"They took all the guys that were working on vehicle autonomy — basically whole groups, whole teams of developers, commercialization specialists, all the guys that find grants and who were bringing the intellectual property," recalls a person who was there during the departures" ... Uber snatched up about 50 people from Carnegie Mellon, including many from its highest ranks.
... the deal includes a "transition period" that keeps some of the departed staffers around ... "The work of these employees is very incestuous and loose," says the same NREC insider. "They are given free rein of the facilities as part-time CMU employees, but there are absolutely no checks on the work that they are doing or what [intellectual property] they are taking. Is it for CMU? Is it for Uber? None of us here know."
Edit: could CMU have gotten better IP licensing terms and ROI for the University, if they had spun out the entire team (with private financing) and had an open auction of RoboticsResearchCo to the many companies investing in this field?
I think this is a better example of dysfunction in academia than retaining/training a workforce. In particular, previous articles suggest that most folks saw their salaries doubled, with six-figure incentive checks to lure them away. From what I hear, it's not so much that the new salary is unusually high for industry researchers and engineers, but that the old salaries were unusually low (except in academia).
CMU could probably have gotten better return if they hadn't made it a point to underpay them so much compared to their market value.
Historically, university researchers doing fundamental research with mass-market industrial applications have been spun out into a company, so that both the university and the researchers have an upside opportunity for founding equity stakes.
A signing bonus or normalized salary is in an entirely different (smaller) class of compensation, especially since there was already an international track record of investment into the commercialization of self-driving vehicles.
I would guess that that the NREC engineers were paid locally-competitive engineering salaries in Pittsburgh, which would enable them to live a very decent lifestyle. Doubling their salaries probably was a change from $80k a year to $160k or so— from Pittsburgh to Silicon Valley pay.
For reference, $160k can buy a nice house in a nice neighborhood or suburb in Pittsburgh.
Perhaps this can serve as a cautionary tale to the public about the perils of private-public partnering. Especially when the "partnership" is so slanted in favor of the "private" side of things that such a situation can occur.
It's quantifiable to the administration how much money a winning sports team can bring to the school. What is the average return on a world-class researcher?
"They took all the guys that were working on vehicle autonomy — basically whole groups, whole teams of developers, commercialization specialists, all the guys that find grants and who were bringing the intellectual property," recalls a person who was there during the departures" ... Uber snatched up about 50 people from Carnegie Mellon, including many from its highest ranks.
... the deal includes a "transition period" that keeps some of the departed staffers around ... "The work of these employees is very incestuous and loose," says the same NREC insider. "They are given free rein of the facilities as part-time CMU employees, but there are absolutely no checks on the work that they are doing or what [intellectual property] they are taking. Is it for CMU? Is it for Uber? None of us here know."
Edit: could CMU have gotten better IP licensing terms and ROI for the University, if they had spun out the entire team (with private financing) and had an open auction of RoboticsResearchCo to the many companies investing in this field?