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Waymo’s Hiring Binge

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Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#61

Post by Tyrek »

wpietri wrote: post #53
bko wrote: post #38

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…

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…

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.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#62

Post by ItsDeathball »

wpietri wrote: post #53
bko wrote: post #38

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…

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…

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.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#63

Post by icebraining »

hlmencken wrote: post #21
mdszy wrote: post #5

>Waymonauts 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.

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.

> I can't imagine it was a top down thing.

Why not? We see it every day.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#64

Post by steelframe »

wpietri wrote: post #50
codemac wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They allow transfers from Google, rather than a full interview slate. My bet is transfers outweigh anything you're praising here.

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.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#65

Post by dilippkumar »

Lambdanaut wrote: post #43
ttul wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. I should add: This is a great time to be an engineer. Enjoy it while it lasts. The time to be a founder will be after the next recession.

Quite a bold claim. Care to give reasoning?

A colleague explained it to me like this:

"During a recession, all the big companies will tighten their budgets and not throw money to copy your products"

They then pointed out that all the companies that took off in the 10s started during the 2008 recession.

Look at what happened to Snapchat for an example of what happens when other companies have money to spend to catch up with your product quickly.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#66

Post by draw_down »

aresant wrote: post #19

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…

I wouldn’t start praising them just yet. They do still need to... ship something. Could be a huge success or a huge failure.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#67

Post by nradov »

wpietri wrote: post #53
bko wrote: post #38

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…

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…

There are many places where cars have to go with no cellular data coverage, even inside major cities. Tunnels for example.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#69

Post by nradov »

bko wrote: post #38

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…

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.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#70

Post by nradov »

dpq wrote: post #40
bko wrote: post #38

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…

Welcome to https://phantom.auto

They have a clever market strategy but those vehicles don't operate on public roads.
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