Source: Apple Aggressively Recruiting Ex-Google Maps Staff To Build Out iOS Maps | Hacker News Reader

Source: Apple Aggressively Recruiting Ex-Google Maps Staff To Build Out iOS Maps

techcrunch.com

70 pointsneya54 comments

"...position sounds like a product development manager position, and will pay him $85k+ and all the moving expenses from the East Coast..."

"Apple Aggressively Recruiting Ex-Google Maps Staff..."

^These are contradictory statements

I think they left out a zero

Sounds like they're not hiring engineers but "analysts", i.e. people who correct data manually or semi-manually (scripts, SQL queries, etc.). That explains why $85k is "aggressive" and also why working on Google Maps would be considered "tedious".

(I'm a Google engineer who works on maps/local, but this is purely my own personal speculation based on the article.)

Speculation in comments at TechCrunch is that the $85k was a signing bonus rather than an annual salary.

It's a product development manager, not an engineer. They do the specification and to some extent project management. AFAIK managerial talent is not as rare as technical talent nowadays.

I could see a run of the mill CRUD app PM making $85k, but someone who is being actively sought after by the most profitable company in the world because of demonstrated domain knowledge in an area where they have a clear need and who is expected to relocate to SV? $85k is laughable for that. Laughable!

Hm, I guess you're right. Maybe not laughable, but nothing to boast about on TC.

Managerial talent is just like anything else. Truly game-changing people are rare, and when you find one they are incredibly valuable. Product managers most definitely fit into that category. A great product manager is a huge asset worth as much as any great engineer.

$300k and a $1m signing bonus would be more reasonable for this exceptionally narrow and valuable skill set. As you correctly point out, $85k is not in any way congruent with "aggressive recruitment". In the Bay area, it doesn't even qualify as a mediocre salary for recent grads with no specialization.

"$300k and a $1m signing bonus" - Where is that figure coming from?

It's coming from how much minimally you are going to need to lure away a mapping expert from his stable and appreciated job at Google, which includes options, for a place that is opportunistic, unpleasant and unlikely to have much options upside.

Bonus value based on the case of a few years ago, run of the mill employees getting $500k and up signing bonuses, plus generous options, to leave Google for pre-IPO Facebook. That's run of the mill guys, not guys with the specific talent you need working for the ONLY company that has completely solved the problem. For that person you need more, not less. Salary is based on current salaries for this level of extremely specialized expertise.

There are fewer than 10 people worldwide Apple can hire with the skills they need to organize this right. All the guys they acquired from three poorly known companies that were unable to solve these problems well enough to compete with Google are irrelevant since by definition those guys don't have the skills needed. It's not a buyer's market in any way shape or form.

"There are fewer than 10 people worldwide Apple can hire with the skills they need to organize this right."

That's an interesting number. I'm why you chose "10" instead of 5, 20, 50, 100 or 1000? There are a lot of smart people out there, who can get things done.

If there were truly only a 100 people world wide that could turn the mapping ship around, then they are worth considerably more than $300K/Year and a "$1mm bonus'. If there were only "10" people in the world who could pull this off, they could command pretty much any compensation they wished - and it would be in the hundreds of millions based on what I've read about the budget for large scale mapping systems ($8B at Nokia)

I'm guessing, that properly incented, there are a couple thousand people that Apple could reach out to who could, in short notice (2-3 years) lead Apple maps to the same quality that Google Maps is today. And such a position would command a salary around $300-$400K/year, with around a $10mm (all in) bonus for successful delivery on that time line. (Presuming that leading such an organization requires skills, experience, and knowledge so rare that there are only 2,000 people on the planet that can do it in 3 years)

The real question is whether Apple really want to invest in maps. Via Philip Elmer Dewit:

""Not doing its own Maps would be a far bigger mistake," says Asymco's Horace Dediu, who addressed the issue at length in last week's Critical Path podcast. "The mistake was not getting involved in maps sooner, which was on Jobs' watch. Nokia saw the writing on the wall five years ago and burned $8 billion to get in front of the problem. The pain Apple feels now is deferred from when they decided to hand over that franchise to Google at the beginning of iPhone.""

Does Apple really want to invest $8 Billion into Maps? Is there really $8 Billion worth of value there?

Eh, I think it's in the best interest of the employed to throw around numbers like $300k / year and $1mm bonus just to shift the window. If people say them enough, eventually someone will pay it. Maybe to one of us!

$300k/year is not abnormal at all for a fairly senior engineer or director at Google in Silicon Valley after bonuses and stock grants. It doesn't matter whether people say those numbers or not, anyone who works in the Valley knows that's the market rate.

The position described above isn't an entry level or even medium level position -it's a leadership role (Think "principal engineer") for a strategic project (mapping) on the mobile platform(s) for Apple. I guarantee you that person will be making north of $300K/year.

Put that another away - This person responsible for driving a Multi-Billion dollar project will be only making 3x the lowest paid software engineer at Apple, and they will likely have 500x the responsibilities.

With all due respect you are pulling a lot of numbers out of thin air. There are only 10 people that they can hire... really? While a totally respectable position, the hire they are talking about (which I guess is the first of the so called 10) was a GIS analyst - again no disrespect but not exactly what I would consider a 1 in 10 in the world kind of profile. Certainly someone who has skill but lets come back down to earth a bit.

> for a place that is opportunistic, unpleasant and unlikely to have much options upside

It sounds like you assume:

1) working at apple sucks because they never innovate

2) apple stock never goes up

You might want to check both of those assumptions.

The next four words read "would be more reasonable."

That figure came from what the poster believes to be a more reasonable offer.

That isn't really phrased as a salary, is it? It sounds like a signing bonus. Which - well, I've never worked around Cupertino. Is $85k really a typical signing bonus?

For a company that has $117b+ in cash reserves and a HUGE PR blunder on their hands with the new Maps, I would assume the incentives for hiring on the key guys to fix that problem would be more substantial.

I'm confused - can someone explain to me the benefit of Apple developing it's own mapping software? Apple is not full of PhD's studying problems for the sake of it, they are a collection of people creating products that push their bar higher and higher. They make commissions from digital goods being purchased on their devices. This is why I'm confused. They don't have computer science PhD's to throw at challenging problems. They could hire tons of PhDs, but Apple hasn't really done that yet, they design something pretty good, package it up nicely, and sell it.

Google has a very attainable goal (or cause) for it's mapping project (at least that's what it seems from the outside) - the creation of self driving cars. Regardless of their initial motivation, looking back in ten years it will seem like Google wanted self driving cars, and Google created awesome mapping to provide the infrastructure for their cars.

Apple isn't going to create 'Apple cars' that drive around and take pictures of everything, will they?

How much is their to gain in them creating their own mapping software, what is their motivation for doing it?

It's all about the data. The more you know, the better you can serve your users. But to get data on people, you need people using your products.

Um, what data can Apple get from iOS 6 Maps that they couldn't get previously? Remember, they wrote the iOS 5 Maps app, Google was just the information source. They could (and did) have gathered whatever data they wanted. It is quite possible they didn't want some data that they should have gathered, but that's a different issue entirely.

Because maps are a core use case of a smartphone hence Apple needs a good implementation.

That's not a strong argument for them. They could just stick with Google Maps

Well, as no one knows why they didn't sign a new licensing agreement with Google the only thing we know is that they couldn't stick with Google Maps, for better or worse.

"many of those individuals seem eager to accept due in part to the opportunity Apple represents to build new product, instead of just doing “tedious updates” on a largely complete platform."

Apparently, doing "tedious updates" on google maps is hard work and undesirable, but building apple maps should be a walk in the park.

I don't see that being said anywhere. Rather, it seems that these employees are looking for a challenge, that being on the Google Maps team can not currently provide.

It's pretty common for people to find working on a new product much more enjoyable than working on an existing one.

I understand, I just thought the way they worded it was funny.

This should have been done before actually releasing the product to M of people.

This is completely on the mark, think about it, Apple have massively damaged their reputation through this. Perhaps they could have removed a default map app for now and speed through Google's map app, as they have made one. and wait till a few months to release their own version, then for next year make it default.

This would be essentially "Admitting defeat" and would cause a lot more issues with PR/Branding/Customer Psyche IMO.

I wonder how the public would have perceived a situation where Apple took that path originally, or even if they played ball and kept the default Google app as it was, being behind Android and paying money to Google, until a few months time when they release their own.

Anyway its all hindsight I guess, now they need it fixed as soon as possible to stop the jokes, everyone is talking about this, most of my friends are not into tech and they all know about it. I really hope they release a stellar iPhone 5s when the time comes, with this and just giving money back to shareholders I can't see them lasting the next 50 years.

I hope Apple really gets this fixed soon. The joke has to end.

> Apple have massively damaged their reputation through this.

No, they haven't. Stop it. It's one app, and Google Maps is still browser-accessible. Seriously, just stop.

They switched their Map Kit framework over, too. So all apps that use it have now switched to Apple maps. It's not just one app.

"It's just a phone". A phone that is Apple's flagship product. An app that's a core use case.

Because technical users telling their non-technical family members "Whatever you do, do not upgrade your version of iOS to the newest version. Your map app will be completely wrong."

And "Print Google Maps instructions before you go on any trip, iOS Maps is broken"

Isn't damaging?

I don't know. The last thing I would do on my phone if I weren't a technical user is go to the Google Maps website when my default "Maps" app isn't working. If this was a consistent problem for me, for every or nearly every address I checked (I mean really, Berlin in Antarctica?), I would just say that Apple Maps sucks and refuse to use it and share this unpleasant situation with my friends and co-workers and other iPhone users that happened to mention they would just punch it in to their Maps program. That's just me, though.

Its just one app that everyone I meet talks about, I am surrounded by non-tech people from all walks of life, no bubble here. Apple has become a bit of a embarrassment.

In fact one friend felt bad about upgrading his iPhone because his provider offered a upgrade on his contract. He said it didn't cost too much so doesn't matter. These are normal people who think iPhone is becoming a joke.

This is because of a sub-par launch that was over anticipated and a complete mockery of the richest public company in the world because of this single app. A app widely used by millions for transportation times and searching for places.

Navigation doesn't work in the browser.

So the anti-poaching agreement with Google will now bite Apple right when they badly need current Google Maps staff?

It's the data silly - and if they are recruiting analysts that correct data manually or by writing scripts (per endtime's speculation) - $85K is believable.

But if they don't have complete data and they aren't running their own street view cars - how much would correcting existing data help in actually reaching parity with GMaps?

Not if the anti-poaching agreement makes no specific mention about "CONTRACTING employees" of Google. If that is the case, then it's turkey shoot for Apple.

I was more thinking of regular Google maps employees that do more than just data collection/correction - Apple would benefit a lot from poaching them in absence of the anti-poaching agreement.

Wait, I thought the anti-poaching agreements are no longer in effect, per the Department of Justice's request in 2010? http://mashable.com/2010/09/24/doj-anticompetitive-employee-...

Apple bought three mapping companies: C3 Technologies, Poly9, and PlaceBase before this. I wonder what the heck happened on the data side.

Given the way Google implemented gathering street view data, I wouldn't be surprised if Google has more map data in the USA than all the other map companies combined.

It's hilarious how many people fell for Google's PR efforts.

Street View is great for finding faults in existing data but the fact is that it is the same old mapping/directory companies that do most of the work.

> the same old mapping/directory companies that do most of the work

The Atlantic article mentions that they started with the TIGER data, not something from a mapping company.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...

Wrong: Since 2009, at least in US, TeleAtlas was replaced by data from Google Street View. http://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/10/12/google-replaces-tele-...

Business listing comes from "information from our web search results, data submitted directly by local business owners, and third-party sources such as publicly available Yellow Pages directories" https://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

It's hilarious how quick you can accuse someone without even having some sources to back it up.

Apple chose not to license from third parties. That is what happened.

Here in Australia Google licenses map and POI data from Whereis/YellowPages. Apple doesn't and it shows.

Where did you get that information from? Apple is licensing stuff from third parties: http://gspa21.ls.apple.com/html/attribution.html

Interestingly, which was glossed over and pretty much ignored on TC, it sounds like Apple has been ramping this up for a while. If people were enquiring about jobs based off the rumours that Apple was working on a mapping application then you're going back a few years really, at least two.

Once again though, we know nothing about the situation past rampant speculation, maybe Apple has had senior analysts and engineers in for a week or for years, who knows. It's easy to read a lot into recruitment postings.

Only AOL could turn requiring perhaps the most relevant experience into news.

Where "news" is used almost as loosely as "journalism".

Better late than never?

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