Uber poached people from Carnegie Mellon robotics lab to build self-driving cars

Re:Uber poached people from Carnegie Mellon robotics lab to ... by shalmanese on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @07:09PM (#9608269)

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.

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Re:Uber poached people from Carnegie Mellon robotics lab to ... by JoeAltmaier on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @08:45AM (#9610926)

Maybe they'll just move the lab to their own company. They'll have all the researchers after all, with a real budget and real goals.

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Re:Uber poached people from Carnegie Mellon robotics lab to ... by shalmanese on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @12:46PM (#9612616)

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.

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