Does Tesla not pay well by industry standards, or is that when comparing them to software companies? Seems like they work their employees very hard, though, so maybe they lose out on talent– on the other hand there was a time when Apple worked its employees hard and they were still able to retain top people.

Regarding the data collection, that's a great point. I hope that's not the case though, as I would think the data is far more valuable than the bandwidth it's carried on. Though, I suppose the capacity simple doesn't exist to send it over the air the way you can just store locally and physically offload. Then I guess it comes down to whether the compressed data from an enormous number of vehicles still gives a significant advantage.