One door closes and another opens, the old saying goes, and that could well be the case for thousands of tech workers who have recently lost their jobs in California’s Silicon Valley. They are exactly the kind of new hires the auto industry needs.
The car world is going through some huge changes, as if you needed reminding. New vehicles are crammed with technology and are only going to get more complex in the coming years, meaning automakers are on the look out for employees with a very different skillset to those that have been traditionally employed in the industry.
Car companies still need guys that know one end of a steering rack from the other, but they increasingly need tech-heads, workers with computer backgrounds to make sense of EV powertrains, infotainment systems and autonomous technologies.
At CES in Las Vegas earlier this month Bloomberg spoke to multiple recruiters hoping to hook software engineers that could work as data scientists, user experience developers and manage cloud infrastructure, among other roles. And they all believed that the recent layoffs in Silicon Valley could provide rich pickings for the car industry.
Related: VW Cariad’s Software Issues Trigger Delay Of Porsche Macan EV
One company hoping to attract new talent at CES was Cariad, the trouble-hit software arm of Volkswagen that was blamed for the delays in cars like the Porsche Macan EV. Cariad’s head, Dirk Hilgenberg, said the firm is currently five times the size it was when it was founded in 2020, and it hopes to increase the headcount again from 6,600 to around 8,300 this year.
But Bloomberg’s report highlights that the auto industry isn’t the only one with its eyes on the tech-world’s cast-offs. It says demand for entry-level software engineers has rocketed over the past 18-24 month in other sectors including government and construction.
The car industry is entering a fascinating tech-driven era that could well lure many software experts, but it seems carmakers have another plan up their sleeve, should the tech geeks not like the idea of working in the world of autos. Stellantis has teamed up with tech companies and Amazon to set up a coding academy to retrain up to 1,000 existing mechanical engineers as coders.