
Carnegie Mellon Reels After Uber Lures Away Researchers - kjhughes
http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carnegie-mellon-in-robotics-1433084582
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x0x0
tl;dr

uber hired 6 PIs, 34 engineers, and the institute's director by, in some
cases, doubling salaries and/or paying $x00k bonuses

Apparently systematically underpaying people (for science!) isn't as good a
strategy as one may naively believe it to be...

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hga
One serious problem with universities, and the explicit reason Danny Hillis
had to create Thinking Machines to get his Connection Machine (CM, first
version) developed, is that they can't pay researcher more than the pay
professors. The CM needed 1-2 top notch analog engineers there were wires in
the interconnect that had to hit each of the processor chips, which could be
as many as 65,536.

And, yeah, the people who pay for this sort of thing have been on a campaign
since the '80s to drive down salaries for STEM researchers; the only reason
the fields are doing half-way well nowadays is the Great Recession has made
other field suck, and of course lots of private money from companies like
Google and Uber.

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vishaldpatel
Sounds like the institution moved and left Carnegie Melon behind.

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dalke
This echos the story of how Symbolics/Lisp Machines effectively wiped out the
MIT AI Lab in the 1980s.

Can anyone else think of similar parallels?

~~~
hga
The problem with that analogy is that these companies _didn 't_ gut the MIT AI
lab, especially at the level of actual AI researchers vs. the systems people
who built and maintained ITS, MACLISP, the Lisp Machine and the Chaosnet
(MIT's first LAN). Per
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140401022259/http://danweinreb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140401022259/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-
to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi/) for Symbolics
and my memory as an LMI employee:

    
    
      Tom Knight (from MIT AI Lab)
      Jack Holloway (from MIT AI Lab)
      David Moon (half-time as MIT AI Lab)
      Howard Cannon (from MIT AI Lab)
      Mike McMahon (from MIT AI Lab)
    

Plus Richard Greenblatt for LMI.

While some of these people did some actual AI work (and that included Richard
Stallman), they were primarily systems people who developed the infrastructure
AI research needed prior to industry adopting the these sorts of things like
large physical memories ( _one million dollars_ ... er, 9-bit bytes), personal
workstations, LANs, etc.

ADDED: People really wanted and needed Lisp Machines (Danny Hillis was quite
distressed LMI's weren't available when he needed them for Thinking Machines),
way beyond what the AI Lab could build, let alone how improper it would have
been for them to get into that business, so the commercialization of it was
pretty much inevitable, be it on a shoestring, later rescued by TI for LMI, or
via the healthy VC market back then for Symbolics.

~~~
dalke
Thanks for correcting my history!

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caminante
WSJ commenters speculate that CMU screwed up their contracts and could've
protected themselves with better.

Thoughts? Do academic researcher contracts ever include non-compete clauses?

~~~
hga
Given how easily these positions go "poof" when a grant ends or doesn't get
renewed, that would make any such hiring contract _amazingly_ unattractive
(poor pay, no equity, a resume that may not make it clear you can cut it in
industry), and very much against the general academic ethos.

As a matter of law, they would only be enforceable against industry sponsored
research where the companies involved maintain trade secrets, which again is
against the ethos of academia, especially nowadays. (The only legal basis for
non-competes is that you will learn trade secrets and need to be prevented
from getting the "first bite from the apple* by initially disclosing them to
another outfit before legal action can be initiated).

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nsnick
They lured staff away from NREC. I don't think this will affect the academic
programs of Carnegie Mellon at all. NREC works on technology commercialization
not fundamental research.

