
The going rate for self-driving talent is $10M per person - sagivo
http://www.recode.net/2016/9/17/12943214/sebastian-thrun-self-driving-talent-pool
======
emcq
"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.

~~~
strathmeyer
I 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
Why/how did they do great?

~~~
2200001426
Every 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.

------
user5994461
Short 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
Not really. Self driving talent is hugely valuable. I am curious though how
much of that 700 went to the talent at Otto.

~~~
seanp2k2
I also wonder how much they're getting in salary + equity working somewhere
like Uber or Google. I highly doubt it's even $1m/year.

------
dhruvp
Hi 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

~~~
MrQuincle
What 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
Hey!

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!

~~~
MrQuincle
Cool, here in the Netherlands I have all the time trouble finding master
students that have a thorough machine learning background
([https://dobots.nl/hall-of-fame/](https://dobots.nl/hall-of-fame/)). There is
quite a need for this, also in general autonomous robotics! And there is lower
hanging fruit than self-driving cars...

I would be grateful if you provide good (math) fundamentals. It's much harder
to understand how things work if you have to search for it yourself. Suppose
you've never heard about a spark
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark_(mathematics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark_\(mathematics\))),
a Hilbert space
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space)),
Metropolis-Hastings
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis%E2%80%93Hastings_al...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis%E2%80%93Hastings_algorithm)),
or a Dirichlet Process
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirichlet_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirichlet_process)),
then it's not so easy to find such concepts and understand their significance.

(1) If you need some help, you can find me here. I'm currently playing with
MCMCs in nonparametric Bayesian methods that adapt to the structure in the
real world. It is a waste to sample everything. For examples aisles in a
supermarket have structure to them. In the "visual grammar" of the
supermarket, they are aligned with each other. MCMC that can encapsulate this
type of grammar will mix much faster.

(2) If you find a pupil interested in the combination of transfer learning and
deep learning, feel free to refer to me. I'm not interested from the viewpoint
of domain adaptation, but from the viewpoint of robotic communication.

~~~
socmag
Do they have to be Masters students?

~~~
MrQuincle
Yes, I found out that the topics are typically hard enough that around 9-10
months are spent on them, typical graduation time in Europe. Of course, it
also gives me the opportunity to see how someone works, rather than relying on
a short application process. :-)

------
lordnacho
> 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?

~~~
dhruvp
I 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.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
CS courses provide background and some training, but one must still put in the
10,000 hours of practice to really become "skilled" at something. Applied is
best learnt applying!

$10M for a truly skilled self driving car engineer doesn't seem that weird in
context, since training (well, more like nurturing) one up takes much more
time than money.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
Only in Silicon Valley does that not sound exceedingly absurd.

Also right now they seem to be aiming for "full stack" self-driving engineers,
when the future will probably be commoditized libraries and hardware.

How many web developers know the details of TCP/IP?

------
driverdan
There 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.

------
thr0waway1239
Oddly, 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
Should 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-d...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/self-
driving-cars-could-save-300000-lives-per-decade-in-america/407956/)

~~~
thr0waway1239
No 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
But 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 ).

------
Animats
Maybe I should have stayed in self-driving. But in 2006, the field was dead,
and I got into other things.

~~~
jayjay71
Why 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.

------
tomrod
Interesting. What is the mix of skills needed to be an automotive engineer in
the self-driving space?

~~~
my_first_acct
Here's an article by David Silver on the subject:

[https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-
autonomo...](https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomous-
vehicle-job-ffb641570b01)

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
That 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-
autonomo...](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)

------
kriro
So 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?

------
eggy
I 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
I 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.

~~~
eggy
I don't think it is just markets, or any confusion with passion and profit.
Having grown up in Brooklyn in the late 60s/early 70s and then some, I have
seen regulation quell a lot of hacking or making in the US. It struck home
when I tried to buy my kids chemistry sets in the 2000s. Baking soda and
vinegar basically, that was it, due to all of the safety and litigation
concerns.

I am not calling for a wild west mentality, but the opposite of trying to
legislate intelligence is a sure way to stagnation and oppression of
creativity, passion and possible profit.

I was making blackpowder from my hobby store-bought kit in the 70s, and
playing with all sorts of chemicals. My mom & dad did not discourage me. I had
to setup my darkroom after they went to bed, since we lived in a railroad
apartment. If my Dad got up to go the shared hallway bathroom, there went my
negatives or prints!

I went on to melt and cast aluminum, solar ovens, tesla coils, lab mice, the
whole shebang.

Anyway, I am optimistic by some of the things I have seen kids do on YouTube
in the US, but some of them seem like they have been funded by a huge
corporation (VIDEO:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92M5qcjDkaU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92M5qcjDkaU)).
I give my kids as much support as I can, but even they will not accumulate the
materials present in that video even with a singular-purposed feat such as
that.

My son had told he might not have been able to bring his science project to
school, a home-made cathode ray tube, for safety reasons even though the
teacher knew it didn't emit harmful Xrays at the power and configuration of
the setup. He finally proved it, and was allowed, but there were other
'mysterious' concerns about such devices and the local police.

Now I have lived in SE Asia for almost 8 years. Chinese farmers/tinkerers are
building home made submarines to harvest ocean bottom sea life that are so
much a part of Chinese cuisine. That and trike planes, basically tricycles
with a hang glider and a huge propeller on back - sort of a real hacked
ultralight you would see in the US. The scene is surprisingly large in the
light of such a heavy-handed government.

Even now where I am in East Java, people hack together some weird stuff, and
the police don't stop them or pull them over - imagine a train of dollies
being pulled by a small 125cc scooter on a secondary road with passengers!
Scary, but I am glad to be around creativity and people using their wits to
solve problems with constrained resources.

------
pontifier
Coincidentally 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)

------
korias
Using 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

------
goldfeld
Great, here I was looking for a chaffeur with experience in self-driving.

------
jsprogrammer
I 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?

~~~
ci5er
If 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
> _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
Well, 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.

