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.

Comments

Pay them market value

[Anonymous Coward]

How loathsome that CMU will have to pay their researchers MARKET VALUE to keep them!

Re:Pay them market value

[halivar]

Universities may be publicly funded, but when it comes to research patents they are as commercial as any corporation.

Re:Pay them market value

[plopez]

I'm not sure if it is market value. It could be at a premium. In addition there was no indication they would actually be doing research. It could be a strategy, also used by MS, of poaching talent just to keep it from falling into the hands of the competition. Another factor to consider is that now it is private the information gathered is less likely to be openly shared. Proprietary and closed researched as opposed to open research. The situation could become very dysfunctional very quickly.

Re:Pay them market value

[Minwee]

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

Those who can't understand, complain about teachers.

Re:Pay them market value

[quantaman]

How loathsome that CMU will have to pay their researchers MARKET VALUE to keep them!

The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.

What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.

Re:Pay them market value

[rockmuelle]

Most CS professors are paid market value. You can look up salaries at public schools. You'll find that at the ones that compete with CMU, the salaries are all in the range of what the researchers would make at a company ($100-250k). Bonuses are a little harder to compete with. But, in CS at least, grants cover a ton of travel. To publish in CS, you have to go to the conferences you're publishing in, unlike the rest of science which just has journals. That more than makes up for the lack of bonuses as far as fringe benefits go.

Now, the one benefit you get from industry is that you don't have to write grants. But, you also have more job security in academia. What worries me most about this is that when this bubble bursts, Uber will be one of the first companies to go (at least, research at Uber will go quickly). These researchers will now be stuck without jobs in a market that will be very hostile towards PhDs. For their sake, I hope they all vest quickly enough to get a nest egg before things go south. (it's going to happen, it always does)

-Chris

Re:Pay them market value

[Phillip2]

Struggling to see how a "ton of travel" makes up for a fringe benefit. Sitting in an airplane for hours, so that you can get to the hotel from where you commute to the conference venue then back again. Depends on whether you have a life or not, of course, but the travel is a substantial cost for many people, hardly a fringe benefit.

Re:Pay them market value

[chilenexus]

"Benefits society" != "gets them lots of cash". Sure, those two categories frequently overlap, but there are also many occasions where that overlap is mere accident or as a consequence of some legal requirement that isn't that much of a "benefit". There's many occasions where people have been lured from doing something that would be massively beneficial to society to do something that ends up being only marginally beneficial (or outright harmful) by offering them more cash to do it. The ability to extract cash isn't a reliable indicator of benefit. People get more money if the knowledge they have is rare and in short supply - passing that knowledge on to others and training them how to use it is of a huge benefit to society. Holding on to that knowledge themselves preserves that shortness of supply and will get them more money, but at the cost of many other advances delayed because the company (in this case Uber) paying them the money wants the benefits for themselves. Please, try thinking outside of the patterns of old, trite memes coined by pessimistic opportunists who can't see the value in things that don't benefit themselves immediately.

Re:Pay them market value

[quantaman]

The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.

The fact they aren't working there anymore suggest they weren't.

Depends on your definition of market value. If they went to multiple companies I'd say CMU was paying below, but the fact they all went to Uber suggests that Uber paid well above market value to make sure they accepted the offers.

What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.

So the employees rather than shareholders, managers or the CEO got a fat paycheck for being good at their jobs. That's communism!

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing but it's different from how we usually evaluate market value for employees.

Do these companies really hate people so much...

[Viol8]

... that they'll even spend probably billions trying to replace the minimum wage guy at the wheel of the taxi with some automated system that probably won't work as well for decades if ever?

Someone explain this techno nerd obsession with replacing people with robots, I just don't get it.

I hate Uber but...

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:I hate Uber but...

[bulled]

This. Uber may be run by (as stated by another /.er) "the most punchable management shit weasels" but at least they are committing to this free market idea we supposedly support instead of trying to suppress wages.

Re:I hate Uber but...

[serviscope_minor]

Both CMU and Uber want 40 people with these skills, there are only (at least according to Uber's hiring practices) 40 people available. That's 80 jobs, and 40 people. In what way is that not a skills shortage?

In your completely hypothetical world, you're right.

However the real world isn't your world. The pool of vision and robotics people is much larger than these 40 people. It also includes people with the knowldge and skills who left after a PhD and went into banking because the money is much better than engineering. If other places want those people so bad, they can bump up their salaries or other job perks to match what the banking industry matches.

So then who can CMU hire to replace the people that Uber hired?

Oh gee, I dunno, how about the legion of people who finish PhDs or postdocs and don't currently get academic jobs. Or possibly raising salaries to compete with banking.

Like I said, there's a cheap skills shortage not a skills shortage.

Re:I hate Uber but...

[beelsebob]

So you're saying that it's impossible to ever have a skills shortage, because there's no such thing as a skills shortage? Even if there's only 1 person capable of doing the job, and 1000 companies want to hire them, that's 999 companies' fault for not being commercially or economically viable, and not a skills shortage, right?

Re:Do these companies really hate people so much..

[Anonymous Coward]

... that they'll even spend probably billions trying to replace the minimum wage guy at the wheel of the taxi with some automated system that probably won't work as well for decades if ever?

Someone explain this techno nerd obsession with replacing people with robots, I just don't get it.

the underlying economic principle behind replacing humans with machines is that humans (in this case, taxi drivers) won't be needed no more so they'll go back to school and get a better job with more value added to the overall economy. on the short run it may hurt (because yeah, 60yr old taxi driver won't become a doctor...) but on the long run its what makes economies evolve. thats why the average american is more educated and has a better job than the average chinese... FOR NOW.

And UberX...

[theodp]

...poached Professors Chang and Slater from Greendale Community College!

Follow the money.

[AltGrendel]

It is capitalism after all.

Re:Follow the money.

[KalvinB]

This is brain dead capitalism. This is Scarlett O'Hara exploitative, short sighted, moocher stuff where you go in, get what you want and have no concern for the people or big picture view. When things fall apart you go cry and run off to the next batch of suckers.

This isn't Ayn Rand, understand your interdependencies, work together and support your highly competent support structure to build a larger ecosystem where everyone wins and improves in their core competencies to the benefit of everyone else.

Uber doesn't just need researchers. They need Google. They need Tesla. They need other car brands that are working on the problem. And they certainly could have used the money that the government and students were putting into the school to fund those researchers and give them access to other projects which may have given insights to the project they cared about. You can bet the government is interested in autonomous vehicles. Now that's gone because those researchers won't be given money or access to work already done in that area for the government.

Re:Do these companies really hate people so much..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Just Wait

[plopez]

It doesn't have to bear fruit, just block others from getting said research and thereby blocking them. A strategy used by MS.

Re:Do these companies really hate people so much..

[ctronsys]

This is the old Luddite-Techie dialectic; will the people be enlightened enough to either a. destroy the things that will unemploy them b. design a system of "employment" that has minimal work and maximal rewards, and let the robots do the hard stuff For a lot of techies, they spend their entire life automating, never being rewarded for they've made so much as what they will make and how little work it will take to maintain. Extrapolate those values and you'll be pretty close to the psychology =]

Idiots

[KalvinB]

If they had let the researchers work through the university, they would have saved themselves a lot of money paying for the research.

Uber apparently thinks they need to own patents on self driving technology rather than just mass produced self driving cars ASAP.

Google is light years ahead of everyone else when it comes to navigating highly complex city streets. By destroying a research facility and bringing researchers in house, they've pretty much just cooked the golden egg. A university has a much better inroad to private industry and public funding to work together to solve this kind of complex problem.

They didn't just need those researchers. They needed access to everyone's researchers who are working on solving this problem. It's a huge win for everyone when people no longer drive cars and everyone gets to their destination safely. There's a huge motivation for collaboration. And apparently Uber isn't interested in that sort of thing.

So a university is out of a lot of money and valuable education resources for nothing.

Re:Idiots

[Goldsmith]

I think you have a little too romantic view of universities.

I run a small research-heavy business. Big research universities are now very disciplined about insisting on NDAs and not doing any work without a contract. They have very high overhead rates, pushing typical business costs covered by investment and sales onto R&D contracts. Last, and worst, high level researchers have insane demands on their time outside of research. There are professors I visit who don't make it into their labs more than once a month, and haven't performed meaningful lab work with their own two hands in years. Instead they spend their time raising money and marketing their results. Why has the university system has turned our best scientists and engineers into business development executives? Is that really helpful?

Many of the professors I talk to would love to get out of academia, not because there's more money in the private sector (there's not, really), but because there's more opportunity to actually do real work. The trick is finding a business or business partner you can trust.

poaching?!

[Bugler412]

(disclaimer: CMU Employee). If someone offers a better salary and the person takes it voluntarily, that's not poaching, that's a "competitive market".

CMU struggles to retain talent with low pay

[swb]

...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."

Re:Do these companies really hate people so much..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Noncompetes in 3. 2. 1...

[Minwee]

You attract more flies with honey instead of vinegar.

But you can keep the flies the longest with fly paper. That doesn't necessarily make it any better for you or the flies.

Re:Poaches?

[gatkinso]

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.

getting my popcorn ready

[Thud457]

It's gonna be fun to watch what happens when the teamsters start sabotaging self-driving semis.
All the best parts of Mad Max : Fury Road all in better-than-3D on Americas highways!

Re:Poaches?

[Bugler412]

"poaching" is the pejorative term, likely spun that way by management types that hate when it happens. From a worker's point of view, it's the payoff for selecting a career with upward mobility potential. Poaching is GOOD for employees.

Re: What is market value?

[iluvcapra]

"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...)

Evil?

[SmaryJerry]

Apple and other tech companies having an agreement not to hire each other's employees was evil, but when a school is involved many are saying that they should not be able to hire those from another company. Which one is right?! Tell me what to think!