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Carnegie Mellon Struggles After Uber Poaches Top Robotics Researchers
ideonexus sends a report from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) saying Uber has poached 40 researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in an attempt to jump-start development of autonomous vehicle technology. In February, Uber and CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center announced a partnership to work together on the technology. But according to the WSJ, Uber quickly offered massive bonuses and salary increases to simply bring many of the researchers in-house. The NREC's new director made a presentation a few weeks ago about strategies for rebuilding and recovering. The presentation said NREC’s funding from contracts to develop technology with the U.S. Department of Defense and other organizations was expected to sink as low as $17 million from the $30 million originally projected for this year. Some contracts scientists were working on disappeared when the researchers left, accounting for the drop in funding. And it appeared the center would have to raise salaries significantly to prevent more exits. A few scientists left NREC for other companies in Pittsburgh because of concerns the center might be shut down, said two people familiar with the departures.
How loathsome that CMU will have to pay their researchers MARKET VALUE to keep them!
on't get me wrong, Uber seem like scum.
But finally someone gets it! There is NO skills shortage, there's just a cheapass git excess. Uber have apparently realised that one flip side of the free market is you can just offer larger and larger salaries until you get to hire the people you want.
Score a huge WIN for the researchers who were poached.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You only have to solve this problem once, and everyone can enjoy the benefits forever in every vehicle. Not to say that it isn't a hard problem to solve. Personally, I value human life and intelligence enough to think that there is something better a person can be doing with their time than driving others around.
(disclaimer: CMU Employee). If someone offers a better salary and the person takes it voluntarily, that's not poaching, that's a "competitive market".
...is how the headline should read.
I would wager that none of these guys are pathologically short-sighted rubes falling for false promises of more money. They more than likely made sure that the money was real, the freedom to develop their work was real, etc.
Every time I hear these "Foo poached all the talent from bar" stories I just automatically reverse the message to "Bar wasn't paying their talent enough."
Yeah, Down with machines. No more excavators, give people shovels. (make sure they are hand forged blades and hand carved handles). Why would you let evil machines do the work of humans? Why would you want to make the roads safer and public transportation cheaper?
How dare Slashdot use machines to check captcha. How dare they run a machine on to display this page... we should have squires hand writing these and mailing them to people.
Yes they did... AFTER gaining access by forming a partnership (which it sounds like they are abandoning) to find out just which staff to target.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"Market value, by definition, is what somebody is willing to pay."
Therefore it is impossible to overpay for something, as long as you're willing! :)
"Market value" in this meaning only applies in aggregate given the prior assumption of a liquid market. Is their a liquid market for autonomous car researchers?
You can't really apply commodity economic laws to "rockstars" like CEOs, entertainers or top researchers; when there's only one or a few of anything prices are more the result of rentierism and Veblen effects.
What good is going to do any of us if these guys end up working for Uber for 5 years, producing no useable products, and in the process destroying our best university autonomous vehicle program? Is that efficient? Or did Uber just have a huge checkbook and such a small marginal value for dollars they were happy to blow a few million dollars to slow down Google and Apple, with the completely speculative objective of maybe developing some product at some point.
It makes no sense to speak of market value when someone has so much money they can simply buy the best of everything and let it burn just to deny the other barons (er, capitalists) the prize.
(I really do think Uber has absolutely no idea what they're going to do with these people and zero wherewithal to run a R&D organization. This was just the rich parvenu buying the most expensive caviar to impress his friends...)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.