131–140 of 157 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not get into a car driven by someone in a "low cost" country whose only incentive for not getting into an accident is getting fired.
They might also care about not killing people, but fair enough I guess.
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…
Turnover in professional jobs is quite high, sometimes around 20% per annum. There may not be many people out of work, but there are always people looking for the next job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like your key metric is “hours spent at desk”. By that measure, you are probably correct.
No, my metric is output per engineer which losely correlates with hours spent at desk. The output quality and quantity was the lowest at Google
And I diagnosed a serious problem and got a fix actioned - the problem had cost them > 500,000 k in less than a week.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
BAE where doing tests of this lading passenger jets on wet and slippery runways for example
>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.
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.
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Waymo offers Waymo RSUs which are not liquid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You might waste some money, but at least they're not creating value for the other players. Is that their strategy?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.