Carnegie Mellon's Brainhub Hosts NeuroHackathon for Computer Scientists

To be exact one/two of the NREC teams that worked on the DARPA Robotics Projects left. To put that into perspective - NREC is ~15 min drive from CMU.

And "underpaid" is inaccurate - it's well known that industry pays far more than academia can usually.

Furthermore NREC is one of the many institutes under the CMU SCS (school of computer science) banner. It finds/pays for its grad students and then pays main campus for its students to take classes. Saying that CMU was vastly impacted is incorrect - this did not cause the loss of CSD - the actual Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon - faculty. There are some 6? autonomous/semi-autonomous institutes/centers and then the actual CSD.

-- a CMU student

ps: for interns/FT alone Uber ATC allows for 2x overtime pay (ontop of a pretty high base).

ps(2): for less exaggerated news, refer to the interview with Dean Moore.

10-15 years ago, researchers working on self-driving cars weren't in-demand engineers. They were academic robotics researchers primarily subsisting on grants rather than capital. And CMU isn't in the business of venture capital. They're in the business of doing the research that results in the innovation that venture capital then develops into products.

To put it in SV terms:

* Saying that NREC employees were under-valued during the early days of self-driving is kind of like saying that an early-stage startup was undervalued with ten years of hind-sight.

* Saying that NREC should have increased their pay for those employees to work on (new, different) research projects is kind of like saying that early-stage startups should match Google's salaries for their employees working on a (new, different) startup.

In other words: maybe scientists are underpaid, but the fact that successful researchers can leave academia and make more money is basically a tautology.