Steven Coast (founder of OpenStreetMap) explain how that is now sufficient to even start a map from scratch.
- wly_cdgr 4y ago
- antholeole 4y agoWhat?
- wly_cdgr 4y ago
- StillBored 4y agoI just saw a car with their logo and a couple roof mounted cameras driving around in my area last week. Apparently doing a streetview kind of thing.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoIt's not necessarily for a street view style product, they could just be gathering ground truth data for more accurate maps. (I've always been surprised that Tesla didn't leverage their fleet of cars covered in cameras to build a maps product.)
- lambo4bkfast 4y agoI'd imagine some mix of legal liability, pr issues, and the fact that Teslas only traverse a minority of the planet would mean it would just be another map & not disruptive to google or apple maps.
- hvjackson 4y agoMaybe this is just my consumer perspective but I feel like TomTom really missed on a pivot to other GPS-related products that Garmin has successfully nailed. 10-15 years ago both companies were known mainly for car sat-nav systems but Garmin now has an incredibly diverse product line with well-liked fitness watches, bike computers, exploring/off-grid satellite communicators, marine charts, aviation, etc. Whereas TomTom seems stuck still selling the same handful of automobile satnav products which are surely squeezed to a tiny consume base between smartphone apps and feature-rich car screens. I know there is map IP as well and maybe that's their only real business opportunity going forward.
- normie3000 4y agoWasn’t Garmin already an established company with other GPS-based product lines before they got into car satnav?
- nixass 4y agoCorrect, they are also in avionics business which gives them nice revenue too.
- afterburner 4y agoAh, the secret to "success" in all things: already having piles of money.
- colechristensen 4y agoGarmin makes commercial, aviation, defense, etc. kinds of GPS systems and was producing systems. This was their first product, http://retro-gps.info/Garmin/Pronav-GPS-100/index.html http://retro-gps.info/Garmin/Pronav-GPS-100/index.html and their first customer was the US Army. It replaced Army GPS systems which weighed nearly 40 pounds.
- jlg23 4y agoI bought my first Garmin device more than 20 years ago and already back then they were the go-to source for consumer handheld GPS location/mapping devices.
- chzblck 4y agoI know most people in the states think of them as the old Navi company but in europe they are the market leader in telematics (tracking driving) Also up until 2020 they were supplying apple maps with map data.
- rompic 4y agoTomTom telematics afaik was sold to Bridgestone and is called webfleet now.
- fbn79 4y agoUsing TomTom web map API for a project and they are really well developed. Great product that can compete with Google Maps.
- alaricus 4y agoI think Apple Maps is basically TomTom with a Apple logo slapped to it.
- groovybits 4y ago"The main provider of map data is TomTom, but data is also supplied by Automotive Navigation Data, Getchee, Hexagon AB, IGN, Increment P, Intermap Technologies, LeadDog, MDA Information Systems, OpenStreetMap, and Waze." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps#Features
- djvdq 4y agoI'm slightly surprised by Waze. I did not expect Google to support the competition
- samyok 4y agoThey stopped using TomTom in the US in 2020: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-maps-redesign/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-maps-redesign/
- scotty79 4y agoI used to work for TomTom maybe 10 years ago. I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company. They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it. Main idea for staying in business, since you can't compete with free, was to go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars. They were already doing it back then, I think, but they've seen their salvation in capturing bigger part of that market. I was a software developer there, employed in projects pretty far from their core business, but I learned there a lot about how companies become corporations why they can and do run like a headless chicken, spilling money left and right. It's basically about survival. Company becomes a corporation when it randomly discovers a gold vein in the economy. For TomTom this gold vein was maps on portable computers. This gold vein brings in absolutely insane amount of money. Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one. From what I see shared in this thread, TomTom still haven't found their second gold vein. Maybe I should get hired there again. A lot of my friends from other jobs work there now. I never seen from the inside how corporations die.
- tdfx 4y agoIf it makes you feel better, Google doesn't have a second gold vein yet, either.
- alaricus 4y agoGoogle is fk'ed if wide-scale ad blocking really picks up. For example ISP-level adblocking.
- wonderbore 4y agoOf course they’re not. It just might get more complicated for users but it’d be super easy for them to set up cloaking. uBlock could deal with that, ISP won’t. Either way that will never happen obviously; Why would an ISP “block ads”? They’re literally hosting Google hardware (specifically YouTube’s cache)
- e_i_pi_2 4y agoSad to keep seeing automation get better and the headline not to be "TomTom increases paid time off due to improved automation"
- scotty79 4y agoThat's not how capitalism works. Besides TomTom is a Dutch company so the conditions there are already pretty awesome.
- tealpod 4y agoI worked for TomTom ~12 years ago, they had some of the best dev from all over the world. The one issue I found was they had all indpendent teams which are bit disconnected and not sure what everyone were doing in total.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoWhoWho?
- frenchman99 4y ago> Regrettably, this will have an intended impact This reads weird to me (non-native English speaker). How can you regrettably reach your intended impact? Is that some kind of an idiom?
- stkdump 4y agoNon-native speaker myself, I had to do a double take as well. I think 'to regret sth' can have two slightly different meanings: 1. If I could reverse time, I would decide differently getting a different outcome. 2. I am sad that this happens, but it is still the preferable outcome, compared to the alternative. I think I 'default' to the first meaning. But in this case the second is probably more fitting.
- pantulis 4y agoI think they are threading a fine line here. They regret that they had to make these plans. Or, note to investors: we are firing people but it was expected.
- laputan_machine 4y agoI'm a native speaker and it is paradoxical to me, too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- glintik 4y agoMy thoughts: Any middle or large company can fire off at least 20% without any negative impact to earnings.
- nickdothutton 4y agoFrom what I’ve seen of recent products, they should probably close up shop and just license patents and collect dues. Dead company.
- rsimmons 4y agoI thought TomTom was just another Kodak, Blockbuster, or RIM. Didn’t realise they were still trying to make things, surely Google and Apple own the car market now?
- lambo4bkfast 4y agoI get the feeling that the intended message is that there is a layoff and that the framing of the layoff being due to efficiency gains is largely bs.