Would you stay at CMU while your colleagues are being hired into industry at a multiple of your salary? Yet the argument is, they should stay for some reason. In the end, its up to the researchers to choose their own path.
All the companies in robotics making hiring agreements would actually be illegal. Collusion in fixing salaries/blacklisting whole categories of employee candidates is a much worse evil. Maybe we can stop trying to social engineer, and address the situation as it exists.
But Uber could hire 3 or 4 professors a year, offer internships and fellowships for PhD and Masters students, provide funding grants to professors still working at CMU and slowly work it's way up to a 100 person research lab over the course of 5 years. Or Uber could immediately hire 30 people straight away and destroy the lab and then find itself unable to hire anyone else and stuck at around that number 5 years later.
It's better for both CMU and Uber if they perform the former. It just requires Uber to take a longer term view of things rather than optimizing for immediate gain.
I'm not arguing that this is the reality on the ground. But I see this as a potential line of argument worth considering.
But no institutional capacity to grow new researchers. Producing PhDs is a highly resource intensive endeavor that requires a ton of institutional support. Universities consider it their mission but private companies have no interest in it, even if it's vital to their long term success.
All the companies in robotics making hiring agreements would actually be illegal. Collusion in fixing salaries/blacklisting whole categories of employee candidates is a much worse evil. Maybe we can stop trying to social engineer, and address the situation as it exists.