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Carmakers are struggling to bring top engineers to Detroit

“It’s become a CEO issue, not just an HR issue”

- Keith Naughton, David Welch, and Jamie Butters

Detroit needs more people like Victoria Schein. Less than a year out of Smith College, the 23-year-old software engineer has filed for 14 patents and received nine as part of Ford Motor Co.’s driverless-car research team. A self-described California girl with a thing for cars, Schein, a former Ford summer intern, passed up a couple of enviable Silicon Valley offers to work for the automaker full time. “It’s not that I don’t want to be in Palo Alto, I love California,” she says. “But when I came out here, it opened my eyes to different possibilities.”

Schein is the exception. As U.S. automakers race companies such as Apple, Uber Technologies, and Alphabet’s Waymo to automate driving, most of the top talent continues to cluster out west, where there’s better pay and weather, among other things. The Detroit Three and other big automakers have about 5,000 job openings in software and electronics product development, representing about a third of their unfilled jobs, estimates consultant AlixPartners LLP.