12 ms·
God what kind of knowledge / training do I need to get that level of bonus?
by cgb223 6y ago
God what kind of knowledge / training do I need to get that level of bonus?
- rexpop 6y agoYou need serendipity.
- teej 6y agoThis is the Google version of winning the lottery. Right place, right skills, right time.
- ponker 6y agoNo, you cannot compare becoming the world's best self-driving engineer to winning the lottery. This is like becoming Lebron James, it's tremendous talent combined with tremendous commitment.
- bduerst 6y agoThat's survivor bias though, isn't it? Hard to see the world's best self-driving engineers when they're not getting caught stealing trade secrets and forced to reveal compensation.
- ponker 6y agoNot really, I can say that for example Karpathy is at the same general level as Levandowski and he hasn't been caught stealing trade secrets.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kyawzazaw 6y agoI don't think that's true. Because they were already being compensated very highly.
- disillusioned 6y agoThought this was going to go a different direction for a moment...
- maccard 6y agoWell they wouldn't be the world's best self driving engineers in that case would they?
- monadic2 6y agoWell, it's a lot more like tripping and falling on your face than being Lebron James in this case.
- pcwalton 6y agoAt this point the right sports comparison isn't LeBron James; it's Lance Armstrong.
- user5994461 6y agoSounds about right. Lance could basically sit down in the rocket and take the fame, while thousands of other people did the work to make the rocket and have it go to the moon and back.
- JohnBooty 6y agoAre we confusing Lance Armstrong and Neil Armstrong?
- user5994461 6y agoYes, my bad ^^
- JohnBooty 6y ago=)
- _ph_ 6y agoRight, Lance Armstrong was the great musician :)
- mensetmanusman 6y agoHahahaha, yes, I was like ‘wtf, lance armstrong? are coders doping?
- JohnBooty 6y agoAbsolutely we are doping! Adderall, modafinil.... caffeine...
- rorykoehler 6y agoIt's not that he's the best self-driving engineer (though no doubt he is excellent). It's that he is the best self-driving engineer who is also a shrewd political operator.
- baryphonic 6y agoNot shrewd enough, apparently. Or maybe he just got giant hubris and thought he could fool all of the people all of the time.
- dkarl 6y agoHe was the best self-driving engineer at a time when that was worth $120 million to Google. Is the world's best hydrogen fuel cell engineer getting $120 million bonuses? How about the world's best metallurgist? Historical linguist? You have to be the world's best in a field that could unlock dominance in an enormous potential market that is being actively contested and that one of the world's richest corporations thinks might be won in the next decade.
- dx034 6y agoA valid point. Especially as self driving is nowhere close to bringing in revenue for any of the companies involved. Other than engineers working with batteries or metals which lead to actual billion dollar revenues.
- pythonaut_16 6y agoYou might say what's unusual with Levandowski is that he made so much money while working for someone else; and while not actually achieving any additional revenue. If a battery or metals (or self-driving) engineer comes up with a material break through and starts a company they could easily eclipse Levandowski's earnings.
- nathanvanfleet 6y agoI think they gave the credit to him about having the skills. But it's the truth that luck is a huge factor. The same goes for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They had enormous skill and talent but if they so much as had slightly different childhoods or friends or geographic locations it would have been someone else. 1. Bill Gates had computer access 2. Steve Jobs met Woz
- jimnotgym 6y agoYes, imagine they were born 50 years earlier, or indeed now!
- ehsankia 6y agoNo one is saying that talent and commitment weren't involved, but anyone who thinks there's not also a lot of luck involved is kidding themselves. Any number of fantastic and hard working engineers, not being at the right place at the right time could end up nowhere. Of course, commitment can increase your odds grealy, but it doesn't magically make them 100%.
- alexbanks 6y agoLebron James was the exact definition of right place, right skills, right time. Lots of players have "tremendous talent" and "tremendous commitment." Lebron wouldn't be what he is today without a tremendous amount of luck. Would his career have worked out if Carmelo was drafted to Cleveland and Lebron went to the Nuggets? What about if Lebron needed to do a year in college now? How would that have impacted his trajectory? Nobody is doubting Levandowki is an extremely talented engineer, but literally every person that achieves that level of success also took a considerable amount of luck to get there. Right place, right time, right skills is everything.
- ponker 6y agoSure, but there is an ocean between the fraction of Lebron James' success that is luck (which is substantial, as you point out, call it 25%) and that of a lottery winner (which is effectively 100%)
- alexbanks 6y agoYou're arguing against a point no one made. I never said said Lebron was all luck. I said that the luck was Lebron having his genetics and mindset combined with the year he was born, the circumstances with which he was drafted and the coaching and teammates he got.
- solidasparagus 6y agoI don't think this is a great example. LeBron James has once in a generation physical gifts. It is not true that lots of players have the physical talent that LeBron has. With those gifts, he is going to go pro in a major sport and probably be a standout in most situations. I think his success is pretty independent of luck and time.
- ako 6y agoHaving once in a generation physical gifts is a huge amount of luck. Most people have to cope with mediocre physical gifts that no amount of training will fix.
- Tomis02 6y ago> world's best self-driving engineer Citation needed. I don't see many self-driving cars around, did you mean "world's most self-promoting engineer in self-driving cars"?
- tester34 6y ago>I don't see many self-driving cars around It doesn't mean that he's not the best, does it?
- Tomis02 6y agoThat's why I was asking for a citation, I want to know by what criteria he was deemed to be the god of self-driving cars.
- tester34 6y agoMy take on that but by no means I'm knowledgeable in those topics: As far as I've heard Waymo was considered to be #1[0] when it comes to self-driving cars, thus it's probably someone of Waymoers So if he was actually doing a lot of work there (basing on experience and how important for Google he was) then I think it's fair to consider him as a pretendent to be industry leader [0] - Basing on Googling "most advanced autonomous cars"
- watwut 6y agoBeyond that, the exact moment when this guy stop those trade secrets was unlikely to be the first time he did something unethical. He was likely manipulative, lying, either to harm competition etc etc etc long before which made him good at climbing corporate ladder and negotiating. He just got too brazen with those trade secrets. Which is exactly how people get high rewards, until it breaks.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway_4179 6y agoThis point cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Having known him personally, he does not have the same kinds of qualms as most of us here.
- Nightshaxx 6y agoBut compared to the lottery, the skills needed to exploit the right place and the right time are not trivial to learn.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoThere’s enough people in the world to make the chance become the primary driving factor in that. You could post factually justify their place, but that’s easy in hindsight. If you think your statement is true - could you please provide a research into which skills would be needed to exploit the right place at the right time that actually proves that’s not some mystical abberation of self-help books?
- ridaj 6y agoThere's a profile of the dude in Wired that goes over what made him so valuable in Larry Page's eyes. https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levandowski-is-his-messenger/ https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levando... Basically, he was one of the key founders of the project that made Google Maps what it is today (a crown jewel of Google with one of the best cartography datasets), vs what it was originally (better UI to third-party, licensed cartography data). I remember about 12 years ago somebody from the GIS industry, scoffing at the notion that Google might even try to go do some mapping of their own. For him, maps was something Navteq and TeleAtlas knew how to do, and a search engine was deeply misguided if it thought it could venture into that space. That was honestly the prevailing wisdom at the time — it was going to be hard for web-based Google to even deal with the ugly real-world-ness of mapping. Fast forward to today. Google Maps basically showed the GIS crowd how their work oughta have been done all this time. They invented street cars, street view, and actually made it work; and they used the data to produce accurate maps of the world. So to your question, what led this guy to an astounding level of monetary reward was that he was part of a team that made a big, calculated bet with Maps and executed very, very well on it. That gave Page ample reason to compensate them well, and it gave him trust that they could handle more projects where they would show up incumbents (such as the traditional car manufacturers, whose inroads into self-driving tech had been very timid for decades). And it's not clear that they are close to self driving cars, but they certainly contributed to upping the game of that whole industry. So there's your recipe :) I'd bet that folks who came up with the key tech behind the iPhone are in similar positions at Apple, given how they turned the whole mobile phone business on its head (remember Nokia?). EDIT: I don't mean the above to indicate that the reward was deserved in any way. Likely, a lot of what happened here is luck plus outstanding team work rather than individual lead performance. But to the question being asked, this is the kind of circumstance and outcome that seems to have supported, in one man's view at least (Page), that level of compensation. If you look at folks at Google who made/make big $, the story is often similar - they led products that were fledgling challengers into industry leaders within a few years (Chrome, Android...).
- m463 6y agoand more leapfrogging. google/apple were taking it to the next level (phone locaiton telemetry for traffic conditions) and then tesla with not only location telemetry from their cars, but uploading images from customer cars.
- known 6y agoknowledge / training + bargaining skills
- noobermin 6y agoIt's telling that the "he deserves it, it's all foresight and brilliance" is the leading reply and the "right skills, right time" reply is behind. I imagine just by sheer nature of the power law that some upvotes are people trying to justify their lot but that would be the minority of people. I guess just so many who haven't made it at all but hold this fiction dear for their own peace of mind?
- throwaway2048 6y agoThe Just World Fallacy is an important cornerstone of a lot of people's beliefs about the world. It tends to come out most fervently in strained justifications about such massive and obvious inequalities in compensation, such as this case.
- philh 6y agoWhenever someone says "this state of the world is just, because <something you disagree with>", it's easy to say "that's the just world fallacy talking". But it's basically contentless. Really you're just saying that you disagree with the "because", and not explaining why you disagree. I wish people did it less often.
- throwaway2048 6y agoThe problem isn't with the explicit statement, which is rarely made. The problem is with the fact "the world is just" is a position they reason from, and seek to defend, often in blatant contradiction to the facts of the situation.
- philh 6y agoI agree some people do that. But not everyone who says "this state of the world is just, because <something you disagree with>" is doing that. How do you tell the people who are doing that apart from the people who just disagree with you in this instance? It seems to me that you're accusing people of a pattern of "mistakenly seeing the world as just". But your only evidence for this is one case of them mistakenly seeing the world as just; and in that case, you haven't even put in the work to show that they're actually mistaken. (edit - for that matter, how many people even think this state of the world is just? From skimming, I can't see anyone explicitly saying it is. The author of the comment that triggered this subthread explicitly disclaims it.)
- schemy 6y agoSociopathy and narcissistic personality disorder on top of average skills. My career took off when I had a particularly bad metal break where I exhibited both to a frightening degree. When I got over those I just retired with all the money I'd made. Make no mistake, success is a mental illness.
- usrusr 6y agoOne basic requirement is that you must be so greedy that this kind of bonus isn't enough. A person less greedy than that would never pull through with the posturing that gets anyone to that level.