Instructive the degree to which good HR, recruiting, and operational onboarding can create giant moats for these larger tech cos.
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.
This was my thinking as well. The power and wealth of the big-five tech companies is staggering, with their smaller siblings (Uber, Cloudflare, AirBnB, Dropbox, etc.) trailing not far behind. It is very tough for startups to compete with public companies who can offer liquid RSUs monthly along with whatever salary is necessary to close the deal.
My non US experience is I have seen no correlation of the boom/bust cycles and "how good it is to be an engineer". I realize that FAANG employees are of course raking it in like never before. But I thought that was because of a lack of a salary cartel and general software eating the world.
True to a degree. Thanks to the huge influx of SV companies opening up shops in Eastern Europe, even if it's just outsourcing the "boring stuff", has led to an increase in local tech salaries that they're now rivaling Western Europe.
Not that Western Europe has big IT salaries compared to the US. It never seemed to me that IT is viewed in EU as this big growth engine compared to the USA and salaries and prestige seem to reflect it.
That is changing as well. US tech companies are hiring more and more across Europe, and the local startup ecosystem is growing also. Some local founders who have made money in the US are coming back and seeding local startups, which has an accelerating effect. Another factor is remote work, with some developers getting nearly US-level salaries while living in Europe. The result is a new class of ultra-well-paid software developers enjoying the good life in many European cities. It's still a niche phenomenon, but not for long. The SF Bay Area was in the same place around 2011-2012. I expect a massive wave of gentrification and anti-tech sentiment in Europe in 2-5 years, similar to what the US is experiencing now.
Maybe I'm not in a good niche anymore, but seems to me many US companies are setting up local shops which means they won't hire you remotely as an independent contractor but as a local employee / contractor which has much lower rates.
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.
Yes, most of those new bigtech/startup employees are getting compensation in the local band. But they are in the very top of that band, and gradually shifting it up as US companies compete for talent, and
VC-funded local companies start competing more seriously as well.
It’s a gradual process but in my experience it’s very real.
This gradual process might also happen because compensation has to cover the costs. While some things have kept their prices seems to me some services have gone way up. I was just discussing that a hotel we went to long ago basically tripled their prices. Real estate is also up.
Wow, that's clever. Also dangerous, of course. If I were at Google and had a direct report who was not up to snuff, I might point them at such a convenient option.
Very, very few Googlers are "not up to snuff." As controversial as their interview process is, it does tend to let only highly capable people through. If a Googler is not meeting expectations, the vast majority of the time it's effectively remedied with the proverbial "new manager and 6 more months" treatment.
Disagree. I have worked at Google, other startups and middle sized companies.
By far the least productive place per employee was Google. Not that the average employee was stupid but the average output per engineer was comically low. A lot of Googlers take it very easy there and work 10 to 5.
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.
Agree with you here. Some of the worst engineers I’ve worked with have been at Google, especially the younger newer ones. There’s a combination of impostor syndrome driving people to dogma (thus lack of thinking) as well as annoying arrogance towards anything that not orthodox.
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...
And yet if there is one thing these tech giants are famous for it's output per employee, measured in dollars.
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?
When I was an engineering manager at Google, my group would look more closely at impact than we would at output. In fact, if the output ended up being more technical debt than durable improvement (the proverbial "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!" effect that Dilbert spelled out), we would count that against the engineer's evaluated performance. And it would usually take more than 2 months to determine when that was the case.
That's one way to look at it. The other is that it creates an internal market - as a manager, you have to make your team attractive or people will transfer away and people won't transfer to it.
In reality, market is not that liquid: interesting projects have no headcount, problematic projects are available. At the end of the day you need to know people and come with recommendations to actually transfer to something good. Ask me how I know.
You can do a 20% project for them even if they don't have headcount and managers can view your performance history so it is not hard to join an interesting project if you are good. Also if you are good enough they will add headcount to the team so you can join even if there weren't any before. Ask me how I know.
You are just advancing my point. I agree with what you say, but my point is that what is taunted as egalitarian fair system - “once you are in, it’s easy to transfer, just click the Transfer button” in reality doesn’t work like this at all.
Ah right, if your point is that you can't just transfer to a good team when you get in I agree, but it sounded as if being friends with the right people was required. It is all up to manager discretion, if they like you for any reason (beer or skills) you are good. Skills are usually easier to work with since it can be used to ask for more headcount while nobody would give you headcount so you can hire your beer buddy (I hope...).
And if I found out that a manager was shipping low performers to other people to deal with rather than doing their job and either helping that person or managing them out...
> but it is unimaginable how one doubles the highly compensated / hard to find employee count in a year at that scale.
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.
The other people hired? Those individuals are likely getting paid $500k all-in and get to work on "world changing" software with unlimited future career opportunities ("I worked on AI at Waymo").
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.
There are many problems of hiring randomly and hastily:
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.
One of the most dangerous things in a tech organization is a group of developers productively and efficiently building completely the wrong thing. What would scare me about adding 800 engineers in a year is how to set up an org that points them all at the right problems.
In the us the tech industry attrition rates Ive seen are around 15% per annum. Varies slightly based on company/year/market/location etc. 20% is “bad” and 10% would be surprisingly “good.”
When I was at Google most recently, I saw quite a few transfers to Waymo that initially struck me as odd matches. Aside from the pseudo-retention (aka denial of talent) aspect, there's also a lot of non-car related work (e.g. apps, demand prediction) that needs to be done for Waymo to progress.
I suspect that most are transferees, big companies can do that back when I worked for British Telecom they moved 800 people onto middleware projects for example.
This may seem like a stupid question, but why isn't there a company that just outsources driving to remote drivers?
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?
I think it's crazy for reasons other people state, especially latency and connection reliability issues. But I think a related idea can work pretty well.
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've thought something similar for a while, and it's been long enough that I think the problem is the failure mode. It might be that getting a car to recognize when it's encountered an edge case and needs to kick it to a human is about as challenging as just getting the car to come to the right conclusion and drive itself anyway. Intuitively we think of the problem as what the car needs to do, but the main problem is ascertaining the state of the road accurately. In the autonomous crashes we've seen from Tesla and Uber, it looks like the cars never even noticed enough to have an ambiguous condition they could deactivate autopilot from. They just had a completely erroneous perception of the outside world.
And I think that's due to a "let's keep driving" bias. In Uber's crash, for example, it detected an object moving in the road, but didn't understand what it was. Any reasonable human driver would have quickly stopped until it was clear what was going on. But the Uber car just kept going at speed until it was sure that it was a pedestrian, at which point a collision was inevitable.
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.
In the case of the Uber crash in Tempe, the car did kick the decision over to a human operator. However, it did so 1.3 seconds before impact. This wasn't enough time for the human to assess the situation and decide what to do.
We're talking about two different things. Uber's approach was horrific in many ways, and I agree that's bad. I'm talking about a car that is advanced enough to drive and stop safely, but may sometimes not be sure what to do, especially in situations that require social cognition.
Starlink won't grant Internet coverage inside tunnels or underground, but it plans to blanket all of the US with Internet coverage making that far more possible than with terrestrial cellular data networks.
I'm sure Tesla has been keeping that in mind as their self-driving technology progresses.
The easy solution to this idea is to have the guy inside the car (you know, the passenger) pick up in this case. He's right there - no latency problems. The difficulty is in correctly identifying an unresolved edge case with enough margin to brake safely and draw the attention of a distracted passenger.
Sure, but then you lose the self-driving illusion, which is a big part of what's being sold. By all means have that as a backup mode if it can't phone home. But trained remote operators will not only preserve the fiction, but they'll be much more effective and they'll be the source of a lot of good feedback for the dev teams.
No, they hire 3 drivers in "low cost" countries and the car controls respond to the majority vote, for built-in redundancy. If you buy the premium subscription it's 7 drivers instead.
Latency is literally a killer problem in remote operation. For example, the US Air Force operates Predator drones all around the world remotely from a base in Nevada. But for takeoff and landing (the most hazardous phases) they usually hand over control to another pilot located at that airfield.
The only surprising thing in your statement is the fact that the drones can’t land themselves. Even large commercial passenger aircraft can do that. Nobody dies if a drone cocks up on landing.
Very few commercial passenger aircraft have autoland capability, and even those that do have two human pilots ready to take over instantly in case of system failure.
The first part of your statement is not true. Autoland as in "press a button and go get a coffee" sure. Almost all commercial aircraft have systems that can land the aircraft themselves (with the pilot ready to take over at any point), but it is not often used in practice because:
- 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.
1) Ground aircraft are always kept out of the ILS critical zone when there is IFR traffic landing, which happens to be all commercial flights and almost all business aircraft. Autoland being used has nothing to do with this, besides, even GA planes can autoland today with RNAV GPS LPV approaches.
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.
>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.
So the drones has a few strains, Predator is a frontline ones akin to A-10, reportedly uses some Cisco VPN gears in it. There are Global Hawk, which is basically modern Air Force U-2, or X-37B or X-47B, controlled like stah-tegic wargame piece, and how each ones fly are different.
The primary issues here are the latency, throughput, and availability of information to this remote driver.
* 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
Among many other issues is connectivity, in the bay area on 280 or 101 there are dead zones and when there's heavy traffic all those cars/people/phones connected to the towers and swapping as they move along overload the connection at each transition point. It wouldn't be possible today to reliably maintain a connection for such a human critical situation. Even with 5G a small interruption would likely be too risky for consumer projects.
Yes, this is called remote operation or teleoperation and many people have attempted it. But as far as I can see, they all hit against the latency/bandwidth/availability barriers. The hope is that 5G will help.
Currently, everyone is vaporware. Including Phantom.
Bit scary due to latency and connection reliability. If the connection breaks you’re stuck, or worse. If it breaks when you’re on the highway at speed, or on a twisty road, or in a tunnel...
The article points out that the heads of perception and of motion planning have been replaced. That's big. The former head of planning Nathaniel Fairfield specifically has a legendary status there.
Not mentioned in the article is the high rate of attrition at Waymo. It's roughly the industry average (~20% Y/Y). So the % of folks that are new is even higher than reported here.
This is less a story of anything other than that "theinformation" has access to google's internal systems and should be investigated accordingly in a court of law.
Weird, they ghosted me after my phone screen, coming from another self driving company. Guess they weren't that impressed with me. Or I "missed" the hiring binge.
> Mawakana just hired a new head of fleet operations, Ryan McNamara, who previously worked on product quality for the Google Pixel phone
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'm not trying to argue with you, obviously everyone has different experiences, but that's such a funny thing to hear someone say. I had a Pixel 1, Pixel 2, and a Pixel 3a (current phone) and I feel the 2 was the worst of the bunch. I had mine replaced twice in the 18 months I had it due to crashing and overheating issues.
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.
I've had the Pixel 2, and never had any issues, now I've had the 3 for over 8 months I think, and It has convinced me to switch to iPhone. It's full of bugs and inconsistent UX. I need to reboot the phone every 45 minutes since it will not connect to wifi.
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.
Who cares. People like to be a part of a team. I was a noogler for a little while. The little propeller cap is on a shelf a few feet behind me as i type this. I was in my 40's but it was the first time i was part of a tribe at work and it felt kind of good (despite being old and 'kind of weird' relative to the rest).
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).
Or it's just convenient to have a shorthand for people working at a particular place, and as long as you're doing that, may as well have fun with it. The obvious "Waymoers" doesn't exactly work anyway.
This is your career, so do with it as you like. Nevertheless, understand that there are people who hate the pet titles that "fun" investors like to give to their employees. Enjoy it "Waimonauts", lol.
I can't imagine it was a top down thing. It's just a silly point of culture that isn't that important day to day. Take a step back and have some empathy for people who aren't under iron rule and shitpost and have fun in ways that are stupid but trivial midday.
That said, there is a large, reputable, international law firm called Morrison & Foerster that revels in this wonderful domain name: https://www.mofo.com/
Is there really so much need to take ourselves so seriously and simultaneously go out of our way to try and make others feel badly about the way they live their lives? It's unfathomable to me.
Gamification, creating fake ladders, groups, clubs and shiny awards are common techniques in managing the emotionally-driven producers, aka the line workers. I'm not sure if this works with waymo employees, as they are likely smarter than those who create these kindergartens.
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.