Waymo’s Hiring Binge
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Hiring 700 "mostly engineer" employees in a year!
I pride myself as an "operator" and have worked in businesses that have scaled quickly but it is unimaginable how one doubles the highly compensated / hard to find employee count in a year at that scale.
In an economy where excess labor of that quality is non-existent.
That's an average of almost 3 people a work day you need to recruit away from probably another high income role, getting them to show up, get devtools opened, build and manage security clearances, trying to integrate into the org, etc.
But agree, there simply isn’t that kind of liquidity in the market to make that number without it being suspicious on technical levels.
There may not be many people out of work, but there are always people looking for the next job.
I just had a job change after 6 years and was constantly asked why I stayed so long.
"During a recession, all the big companies will tighten their budgets and not throw money to copy your products"
They then pointed out that all the companies that took off in the 10s started during the 2008 recession.
Look at what happened to Snapchat for an example of what happens when other companies have money to spend to catch up with your product quickly.
There are some lucky few that still manage this or some that even manage to get US-level rates doing open source but that's like winning the lottery; outliers.
It’s a gradual process but in my experience it’s very real.
You throw an EXCESSIVE amount of money at the problem and over-hire (and just naturally weed people out). Recruiting firms will gladly take anyones money to help solve this problem.
Why on earth wouldn't you take that job? Who cares if it actually turns out in the end.
For Waymo, you could hire 10x teams of 10 people to do the same thing. One team would eventually get it right.
If autonomous driving is the next trillion dollar idea, then this is all chump change.
My bet is transfers outweigh anything you're praising here.
And to be more on point, I met definitely more than a couple subpar employee that would be fired after a couple months in a startup.
And I diagnosed a serious problem and got a fix actioned - the problem had cost them > 500,000 k in less than a week.
This is something common in all really profitable companies and tech is merely the best example. Oil "tech" is another. Financial tech is yet another.
Europe, where engineers don't seem to be paid well is very much lacking in the sort of very profitable companies we see elsewhere. And even Baidu is known for paying very well (relatively for China, but even in absolute terms they're paying ... certainly Amazon level).
I see a few indications this may not be a coincidence. Big, huge, very profitable companies ... pay their employees well. Europe, clearly, would rather fade into non-importance. Currently Germany is a bit of an exception but if Tesla does take off, how long will that last?
There are of course many great engineers as well (especially the more OG ones) but the ability spread was way larger than any other company I’ve been at. I think it’s something about its cultural image and incentive structure...
1. Employees are usually the biggest expense and engineers are some of the priciest, so there goes the run rate (unless Alphabet foots the bill).
2. Hiring too quickly ruins the dynamic of existing teams and throws them into chaos.
3. Hiring too quickly tends to not apply good due-diligence because the few staff who are demonstrably good at hiring will be spread too thin to have an impact. This leads to hiring second- and third-stringers who will slow everyone down more than better hires, add to office political BS with their non-value-add/sabotaging drama, zap morale, and drive away A-players to their next adventure.
4. It may or may not be the case, but without a per-department plan to scale their organizations' resources (systems, budgets and staff) according to anticipated added demand to support massive numbers of new hires, that scaling too much in one area tends to overwhelm other departments. I hope they practice safe and sane scaling before it's too late.
PS: Dern, I could probably get a job there and I've been out-of-work for 9 years. Of course, it doesn't sound like a sustainable or happy place to work, more like a pressure-cooker that's hurrying to spend that money before daddy Alpha warbucks cuts off their allowance.
Imagine a car simulation in which someone in a low cost country sees what the driver in the car would see, including the surroundings (side mirrors, behind them, etc). She can look around, same way as someone in the car and that person can drive. And her actions gets sent to the car half way across the world.
Kind of like a Mechanical Turk for driving. Is this crazy?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
The former could annoy you, the latter could kill your entire extended family.
* The remote driver is seeing things 10s-100s of milliseconds after they've happened * And somehow we're getting all of the data coming out of sensors on the car at high enough fidelity over the air * And we're not having connectivity blips that would result in loss of remote control for seconds
Self-driving cars are classified into 6 SAE levels, 0-5. 5 is full autonomy, 4 is autonomy in limited conditions, 3 is self driving but there has to be a driver ready to take over.
Getting to 5 is really hard. It could take decades, because there are a zillion edge cases. But what if you could turn cars loose at the "can handle 95% of driving" level and then let it call a human to give guidance when the car is nervous or confused?
Obviously, the phone-a-friend approach can't work for things requiring quick action. But if you bias the car to just stop safely and wait for orders, I think it's doable. E.g., the car comes upon an accident where the lanes in one direction are blocked. Humans know to go around the accident by slowly and carefully sharing the remainder of the road. So perhaps the car stops before the obstruction and asks for help. A human looks at it and draws in the path it should follow to get back to normal road.
So I think remote "robot coaches" could plug the gap between levels 4 and 5. And maybe some of the level 3 gap, too. And from what I hear of the Waymo operation in Arizona, I suspect Google's doing something akin to this.
I think the right thing to do is to invert the bias. If the car isn't sure it understands what's going on and that it's safe to proceed, it should stop. In which case, development becomes a long series of teaching about rarer and rarer circumstances, so it needs less and less human input to understand the road.
I'm sure Tesla has been keeping that in mind as their self-driving technology progresses.
For whatever purpose they fly Predators manually.
- pilots still need to know how to land an aircraft themselves, so they may as well practice it (it's not like they are driving to work and can read Facebook)
- to prevent interference with the radio signals used for the ILS, ground aircraft are routed away from transmitters which reduces capacity of the airport when it has to be used
- the system isn't perfect, so from a safety perspective it's safer to use it as guidance rather than rely on it
Autoland is a requirement during severe weather conditions - when a pilot cannot obtain enough visual information to perform the landing themselves.
2) Autoland is never a requirement — usually, deciding to try an autoland landing or diverting to an alternate airport is the pilot’s game time decision.
3) Not “almost all” commercial aircraft have autoland capability. It requires specific certifications for the pilot and crew as well as the aircraft itself.
The 737NG, 737 MAX, 747, 757, 767, 777, 787 and every Airbus model have autoland. It's a requirement to be able to use autoland in order to be certified as a pilot for a particular type. Garmin even has a system for newer GA planes so they can autoland nowadays. Autoland is used rarely because its more work for the pilots to enable and they all think they can do a softer landing, but in very low-vis weather conditions its used pretty often.
BAE where doing tests of this lading passenger jets on wet and slippery runways for example
Currently, everyone is vaporware. Including Phantom.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/exclusive-mass-layoffs-rep...
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".
Or some random thing you said triggered a fear of theirs and they downvoted you in an abundance of caution. That’s pretty common too.
Not really worth reading into it. But it is worth applying again at a later date if you’re pumped about the company.
As the previous owner of 2 Pixel phones, this man is the last person on Earth I want in charge of operations of a fleet of 2-ton automated vehicles. No offence.
I would never in a million years recommend the Pixel 2 to someone, but I know there are plenty of people out there who love theirs.
Weird-ass names for employees of a company is one of the weirdest "WE HAVE TO TRY HARD TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL LIKE A PART OF THE CULTURE" things ever, honestly.
Disclaimer: used to be a noogler. I'm not mad at all!!1!
Since Waymo skipped on that demonym, big opportunity for Venmofos.
That said, there is a large, reputable, international law firm called Morrison & Foerster that revels in this wonderful domain name: https://www.mofo.com/
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Shoe-Dog-Memoir-Creator-Nike-ebook/dp...
I quit before i graduated so i guess it wasn't that special, but i think it's overall a positive thing (if managed well).
Why not? We see it every day.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: they did! Changed now.