9 ms·
The going rate for self-driving talent is $10M per person
- thr0waway1239 10y agoOddly, this sounds about right considering the weight you would have to bear forever if you ever hear of some fatal incident involving some technology you built.
- whack 10y agoShould you feel guilty about building technology that saves 10 lives for every 1 person that it kills? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/self-driving-cars-could-save-300000-lives-per-decade-in-america/407956/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/self-d...
- thr0waway1239 10y agoNo question that thought is comforting, but that is the example of the benefit which never appears before your eyes (i.e. it is not tangible, unlike the converse). I am not saying people should stop working on autonomous cars, it was just a comment on how fraught with moral weight the occupation is, particularly for the pioneers.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoBut commercial aviation is extremely safe. I think the point is where it will be, not where it is. This being said, having to balance business issues and safety of a system with as long a lever-arm as this seems blindingly difficult. I wonder hos much of the real work here is ultimately more like insurance than engineering ( as if there were any real difference to start with ).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- archagon 10y agoNot everyone has a strictly utilitarian viewpoint. One life lost might be a thousand times more horrifying than one life saved.
- Spooky23 10y agoPeople have different points of view. There are no doubt people working on applying the same technology to hunter/killer robots and missiles, etc.
- nibs 10y agoUnder this model, drone operators should get paid $100M/year. I sincerely doubt the satisfaction from all the disability adjusted life years saved from facilitating the creation of autonomous cars would be overshadowed by the occasion life lost. It is a similar level of power as a commanding officer in a conflict situation.
- rhizome 10y agoUnder this model, drone operators should get paid $100M/year Sounds good to me.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoThere is a span of time for which drivers/owners of autonomous vehicles are, in effect, test pilots.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoJust trying to construct the cost model for that is pretty deep. The high-altitude view is that there will be a process that slowly eliminates safety hazards. An analogous process is lineman safety in the electric grid; at one point the probability of fatal accident for electric linemen was quite high, and it declined to next to nothing as safety procedures improved. I don't think it'll really be safe until autonomous cars have transponders and can negotiate space in real time, but then you still have all the legacy vehicles out there that don't have transponders.
- asperous 10y agoOne of the professors at my uni, Dr Yavuz (~yavuza), is researching the crypto to make real time transponders secure
- jwatte 10y agoI think you overdramatize. If lives saved is greater than lives lost, your doing great! It's not like all military contractor engineers live under a constant cloud of self hatred and suicidal thoughts, either, and they build things that are about trading "many" "enemy" casualties for "few" "friendly" ones. By contrast, self driving is doing almost entirely good along any moral spectrum.
- wott 10y agoThe how much do you wish to pay the hundreds of thousands of people working for example, in aeronautics or railway, just to stay in the domain of transports? 200 times more?
- CN7R 10y agoIn the United States, human error accounts for 95% of car accidents, with 33000 fatalities and 2.35m injured each year. Behind the house, the second most expensive purchase in a typical person's life is their car, and yet in a car's lifetime, only 2.56% is spent driving on roads with the remainder spent parked or in traffic.
- tomrod 10y agoInteresting. What is the mix of skills needed to be an automotive engineer in the self-driving space?
- planteen 10y agoI've wondered the same thing. For avionics, you have PhDs in control theory doing most of the algorithm development with Kalman filters and such.
- my_first_acct 10y agoHere's an article by David Silver on the subject: https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomous-vehicle-job-ffb641570b01 https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomo... The author is also involved in Udacity's new self-driving car nano degree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12521832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12521832
- knodi123 10y agoThat seems to be an article about how David Silver intends to write some articles on the subject. Do you know how to find the actual article on the subject? *edit: Found it! Google is a much better way to search medium than medium's worthless navigation/search. Here are the three articles: https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomous-vehicle-job-coursework-e7acc2bfe740#.a343s2fsu https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomo... https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomous-vehicle-job-projects-60e073a29bab#.l0j12xs85 https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomo... https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomous-vehicle-job-networking-d2bcd6a8e656#.g7guh92jc https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomo...
- Tepix 10y agoHave you seen the programming challenge that comma has on its homepage?
- tomrod 10y ago
- user5994461 10y agoShort version of the article: A few startups in the self-driving space were recently acquired [by Uber,GM,Google,...] for $10M per head. It's common to see successful tech startups selling for $1M per head. The extremes go for a lot more money. Nothing new. Way too much clickbait in the title.
- blazespin 10y agoNot really. Self driving talent is hugely valuable. I am curious though how much of that 700 went to the talent at Otto.
- seanp2k2 10y agoI also wonder how much they're getting in salary + equity working somewhere like Uber or Google. I highly doubt it's even $1m/year.
- abysmallyideal 10y agoIt's simple economics. Once the problem is solved, or at a certain threshold, the value for other acquisitions begins to plummet. The others begin to realize far less diminishing returns relative to their investment. Edit: This also brings the other aspect of Western educational system in regards to monopolization resource, where they strictly control the education of AI engrs to control the price per head and market. The other problem is also the US social environment, social conflicts and 'wars', where it is far from conducive to support the level of education necessary for highly skilled STEM grads at the cutting edge. The environment itself is conducive to a restricted output of qualified engineers, researchers, scientists, etc needed for the pace and expansion. Mind you, a significant amount of these grads are competing for a negligible amount of resource to succeed,and this is the system and environment the US prefers to culture their grads. It is cheaper in the short term just to steal the skill and discoveries from other countries with promises of wealth, or other questionable means. 10m per head is far, far cheaper, even if CM is the only output 'available immediately'.
- emcq 10y ago"In fact, the only machine learning program in the world, according to Thrun, is at Carnegie Mellon, which still isn’t churning out talent fast enough to meet the industry’s demand" While there is a separate department for ML at CMU, many schools have machine learning and/or robotics departments. Suggesting it's the only place to become educated in this stuff is simply false.
- kafkaesq 10y agoYeah -- that line was just silly. Most likely he's being misquoted.
- strathmeyer 10y agoI graduated from CMU with a CS degree and a specialization in robotics but never seemed to be able to catch the eye of any companies. My female classmates did great, though.
- da02 10y agoWhy/how did they do great?
- 2200001426 10y agoEvery tech company wants equal gender ratios and female CMU grads are usually top tier. Not that the guys are bad either but when you churn out a couple hundred per year it's not as special.
- CN7R 10y agohttp://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
- strathmeyer 10y agoOne of my friends got a job I interviewed for without ever interviewing because I told her she knew the interviewer. They were surrounded by people willing to help them find a job and for some reason aren't able to return the favor.
- dhruvp 10y agoHi all! I work at Udacity on the Nanodegree program mentioned in this article. Feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer them. You can also email me at dhruv@udacity.com or join our slack channel for interested applicants at nd013.udacity.com
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- MrQuincle 10y agoWhat is the contents of the program? + Particle filters? + SLAM? + Sensor fusion? + Bayesian methods? + VC dimension? + Sparsity? + Nonconvexity? + Deep learning? I think it's gonna be a challenge to do useful machine learning for self-driving cars if you're not familiar with quite a range of math-heavy topics.
- dhruvp 10y agoHey! It's a difficult, 9 month program where we cover the following (some of which you mentioned): - Computer Vision and OpenCV - Deep Learning - Sensor Fusion (Radar, Lidar) - State Tracking with Filters (Kalman, Particle) and Localization - Controllers - Vehicle Dynamics We have come up with this curriculum after talking to the heads of Engineering at Mercedes Benz, Otto, and NVidia at length. In addition, we have an open ended section where students can dive deeper into an area of their choosing. Like you mentioned, a lot of this is Math heavy, which is why we have applications to enroll. Hope that answered your question!
- fizzbatter 10y agoDoes Udacity offer programs for those lacking _(partially or entirely)_ in the math(s) required for these types of courses? Ie, to bring them up to speed? I'm not sure if Udacity is even interested in teaching these types of courses, fwiw... though, i know Khan has lots of math courses.
- 10y ago
- lordnacho 10y ago> You’re looking for experts in computer vision, robotics, intelligent systems artificial intelligence and so on. Doesn't every CS program everywhere have courses like that? My brother is finishing up a CS at an Ivy, and he's got a bunch of those types of courses. Now if there's a bunch of courses, there's presumably a bunch of people qualified to teach them. Surely 10M is too high a number?
- Certhas 10y agoIf they are available for hire and don't prefer to stay in academia. Alternatively: Being qualified to teach the theory of these courses is not completely equivalent to working on products in this space.
- pmorici 10y agoMaybe it is now but 10 years ago I don't think it was. My guess it it is very hard to find people with experience and probably easier to find new grads.
- dhruvp 10y agoI went to MIT for my masters and undergrad in CS and took many of these types of classes. However, I've found that these courses were generally more theoretical and not applied enough to be immediately relevant to industry. And this makes sense to me because my Professors were researchers, not applied Self-Driving Car engineers. Some things I was lacking include: - practical knowledge of libraries (such as OpenCV), and best practices for implementing a robust Computer Vision system. - awareness of vehicle dynamics and the engineering behind cars. - sensor fusion and the engineering behind collecting and processing the data a car needs. - practical knowledge on how to implement a controller and all the required software on a car. The general point is that these courses give the theoretical background you need but you still need the real practical skills that come with actually implementing these ideas on a real car. I think that's what makes the folks at CMU's robotics lab and Otto so valuable. Full disclosure, I work at Udacity on the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program and my knowledge around what skills are needed to be a self-driving car engineer come from talking to Sebastian and the heads of engineering at Otto, Mercedes Benz, and NVidia.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoI doubt the average engineer at one of those companies got compensation of $10M. Most of the money/shares/options/compensation likely went to management and investors. It would not be surprising if sama made more on a deal than an acquired engineer. Can we get a fact check, YC?
- shoo 10y agosure, but you're thinking about the perspective of the engineer. from the perspective of the buyer, this is all part of the cost of the transaction
- ci5er 10y agoIf there were 10 engineers, no one else, and no investors, and they each had 10% of the company, and that company sold for $100M, then they would have each gotten 10% of the company. But that's not likely. From the point of view of a buyer who spent $100M and got 10 engineers out of the deal, the cost was $10M/engineer, whether the engineers each got $10M injected into their pockets or not.
- wott 10y ago> From the point of view of a buyer who spent $100M and got 10 engineers out of the deal, the cost was $10M/engineer That's not even so: he didn't buy the engineers, they are not his property and they are free to walk away the day after, so he hardly got them. For a day, OK :-)
- ci5er 10y agoWell, sure - you're right. They outlawed slavery; that's why they have lockup provisions. In acquihire-land, that's the short-hand terminology that is often used. I'm sure there are more precise (and lengthy) ways to say the same thing.
- goldfeld 10y agoGreat, here I was looking for a chaffeur with experience in self-driving.
- Animats 10y agoMaybe I should have stayed in self-driving. But in 2006, the field was dead, and I got into other things.
- jayjay71 10y agoWhy do you say the space was dead in 2006? That was just before the Urban Challenge in 2007. 2008 was the dead year before Google started working on it.
- driverdan 10y agoThere are a lot of recent grads out there with CV and machine learning experience. Maybe not 5000 but there are more than the article makes it sound like. When we had a CV internship listed we got multiple applications per day with minimal promotion. A reasonable percentage of them were decent (experience, working towards post grad, etc). CV is cool shit so tons of people want to do it.
- eggy 10y agoI have a mixed hands-on practical history, and an eclectic self-taught background in AI, computational intelligence, and machine learning before it was called that. From experience, can say you need the guy who can put it all together in a real working prototype. There are tons of academics smarter than me, and some of my past collegues, but it only counts where the rubber meets the road, aptly punned. I have been self-teaching myself neural networks, genetic programming and algorithms and AI since the 80s. I remember the 'Decade of the Brain' the 90s and reading Patricia Churchland and Terence Sejnowski's book 'The Computational Brain'. I was also a welder building motorized and pneumatic and hydraulic animiatronics in the 90s. I started to go deep on the engineering, and it helped a lot, but there was a guy I worked with who commanded the time and space and materials in front of him, and had a gut feeling on how to put it all together. Systems integrations is important, but interative and incremental design, also familiar as a design methodology in coding is the way to achieve results. This is because the individual engineering of subsystems, and the subsequent computer modeling fall short of the emergent behaviors of a real physical prototype. If I were hiring, I would not be scouring Udacity or the Unis, but lone wolf garage engineers and tinkerers with the math aptitude too. Two of the successful companies I worked at started in somebody's garage, and both were not college educated. Find people who have managed to somehow put together 60% of what you're looking for and then fund them and set them loose. Too many of the engineers I've worked with were great with churning out the stuff they were taught, but in the one-offs, or bespoke, which seems to be the fashionable word nowadays, they failed miserably with 'paralysis through analysis' too much analysis. This is why when I had my own business in the early 2000s, I lamented the death of the trade school in the U.S. It was very difficult finding young people who could actually build stuff. The maker movement is welcoming, but a lot of it tends to be mechatronic, and high tech. You don't see too many 'makers' nowadays that are capable of fabricating without a 3D printer, or making heavy-duty iron mechanical monstrosities like some 'Junkyard Wars' aficionados were building for a while. This is also why it is hard to find people to work on the BIG projects like tunnel-boring machines (well this has picked up somewhat), or other big equipment. Now imagine finding someone who can also design compliant controls and mechanics for all of this. Certainly worth $10M per person!
- jayjay71 10y agoI wish more people built stuff as well, but I think you're confusing passion and profit. There are fewer people with those skills because the markets are changing - there's just less demand than there used to be.
- pontifier 10y agoCoincidentally the sparkfun AVC was today. You can see videos on their website, but here is a direct link to the start of the classic autonomous race. https://youtu.be/XjWWUj6ia34?t=27m16s https://youtu.be/XjWWUj6ia34?t=27m16s
- kriro 10y agoSo how unreasonably would it be to ask for a 1 million(+) cash signing bonus from Google as a fresh CMU graduate (if they want to I'd agree and make it repayable proportionally if I leave after X month)? At the very least I'm guessing that fresh employees have more leverage than they think. If you think 1kk is too much maybe 100k? Or maybe ask for them to pay your rent while you work there?
- korias 10y agoUsing the logic in this article on other, more established companies highlights the silliness of the "$10M per person" sound byte: Uber is valued at $60bn, has 6000 employees -> $10M per person Google is valued at $500bn, has 50000 employees -> $10M per person