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Waymo’s Hiring Binge

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Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#141

Post by guiomie »

superfrank wrote: post #101
polishdude20 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man. My pixel 2 is the best phone I've ever had.

I'm not trying to argue with you, obviously everyone has different experiences, but that's such a funny thing to hear someone say. I had a Pixel 1, Pixel 2, and a Pixel 3a (current phone) and I feel the 2 was the worst of the bunch. I had mine replaced twice in the 18 months I had it due to crashing and overheating issues. I would never in a million years recommend the Pixel 2 to someone, but I know there are plenty…

I've had the Pixel 2, and never had any issues, now I've had the 3 for over 8 months I think, and It has convinced me to switch to iPhone. It's full of bugs and inconsistent UX. I need to reboot the phone every 45 minutes since it will not connect to wifi.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#142

Post by selectodude »

az656 wrote: post #118
fyfy18 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first part of your statement is not true. Autoland as in "press a button and go get a coffee" sure. Almost all commercial aircraft have systems that can land the aircraft themselves (with the pilot ready to take over at any point), but it is not often used in practice because: - pilots still need to know how to land an aircraft themselves, so they may as well practice it (it's not like they are driving to work an…

1) Ground aircraft are always kept out of the ILS critical zone when there is IFR traffic landing, which happens to be all commercial flights and almost all business aircraft. Autoland being used has nothing to do with this, besides, even GA planes can autoland today with RNAV GPS LPV approaches. 2) Autoland is never a requirement — usually, deciding to try an autoland landing or diverting to an alternate airport is…

>Not “almost all” commercial aircraft have autoland capability. It requires specific certifications for the pilot and crew as well as the aircraft itself.

The 737NG, 737 MAX, 747, 757, 767, 777, 787 and every Airbus model have autoland. It's a requirement to be able to use autoland in order to be certified as a pilot for a particular type. Garmin even has a system for newer GA planes so they can autoland nowadays. Autoland is used rarely because its more work for the pilots to enable and they all think they can do a softer landing, but in very low-vis weather conditions its used pretty often.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#144

Post by vl »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #89
vl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, market is not that liquid: interesting projects have no headcount, problematic projects are available. At the end of the day you need to know people and come with recommendations to actually transfer to something good. Ask me how I know.

How do you know?

Changed projects while at Google :)

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#145

Post by steelframe »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #83
steelframe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disagree. I have worked at Google, other startups and middle sized companies. By far the least productive place per employee was Google. Not that the average employee was stupid but the average output per engineer was comically low. A lot of Googlers take it very easy there and work 10 to 5. And to be more on point, I met definitely more than a couple subpar employee that would be fired after a couple months in a sta…

When I was an engineering manager at Google, my group would look more closely at impact than we would at output. In fact, if the output ended up being more technical debt than durable improvement (the proverbial "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!" effect that Dilbert spelled out), we would count that against the engineer's evaluated performance. And it would usually take more than 2 months to determine when that was the case.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#146

Post by wpietri »

ItsDeathball wrote: post #62
wpietri wrote: post #53

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…

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…

And I think that's due to a "let's keep driving" bias. In Uber's crash, for example, it detected an object moving in the road, but didn't understand what it was. Any reasonable human driver would have quickly stopped until it was clear what was going on. But the Uber car just kept going at speed until it was sure that it was a pedestrian, at which point a collision was inevitable.

I think the right thing to do is to invert the bias. If the car isn't sure it understands what's going on and that it's safe to proceed, it should stop. In which case, development becomes a long series of teaching about rarer and rarer circumstances, so it needs less and less human input to understand the road.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#147

Post by [deleted] »

fyfy18 wrote: post #98
nradov wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first part of your statement is not true. Autoland as in "press a button and go get a coffee" sure. Almost all commercial aircraft have systems that can land the aircraft themselves (with the pilot ready to take over at any point), but it is not often used in practice because: - pilots still need to know how to land an aircraft themselves, so they may as well practice it (it's not like they are driving to work an…

[deleted]

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#148

Post by zapita »

fierarul wrote: post #130
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True to a degree. Thanks to the huge influx of SV companies opening up shops in Eastern Europe, even if it's just outsourcing the "boring stuff", has led to an increase in local tech salaries that they're now rivaling Western Europe.

Not that Western Europe has big IT salaries compared to the US. It never seemed to me that IT is viewed in EU as this big growth engine compared to the USA and salaries and prestige seem to reflect it.

That is changing as well. US tech companies are hiring more and more across Europe, and the local startup ecosystem is growing also. Some local founders who have made money in the US are coming back and seeding local startups, which has an accelerating effect. Another factor is remote work, with some developers getting nearly US-level salaries while living in Europe. The result is a new class of ultra-well-paid software developers enjoying the good life in many European cities. It's still a niche phenomenon, but not for long. The SF Bay Area was in the same place around 2011-2012. I expect a massive wave of gentrification and anti-tech sentiment in Europe in 2-5 years, similar to what the US is experiencing now.

Re: Waymo’s Hiring Binge

#150

Post by UncleMeat »

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.

And if I found out that a manager was shipping low performers to other people to deal with rather than doing their job and either helping that person or managing them out...
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