Things aren’t going so great for certain General Motors employees today. A batch of workers in the company’s Information Technology (IT) department was laid off on Monday as part of a restructuring of the division.
General Motors didn’t disclose how many jobs were affected, though Bloomberg claims the redundancies have targeted 500 to 600 employees, citing unnamed sources familiar with the layoffs. This string of white-collar job cuts is the second such incident in eight months, following the elimination of over 200 salaried staff back in October.
In a statement to The Autopian, General Motors says the reductions are a part of an effort to “transform” the company’s IT division to better prepare it for the coming future. Here’s the full statement I was sent via email:
“GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles
globally. We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition.”
GM didn’t say which regions would be most affected, but confirmed to me that employees made redundant today would receive severance with the length and amount determined by how long each individual has been at the company, which is a pretty standard business practice.
From the sounds of it, people on Reddit who claim to be employees affected by the layoffs didn’t see it coming. Over a dozen users shared their experience of being laid off or hearing of someone (or a group of people) being laid off. Here are just a few of the comments:
The layoffs come at an interesting time for General Motors. The company has recently been pushing to evolve its company into a tech-first powerhouse, adding more software and computing to its cars to rival tech-forward rivals such as Tesla and Rivian. So it’s interesting to hear so many jobs eliminated in the most tech-heavy section of the company.
It’s possible GM took a look at its current roster and determined it wanted to spend the money elsewhere. While these jobs likely won’t be coming back, GM is currently hiring 83 other positions globally for various IT departments, per its careers site. So it’s not like they’re just cutting a bunch of people and not replacing at least a few of them.
Though GM has remained profitable in 2025, it took a massive $8.7 billion in total write-downs tied to its EV business, which hasn’t panned out due to a lack of federal incentives and slowing demand. In addition to the 200-plus employees laid off in October, the company furloughed 5,500 factory workers at the same time to reassess demand for electric vehicles.
While the company has stayed afloat thanks to the public’s unending desire for giant trucks and SUVs (plus a huge tariff refund), the ongoing war in Iran isn’t doing anything to help inflation or gas prices. So it’s just looking for ways to streamline any way it can. GM raised its profit outlook by half a billion to match the tariff refund, but still expects the rising costs of raw materials to put a huge damper on its bottom line. From Reuters:
The Detroit automaker raised its 2026 profit outlook by $500 million, matching the amount it expects to recover from refunds tied to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down some of the Trump administration’s tariffs. It now expects full-year core profit of $13.5 billion to $15.5 billion.
It still sees U.S. tariffs cutting $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion from profits this year, revised down from an earlier estimate of $3 billion to $4 billion because of the expected refund.
GM’s higher profit outlook comes despite rising costs. It now expects inflation in raw materials, computer chips and logistics to cut earnings by $1.5 billion to $2 billion this year, about $500 million more than it estimated late last year.
GM employs nearly 100,000 people globally, so 500 or so people isn’t exactly a huge amount as a percentage of total employees. But it still sucks, and reading the comments for people who got laid off on Reddit is a reminder that these are real people and not numbers.
Top graphic image: GM
There’s IT and there’s IT. There are people who are writing code for the “next (hopefully) cool thing” and there are people who staff the IT Help Desk. And stuff in between.
A customer/company did the overseas thing over to India a decade or so ago. Management looked at rapidly declining support call stats and thought they were geniuses. In reality, users got so frustrated dealing with thick accents from people thousands of miles away that they just stopped filing tickets. Eventually, the loss in overall productivity of those being “supported” started showing up and the overseas thing got reversed.
The company I worked for until retirement a couple of years ago exported a bunch of programming jobs to Ukraine, and I prayed that the people I worked with would be around the next day after Putin started his “little excursion.”
I’m sure some pretty good babies got thrown out with the bath water and I hope they quickly find new, better, jobs.
It’s all ball bearings these days. No cars have any software in them that might need to be more advanced than any competitors’ software to stay relevant.
Just earlier, I “transformed” a bowl of beans, a cup of tea and a donut by the same method, and I suspect that in 24-72 hours, the result will be the same.
Oh yeah… making part or all of a department disappear will definitely “transform” it.
But not for the better…
What did these 500-600 people do that GM thinks they’re no longer necessary? Were they just redundant/extra/duplicate staff/resources, or is GM just planning to offload their tasks onto remaining workers and/or AI?
I’m just amazed that this article doesn’t in any way mention AI; which is correct, companies just do layoffs for fun regardless.
Or because business is actually rough (can’t imagine why) and they know who they’re happy to sacrifice first.
AI is usually just the excuse that makes their stock price go up more.
I still consider any kind of layoff as a general failing from a company. They failed at something. That’s why they are doing this. I think it’s some of the most offensive shit ever that these companies use it to boost their stock price now. This one likely won’t given the size but that’s 500 people jettisoned into an outright horrendous market for tech oriented job seekers. I got lucky that my unemployment stint only lasted 3 months last year.
Edit: added a word.
Companies are slashing IT departments like crazy and they are refusing to see the impact.
Most of use turn wrenches in our spare time. Do you know what you need to turn a wrench? A WRENCH. If you don’t have the tools, you can’t do your hobby.
Most of us burn bytes as a job in some way or another. Do you know what you need to burn bytes? A COMPUTER. If you don’t have a computer, you can’t do your job.
For me, a computer is like a potter’s wheel, a mechanic’s tool set, a singer’s microphone, an influencer’s ring light. Without it, I can’t do what I am paid to do.
Cutting IT is like turning off the air compressor in a tire shop and wondering why people are taking an hour to pump up customer’s tires now.
My last job was a great example of that. IT staffing had been severely cut over the last several years, production was very noticeably suffering, but management ignored it and/or bragged about “streamlining” things…
The IT department is universally viewed as nothing but a cost at every company because they don’t directly earn revenue. Which is insanely short-sighted and stupid.
My company did a similar thing a couple of years ago, laying off a bunch of IT and other support staff. I’m sure the executives in charge got a big bonus for all the cost savings, while ignoring the fact that laying off tech writers meant their highly paid software developers were now spending a non-trivial amount of time writing documentation.
I’m old enough to remember when Roger Smith’s factory automation program replaced one UAW line worker with two EDS robot software engineers.
By “Transforming” they mean “Sending these jobs overseas”, right?
The 83 people they’re hiring will probably be H1B’s.
To my very old self an “IT” department is a service organization within the company. Layoffs in that area could be understood though not necessarily justified. This sounds like a software or controls development department. That would be a mistake.
This is puzzling. GM usually likes to wait until December for layoffs. It adds extra spice to the holidays. Spare me the “difficult decision” blather. At their next meeting they’ll congratulate each other for saving the company money.
“We are grateful for the contributions”
No, you’re really not…you’re a company
Were the the IT staff non-union salaried employees? If so any unpaid overtime they may have put in counts as a contribution.
Meanwhile I am at a Chevy dealer today getting a loaner and out of 14 Blazer and Equinox EV’s 8 could not be loaned out due to open software recalls… So yeah lay em off, sounds about right for GM… I know several people in various parts of GM in IT or software related roles, AI is the boogeyman but in reality, its just getting rid of people to save costs… GMs been doing this since good old Roger Smith and long before that even…
Back when every company under the sun was chomping at the bit to hire developers, a recruiter reached out to me for some General Motors project that involved a financial services product and credit reporting. I can’t recall the specific details and I would have been a contractor, but I vaguely recall the project being headed out of this Austin office that’s in the lede photo.
This seems DOGE level stupid.
IT has been taking a massive hit because of AI so not a huge surprise.
“GM is transforming its Information Technology organization”
Ha, transformers are what they were calling AI before the decided that AI sounded more sexy. Transformer is what the T in ChatGPT stands for.
I wonder if that’s they mean?
Otherwise, WTF are they transforming the Information Technology organization into?
History.
That’s what the T stands for? I thought it stood for “Terminator”
“ GM is currently hiring 83 other positions globally for various IT departments, per its careers site.”
Check again tomorrow.
Check again in 3 years when the same listings are still “open” and nobody who applied has ever gotten a reply.
That too. Or check how many of those positions have been “open” since the Biden administration.
That happened to me while I was in my senior year of college. I interviewed with Electric Boat and got a verbal job offer. I was so happy and I called my dad. Dad sounded disappointed and told me to turn on CNN. The exact time I was calling him, there was a story about the Navy canceling the Seawolf submarine program and that Electric Boat was going to have massive layoffs as a result.
I ended up living at Dad’s house for 6 months while doing minimum wage temp work and sending out around 100 applications and resumes a week.
30+ years later, I still have no idea how I got hired. I didn’t have good grades and I walked into an interview knowing that I wasn’t interested in the job and assuming nobody would be interested in me. An hour later, I walked out of the interview thinking that that was a complete waste of time. 2 hours later, I got my first offer for a real job.
It sounds like.you’re saying you got an offer but they reneged and you spent the next 6 months living at Dad’s house while doing minimum wage temp work and sending out around 100 applications and resumes a week. That sounds pretty typical for a new grad except for even getting an interview. Normally it’s nothing but crickets except for CEO blather about the ever present STEM labor shortage.
“30+ years later, I still have no idea how I got hired”
Sometimes its as simple as someone on the the hiring line went to the same school as you.
The Cuts at EB were 100% real. The government stepped in a couple months later to extend the program because they were concerned that EB would lose all the talent required to keep a sub operational if they cut any more.
As for being hired because of the same school, that wasn’t it.
I got hired by a German company. They were trying to get into the US nuclear industry and had major culture clashes with US engineers from the industry. They hired someone like me was because of this goal of having US engineers that thought like Germans.
However… I was not a scholar and my grades were dramatically lower than the other 3 they hired. We all came from different schools and although mine has an excellent reputation, they had not heard of it that much being German.
Maybe it is a weird thing. Growing up, my neighbor was an old German lady and she babysat me many times. When I was around 10 or so, my dad became friends with a family from Germany and they were always at our house and they told us many stories about Germany and my parents were sort of trying to matchmake me with their daughter all through college. Most of my mom’s recipes were from the Amish, and Amish food is a variation of old school German food. Maybe they sensed that I was receptive to being “Germanized” as an engineer.
But this feels like a huge stretch.
“But this feels like a huge stretch”
Not at all! Managers hiring within their own culture or ethnic group is common too.
(Or maybe they just thought you were pretty…)
😉
Seriously though my dad was a nuclear engineer too. In addition to commercial power reactors he also worked on a few sub reactors including on one proposal for a top secret sub that in his words would have been able to “go ALL the way down”. That was in the ’60s so who knows what’s lurking down there now.
But I digress. Point being thanks to dirty tricks by the fossil fuel industry, ignorant, fearmongering smelly hippies and the filthy lies of GreenPOSeace and other whoremongering “environmental” groups cuts in the nuclear industry were frequent and painful.
As an insider to the industry, I think the biggest problem nuclear has is with the word Safety.
If you aren’t in nuclear, safety means something very specific. If I don’t do this, someone might die. Inside of Nuclear, safety means that, and Nuclear Safety means that the zoomies stay where they are supposed to be.
These are completely different concepts. This also leads to major PR problems.
With Nuclear, the way we talk about nuclear safety, without making sure people know what we mean freaks people out. If we had a better name for what we call safety (IDK Zoomie Control) then we could assure people that the radiation stays inside the building without them thinking that any exposure would lead to instant death.
For example, I was at a place that had a significant safety report. We had a trashcan for coveralls that wasn’t chained up like it was supposed to and it fell over. When it did, it spilled coveralls outside of the area where radiation was controlled. The coveralls actually weren’t radioactive and it was a $2 chain that wasn’t connected, but still, we didn’t follow procedures and got written up and put in the news. The clean up took 1 person 15 minutes with a mop, a bucket and a Gieger Counter.
I had people calling me to ask if I was going to survive because of the news.
My dad was intricately involved with nuclear safety. One of his many projects was designing the safety mechanism for Clinch River, a liquid sodium cooled breeder reactor.
For those not in the know liquid sodium means metallic, elemental sodium. Its used because it not only provides adequate cooling with a very high boiling point (you may have a bit in your exhaust valves for that purpose) but it is also not a neutron absorber. Those neutrons are needed to convert non fissile U-238 into deliciously fissile Pu-239. Yes it’s a double edged sword because that plutonium is weaponizable but it’s also reactor fuel.
The problem is that metallic sodium is HIGHLY reactive with water. Water is used in the secondary cooling loop to take the heat energy from the hot AF liquid sodium and turn the water into nice superheated steam. That steam is used to turn turbine blades which turns the electrical generators.
IF God forbid there were a breech between the cooling loops and that hot AF liquid sodium metal were to come into direct physical and chemical contact with the water there would be a HUGE explosion. My dad’s job was to contain that explosion. That was done by designing in a set of burst discs into the cooling loops – a distant cousin to the freeze plugs in your engine block.
As the pressure rose the disk would be pushed backwards against a spring onto a knife edge. The disc would be sliced open revealing large, empty containment vessels more than big and strong enough to swallow the explosion. It was purely mechanical, there were no electronics to fail, no possible errors made by under trained technicians to worry about. AFAIK there was no doubt in my dad’s mind it would have worked.
But then the project was canceled because fear mongering hippies.
Before that however he worked at Quadrex. That company concerned him greatly. He even went to the SJ Mercury to blow the whistle on gross safety violations. Apparently in the wake of TMI they had hired a bunch of (in his words) “incompetent Pakistani safety engineers” to rubber stamp whatever safety regulations they were told to rubber stamp. Even though TMI was big news the paper ignored him. He found out the hard way that unless you do all the work of putting together an airtight story on a river platter for the reporter and are willing to risk your job if not your own legal blowback being a whistleblower is a waste of time.
So yes sometimes the concerns are real. All I can say is that in the entire history of nuclear power the number of deaths it has proven to have caused is miniscule compared to fossil fuels and smaller than most renewables. That’s an excellent safety record.
All industries have their dark times and people that are not bright lights. A major shift happened with nuclear power about 20-30 years ago.
Nuclear plants have something called CRs (Condition Reports). If you are working at or with a plant and see something that doesn’t make sense, you are supposed to write a CR. Everyone praises you when you write a good CR and it’s not uncommon to get a bonus if you point out something serious.
That’s all healthy and good.
Except…
Nuclear plants are in the business of making money. Each time you do a CR, this means the plant has to spend money checking to see if it really is a problem and then fixing it if it is. When the bean counters see employee X has written 10 CRs that have cost a total of $8 million and Employee Y hasn’t written a single CR, guess who gets looked at first for being laid off.
Well, that was how it was 20-30 years ago. Then the NRC dropped the hammer on several plants for having “poor safety cultures”. The plants have changed the way they grade employees and if you aren’t generating CRs, they start asking if there is something wrong with you that you are spotting problems coworkers have.
But this culture shift is taking time. I started 35 years ago in the industry. My first step when I see something that looks weird is to ask someone else if this looks weird to them. Then why they are writing the CR, I start looking at the cheapest way to fix the problem and think “If I’m known as a problem solver…” This is my old school way of looking at things and I’ve actually been laid off for not doing CRs that I could have.
The good news is that the change in culture has led to shorter outages. People are reporting problems early, which allow for better planning and less scrambling at the last minute.
The bad news is that there are always those that abuse the system. If there are rumors of layoffs, some dork that hasn’t done a thing will report a pile of problems based on antiquated drawings or just random stuff (saw one where the guy said the crane should be yellow but it looked green when it was in the shade). When the layoffs come, the company cannot layoff anyone with an open CR so they save their job. But there aren’t many of these types out there. Maybe 1-2%? The companies know who these people are and what they are doing and it’s a matter of time…
Good to hear things are getting better than they were. The Chinese are in the commercial nuclear arena too and seem to be well ahead of us, especially in thorium. Hopefully when the first nuclear powered Chinese container/tanker ships show up a fire gets lit that consumes the NIMBYs.
Everyone is doing everything all at once. The Koreans are selling large PWRs, the Brits are doing SMRs, the US has multiple SMRs including Bill Gates’ sodium cooled reactor. There are dozens of start ups all over the place. The biggest challenge I see is a talent gap. There aren’t enough of everyone to meet the demand. It’s like musical chairs in reverse where there are 100 chairs and three players that hop from chair to chair to find the most comfortable fit.
Typical boom. When the inevitable bust happens, probably because of a perfect storm of cheap renewables, cheap fossil fuels, hippie fearmongering, NIMBYISM and maybe an AI power demand bust there will be an ocean of confused, disappointed, debt ridden nuclear engineers wondering WTF companies that post jobs never call them back.
This feels different than before. Honestly it doesn’t matter to me. I’m about 10 years from retirement and I figure that this boom will last me until then. Worse comes to worst, I can do the time-honored Nuclear Retirement. Setup of a company of 1, charge companies something north of $100/hour for consulting and use an RV to go from plant to plant to plant. Except now I might not even need an RV since so much work can be done remotely.
I think about 90% of the nuclear workers I know end up doing that and I would be shocked to find there are people that RV that don’t pull up in nuclear power plant parking lots to top off their bank accounts.
RVs aren’t just for nuclear engineers. Lots of professional folks here in SV live in their employers parking lots and along public streets.
I guess anyone that does contract work would do well in an RV.
I had a friend way back when that was mid-50s when he got laid off from a major company that did A&E work on nuclear. He sold his house, bought a big Diesel Pusher RV and a Saturn to tow behind it (now it would be a Jeep). He made more in 3 months than he used to make in 12 as a full time employee and he RVed around the country visiting friends and family for about 10-15 years and working at the power plants to keep the money flowing.
It’s a very common thing. It’s not uncommon to find RV hook ups in the parking lots of nuclear plants for the outage workers.
Well, that’d never happen today.
Nobody would tell you “turn on CNN” because there’d probably be a yappy panel show on.
I miss the old days of cable. When there was news on CNN (or CNN Headline News), Sports on ESPN and History on the History channel
And Bravo was cuturey film and performing arts shit, and American Movie Classics was classic movies not infinite zombie retreads. And why is BBC America always showing Star Trek TNG
In the corporate world, “redundancies” mean that people are doing the same type of work. Therefore, they can be kicked to the curb and those remaining will assume their workload. …At the same pay, of course. Round 2 happens when they are overwhelmed by the workload and put on a PIP.
Yup my boss was trying to tell me as a level 4 (tech) that I should be doing the same work as the level 5s (engineers) I just trained and level 6s. All part of the whole lean agile BS to me it.just makes it seems like this have people that are specialized in anything so you can lay them off when ever and force all the work on your remaining work force. And as you said people get overwhelmed and overworked when this happens.
Remimds me of Leadbottom offering Dusty his old job back in Planes Fire and Rescue:
Because the answer is “Yes.” -“Yes?”
Yes, of course you can have your old job back. Don’t even have to bother asking. That’s just the kind of guy I am.
Of course, you gotta start back at minimum wage, and you lost all your vacation time, gotta go through orientation again.
That sucks for those affected. Getting laid off in this economy sucks, even, maybe especially, in IT.
The more software bullshit they add, the less interest I have in their cars. Not that I had any to start with, but this would make my interest in GM vehicles like a black hole, sucking it out of those anywhere near me.
I deal with computers all day every day, I want my cars to be as analog as possible.
If you are in IT, AI is definitely coming for your job
Not likely. At least not until it can install and configure it’s own hardware and train the users on how to use it – not holding my breath. I don’t write code for a living. Those guys need to be somewhat nervous.
At best, IA is part of decision support.
Iowa? Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Yes, it’s good at providing frameworks, and even writing basic code. But it takes experience to know what is and what isn’t bullshit being spit out. And a LOT of it is bullshit at this point. I have a client who is a ChatGPT “True Believer” and in the course of the project I had to keep him from doing soooo many stupid things that it suggested he do. Some of which would have brought his entire environment down – 30 years of experience matters. It’s very, very good at making suggestions that on the surface seem very good, but actually aren’t.
Sorry. Carpal Tunnel strikes again.
I do write code for a living. I’ll be fine, too. But that’s because I am a tenured developer who can manage a project from conception to execution and beyond, and to distill a basic set of requirements into a usable system for the client.
AI cannot do that, and likely won’t be able to anytime in the near future. People who use it intensely know that it’s great for solving small problems, but the bigger the issue, the likelier it is that it loses focus and introduces unintended behavior, contradicts itself, leads you down a dead end, or outright disregards your instructions. It really really has to be babysat and it gets incredibly expensive when you want to actually use it like a full-time developer. High-stakes product owners and clients–of which there are a great meany–will not risk that kind of liability and will keep right on paying actual developers to do the work properly.
I am also self-employed. Most people in my position will be fine. The people who need to be worried are:
And that’s only for now, because AI is a bubble. As it is, none of the big AI companies is remotely profitable and it’s insanely resource heavy. Eventually, they’re going to hit a wall and be forced to start pricing their AI products according to how much they actually cost to run, and then there’s going to be a big backlash as AI prices itself out of development pipelines. Likewise, companies whose SaaS products are basically interfaces on top of someone else’s AI API (like, say, those dealership website chatbots) will find themselves unable to rely upon that tactic once the AI companies jack up the price of API access.
Look at my reply above
I agree with you 100%.
Ultimately, AI is the new “cloud”. It will be great for some things, terrible for other things, and a LOT more expensive than most really realize right now who are not in the midst of the industry. In the meantime, the crazy bubble continues.
I work in audio visual and a couple of people have had AI (clever calling it IA) program Crestron. Slower but exact. I have ears since I am audio guy, but people accept less than good sometimes. IT is absolutely less subjective. I have network switches that my dumbass can configure.
Claude recently posted an agent for use within Word. Oh vey. As a Tech Writer who deals with Word all day every day, we checked it out and even Claude admits that Grammary (which has used some flavor of AI for years) is better for similar tasks.
Since Engineers are generally not good writers, we were afraid they would use the Claude agent (beta version) to help “write” their docs, so we tested it. Of course we have to pay to use Claude, so remember that.
It sucks, no surprise, so we had to post a message to the entire company that it should not be use, and to contact us for a Grammarly license or us for assistance with Word or even for co-authoring. We got a bunch of requests.
One of our Tech Writers summed the Claude Word agent up thusly:
Anthropic is having us pay them for us to be beta testers.
While I respect Anthropic for sticking to their principles on stuff like that BS with the Department of Defense, they’re also maybe the most guilty of over-promising every time they announce something new. If you have any familiarity with the areas they’re trying to disrupt, you realize that a lot of their claims are complete nonsense.
The question is when will the rest of the world realize that?
You act like General Motors is the only company adding software bullshit to its cars. Everybody is…so what you really aren’t interested in is a car newer than your E91 Bimmer. Which…is fine, but let’s not single GM out as being a unique perpetrator in that arena.
Where I think GM could use improvement, in terms of development, is unifying its various electrical and software interfaces to just one or two basic ones. They’d probably have better and more reliable software, at that point, and less duplicated effort. Easier said than done, I know, but hopefully they’re working toward a more unified set of systems.
I have no interest in any new cars at this point. I have had several cars newer than my e91, the newest being a 2018 Fiata, every new generation has been of less and less interest to me. The shark is well and truly jumped. But I will single out GM as a company with a long history of producing utter garbage – they had the engineering ability, but not the management ability to get past the 90% mark. They ALMOST got to the point of making decent product and are now doing this BS.
500 sounds about right. I’m guessing that reflects the revenue loss from the California private data lawsuit. You didn’t think that was coming out of the exec’s pockets now did you? Did you?
Only the criminally naive think that fines (or penalties, or taxes, or tariffs) come out of the pockets of management or stakeholders. Hooray California on your win, you really stuck it to them . . . /s
(For the record, I don’t believe the fine to be the reason for the cut – or at least, not the only one.)
The fine is insignificant. It’s that they have been banned from the practice, at least in California, so the business model has been shut down. No better ideas to generate revenue? Lay people off.
I’d like to mock that further, but the truth is I wish the US had country-wide privacy laws.
Although again, I doubt that’s the whole story behind the layoff.
It begins.
Mary Barra’s total compensation for 2025 was $29,895,868.
https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2026/04/20/gm-board-approves-pay-raise-for-mary-barra-exceeds-2025-goals/89690822007/
I’ve always said if corps really wanna save some money via layoffs they’d see much bigger bang for the buck by chopping from the top.
You’d think so, but 500 employees X $105k per year (google AI answer) at a general 1.25x for taxes/benefits/time off equals a staggering $65,625,000.
My calculator must be broken. $29,895,868 a year equals $81,906.48 a day!? No f-ing way. Must be a typo. Right?
Nope, Mary Barra is out on the dealership lot every day selling top trim Cadillacs. The commission on a handful of those easily tops 80k a day!