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
Sort of, you will probably attract the best talent by having the hardest problems, fostering a culture of bottom-up innovation, and giving your engineers a lot of freedom rather than micro-managing them. The pay is closely related, but you also get a lot of people trying to game the system and optimize for max pay, without necessarily the skill or creativity you're looking for. Said another way: top pay attracts people looking for top pay, for better or worse. There's probably a strong correlation between "best" people and high pay, but it's also hard to quantify "best".

How do you quantify best? Number of degrees? Publications? Association with prestigious institutions? Past work experience at top companies? Speed of problem solving? All of this is gameable once it starts being _measured_ and enough incentives exist for people to devote their life to winning the "game".

However, if you happen to hire a math olympiad winning PhD with numerous publications from a tier-1 research institution with a known track record in industry, it would be hard to argue they aren't the best. But success breeds success, and top people will keep being poached to other top places. Kinda how money makes more money.

>>WinLyc+Mf
How do you quantify best?

The bests have cool stories to tell.

>>quadco+Mp
Right, but you have to be in a position where you get to do the work in the first place, which requires passing some reputational and skill bar. Or, you could do something which is cool to you personally and someone might not share that feeling and be unimpressed.

As a concrete example, I've gotten more accolades for silly personal projects that sound impressive, like training a convolutional network to pilot a simulated car on the GPU, than for impactful work at my actual job, which was a lot less challenging.

I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy, and I think companies could really get far hiring less than the best people, and just squeezing good quality work out of them (I believe Amazon is known for this).

Obviously OpenAI should not hire subpar people lol, they should keep doing what works for them, just grumbling loudly here.