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Yeah, I'm thinking a lot of the engineers will be unhappy about constantly traveling (or worse, moving) to Arizona.

Their self-driving engineers are now split among three locations: San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Arizona. I think that alone is going to cause significant engineering friction. It's a lot harder to do remote work for testing live robots (especially if they can kill people).

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I'm guessing it'll be worse than a centralized team, but not too bad.

The Pittsburgh team is there because of Carnegie Mellon, so likely where the hardware gets made. The software engineers in SF just need data from vehicles, which doesn't require cars to be near them. The operations folks actually going out and testing the cars can be anywhere, as long as they can stream data back to the SW and HW folks.

The software engineers in SF are mostly doing data science-y type work or working on UberEATS.

The self-driving car ML software is also being worked on in Pittsburgh, along with the hardware.

Most of the Otto engineers are still in San Francisco, and many of them are working on self-driving cars (in addition to trucks).

Oh yeah, I forgot about those guys. I do wonder what the dynamic is like between those two groups now...

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