zlacker

>>zuhaye+(OP)
Other companies nickel and diming engineers think they are somehow getting something for free. All the highest performing companies in the world pay insane amounts to their programmers

>>ldjkfk+E4
Paying someone a lot doesn't magically make them a good engineer. You have to actually hire the best people, and there's only so many of them to go around.

>>jdm221+h6
I'm sympathetic to this argument, because I know both low-quality and high-quality engineers at most FAANGs, but in principle isn't offering a lot of money a good way to attract talent?

In the case of OpenAI you also have interesting tech and a brand that will massively accelerate your career if you want to stay in that field. So while yeah, you have to hire the best people; and OpenAI like everyone else will be paying $LOTS to a few useless engineers in the mix, I think "$900K and everyone knows it" is a pretty good substitute for talent-spotting, which anyway can't be bought.

>>biztos+i8
It's both things. Offering more money increases the inbound applicants dramatically. You want this because top talent is disproportionately likely to have better options and may have a high floor. This does, however, create a non-trivial filtering problem, and one that is hard to scale because recruiters can't reliably differentiate real talent from good talkers. The key here is to make sure your best people are active engaged in recruiting and to minimize the type 1 and type 2 errors in hiring. This is hard to sustain at scale, and I think places like Google and Facebook have been losing the battle on this for many years—also due to engineering brand dilution because they don't actually have that much impactful work relative to the headcount—but OpenAI is small and focused enough that they ought to be able to manage pretty effectively.