Topic: Hiring
Uber Hires Harvard Business School Professor to Help with Culture and Strategy (Jun 5, 2017)
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Apple Hires Senior Qualcomm Engineer as Wireless SoC Lead (May 29, 2017)
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Twitter Hires Former Bloomberg Exec to Lead Live Video (May 22, 2017)
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Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Returns as Internal Culture Champion (May 16, 2017)
Twitter’s three prominent co-founders have all spent time doing other things since its founding but all three are now back at the company in one form or another (Ev Williams has been the one constant, though he shifted out of the CEO role and onto the board a few years back). The latest to return is Biz Stone, who had been running another creation of his, Jelly, for several years, only to sell it to Pinterest a few months back. It sounds like Stone’s role will be that of a sort of internal culture champion and cheerleader rather than a key decision maker, which seems to suit his talents well but means it’ll be tough for outsiders to measure his impact. One of the benefits of Jack Dorsey coming back was that he had the authority of a founder to make big changes to the product (though he spent his first year back in charge failing to do so anyway). Stone’s hiring has a similar benefit in that he has the passion of a founder for the company and clearly believes strongly in its mission and product, and so can hopefully help instill that in other employees at a time when Twitter still feels rather stuck. We’ve seen some signs of more significant change in the product at Twitter lately, especially with its many recent TV deals, but its financial picture continues to be rather bleaker.
via Recode
Facebook Hiring For Original Video Content Roles (May 4, 2017)
Facebook has a job opening on its site for a “Film Producer”, and the description for the role talks about “motion picture content” in a way that makes it sounds like this person is being hired to make movies. On the face of it, that’s an odd thing to do: movies aren’t made by in-house producers, they’re made on an ad hoc basis using the filmmakers (directors, producers, cinematographers, writers etc.) who make sense for a particular project, so if you’re looking to make original content you hire people good at commissioning it, not the people who actually make it. However, the detail of the posting makes it seem as though what this person will be responsible for creating probably isn’t movies for consumption by Facebook’s audience. I think Facebook means video where it says either film or motion picture, especially as it talks about “shareable content”, and a 90-minute movie is not overly shareable. I actually wonder whether this person will be creating content for internal use or to promote Facebook to its audience rather than to be enjoyed by the audience as entertainment. But Facebook’s earnings call this week reinforced the idea that Facebook is getting more serious about creating and seeding video content on the site to boost its video ad revenues, which are very dependent on longer-form video.
via CNBC
Apple Hires Google Satellite Execs, Likely for Mapping or Broadband (Apr 21, 2017)
Google recently got out of the satellite mapping business by selling its Skybox / Terra Bella unit to Planet Labs. That unit had mostly been working on mapping imagery, and Google clearly decided it didn’t need to do that work itself to benefit from the results, and effectively outsourced it. Now two executives from that former team have ended up at Apple, under former Dropcam exec Greg Duffy. Given that Apple has nothing whatsoever to do with satellites today, that raises some interesting questions. While it’s true that Google, Facebook, and others have invested in satellite and other new methods for getting connectivity to remote places, Apple has far less incentive to do so, because its users are typically the kind of well-connected people that can afford premium smartphones and computers, not those in remote emerging markets. And to pursue such a play in a market like the US makes little sense either given how satellite broadband has struggled to compete with wired and wireless services because of limited throughput and high latency (just ask DISH). What makes more sense is some kind of mapping play for better imagery, although even there the same logic that led Google to dump its unit would apply to Apple too. These are certainly intriguing additions to the Apple employee rolls, but I’m not yet convinced that either broadband access or mapping are the explanation here.
via Bloomberg
GM to More than Triple Cruise Autonomous Tech Employees in California Over 5 Years (Apr 12, 2017)
GM has filed for and received a tax credit in the sum of $8 million from the state of California in return for investing $14 million in office space and related items this year and committing to hire 1163 employees over the next five years for its self-driving tech subsidiary Cruise. Given how the importance of autonomous driving technology will grow in the coming years and the fact that California is the hub of much of the testing, it’s logical that GM would want to increase its base there significantly. However, these 1163 employees represent a more than three-fold increase in its employee base in the state, and the average salary GM is projecting for those employees is $116,000, so my guess is they’ll mostly be skilled engineers.
via Axios (the filing from which I pulled the data above is here)
In tech, the wage gender gap worsens for women over time, and it’s worst for black women – TechCrunch (Apr 5, 2017)
I covered a similar story a while back, but this one has more detail, and focuses more on gender in addition to racial disparities in tech salaries. It turns out that being a member both of an underrepresented gender and race increases your odds of being underpaid significantly, such that black and Latina women earn 79 cents for every dollar equivalently qualified men do. In part, as with that earlier study, this is because women often ask for lower salaries than men, though apparently only after their first few years in a career (in their first four years, they actually tend to ask for more). That, in turn, may reflect both conditioning in terms of what to expect and lower previous salaries. Regardless of the reasons, this is yet another sign of systemic problems in the tech industry when it comes to hiring women and racial minorities and paying them at the same rates as white men.
via TechCrunch
Apple hires Jonathan Zdziarski, an active forensics consultant & security researcher in the iOS community – 9to5Mac (Mar 14, 2017)
Zdziarski was in the news a lot a year ago, when Apple was fighting the FBI over the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter, because he was frequently quoted and cited as an expert who backed Apple’s stance. As such, it’s not altogether surprising that he should end up at Apple – he’s been both one of its staunchest supporters around some security and privacy issues and someone who has discovered vulnerabilities in its code. On the one hand, that makes him a useful person to have inside the company – this hire feels a lot like Apple’s hire of Anand Shimpi, another prominent outside expert who was brought inside – but Apple will lose the benefit of having a vocal independent advocate on these issues. It’s also interesting to note Zdziarski’s comments about his hiring and why he’s joining Apple – he cites its privacy stance, which is of course closely tied to security concerns, as a strong motivating factor.
via 9to5Mac
Didi has opened a self-driving lab in the U.S. with famed Jeep hacker Charlie Miller – Recode (Mar 8, 2017)
This seems like a smart move – even though there are lots of talented engineers in China, the nexus for development of autonomous driving today has to be either Silicon Valley or Detroit, so putting a base of operations in the former makes a lot of sense. There’s no evidence here that Didi is otherwise expanding into the US (after all, its new partner Uber is dominant here and that likely wouldn’t go down well), but that’s not to say Didi won’t try to hire from the other companies in the area. It’s already hired Charlie Miller, who came from Uber itself and was best known for having hacked a connected Jeep while it was driving a while back. The competitive intensity in this market, especially over hiring, is only likely to ramp up over time and things will get increasingly nasty as a result (and we’ve already got two lawsuits underway).
via Recode
Twitter’s former head engineer Alex Roetter lands at Larry Page’s flying car startup Kitty Hawk – Business Insider (Mar 7, 2017)
The details of this story aren’t all that interesting unless flying cars are a particular obsession. What’s most interesting here is actually that Larry Page is now doing in separate (often secretive) entities things which in the past might well have been done by divisions of Google. I’ve often said that a lot of what now sits in the Other Bets segment at Alphabet began life as a twinkle in Larry or Sergey’s eye, or as a passion project of sorts, and that’s always struck me as a rather inappropriate use of shareholders’ money. So, it’s interesting to see that not only is Alphabet paring back the Other Bets and exercising greater financial discipline around them in general, but the Google founders are also starting to make those bets with their own money. Both feel like progress.
via Business Insider
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick just told staff he’s hiring a COO to help him – Recode (Mar 7, 2017)
Small follow-up on yesterday’s Information piece about Uber trying to hire a number two for Travis Kalanick. That news is now official, though Kara Swisher here also reports that Uber is looking to put another woman on its board, and that the board would prefer the COO to be a woman as well. That echoes both what I said here yesterday and what I implied last week in my Techpinions piece on CEOs and corporate culture: fixing Uber’s problems will be a lot easier with a woman in a senior executive role.
via Recode
Uber CEO, Facing Multiple Controversies, Seeks No. 2 Exec — The Information (Mar 6, 2017)
In my Techpinions column last week, I argued that it’s enormously difficult to change corporate culture when the CEO is part of the resistance rather than driving the change, and also pointed out that the cultures that have often been least friendly to female employees are those without women in senior leadership roles. Uber fits the bill perfectly on both counts here, so bringing in a number two to Kalanick, ideally a woman, would be a great next step in helping turn Uber’s culture around. This article suggests Kalanick is looking to bring in a number two, but there’s no explicit mention of bringing in a first female exec. I’m still not convinced he’s capable of making the changes he needs to make, so if that second in command isn’t a powerful person in her own right, there’s a danger that this ends up being just more window dressing.
via Uber CEO, Facing Multiple Controversies, Seeks No. 2 Exec — The Information
Alphabet Taps McCray to Lead Access Unit, Including Fiber – Bloomberg (Feb 15, 2017)
Google Fiber and Alphabet’s broader Access unit within which it sits has been somewhat in limbo since late last year, when it lost its leader and canceled all its expansion plans. The story the company told then – and still seems to be telling today – is that it intends to pursue the same goals in new ways, principally through wireless. The fact that a new head has actually been appointed means that it’s at least somewhat serious about that goal, and isn’t just going to sell off or shut down the whole business, but it’s still possible that it might sell its fiber assets even if it pursues wireless technologies in future. Meanwhile, I still don’t think there’s a good reason for Google to be in the access business at all at this point.
via Bloomberg
Lyft has tapped the head of Google Street View to lead its mapping team – Recode (Feb 9, 2017)
This is a big hire for Lyft, which so often plays second fiddle to Uber in so many ways. Being able to recruit a top notch mapping engineer like this away from Google is a great validation of Lyft as a company and as a recruiter specifically, and should make it easier to hire in other talent for mapping and autonomous vehicle technology at Lyft. It’s also notable that Vincent would be willing to leave Google, which obviously has far bigger and deeper efforts underway around mapping and autonomous driving than Lyft does.
via Recode
Being black in tech can cost you $10k a year – USA Today (Feb 9, 2017)
This report from Hired this article is based on has lots of interesting data about salaries for software developers in lots of cities in the US and beyond, but the focus of the article is what the report says about bias. Specifically, the report finds that African Americans are 49% more likely to get hired than white candidates, while Latino and Asian candidates are each less likely to be hired, but it also finds that African American candidates ask for and receive lower salaries than Latino, Asian, or white applicants. The report doesn’t draw many conclusions from the data – increased likelihood of being hired for African Americans may be tied to that lower asking price, to diversity initiatives, or something else, and it’s also unclear whether these candidates ask for lower salaries because experience tells them to expect them, because they’re less well informed about going rates than their white counterparts, or again for some other reason. But the results are the results – yet another indication of systemic issues in the tech industry when it comes to race, whatever the underlying causes.
via USA Today (Hired report here)
Facebook (FB) hires MTV executive Mina Lefevre to help it develop TV shows — Quartz (Feb 9, 2017)
Facebook has to this point been focused entirely on making it easy to share and enjoy content created by others, whether that’s its nearly 2 billion users, news organizations, TV stations, or others. To the extent that Facebook has tried to begin hosting some content, that content has still been created by other entities, even if it now lives on Facebook in either its native video platform or Facebook Instant Articles. However, it looks like that might start changing soon, with this hire from MTV. Lefevre doesn’t specify in her Facebook post what exactly she’s going to be working on, but does say she’s going to help build “Facebook’s original content”, and given her past expertise in TV, it seems reasonable to assume video will be a focus. There’s obviously a broader trend of platforms owning more of their own content, from HBO to Netflix and Amazon to Apple and so on, but this is new for Facebook. I’m very curious what the focus will be here – there are so many possible directions Facebook could go in with original video, though scripted dramas a la Netflix seem like a poor fit.
via Quartz (Lefevre’s FB post here)
Apple Hires Amazon’s Fire TV Head to Run Apple TV Business – Bloomberg (Feb 7, 2017)
Two things worth noting here: firstly, this is one of a relatively small number of senior hires at Apple in recent months amid what has seemed like a larger number of departures from the upper echelons there (including one earlier today). In and of itself, the numbers don’t mean much – Apple is a massive company and many of those poaching its employees are smaller (notably Tesla) such that the balance will always be lopsided in favor of the smaller companies, where promotion opportunities will also be greater. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this hire itself is into a hardware product role, but it frees up the guy who had been running the Apple TV product to focus on content negotiations, which is arguably where Apple really needs to be putting its investment right now. I continue to maintain that this is the year when Apple finally launches its own subscription video service – the pieces are in place with the Apple TV and the TV app it launched last fall, and the market is getting to a tipping point where an over-the-top pay TV alternative is both more feasible and more needed than ever. This move will hopefully help move Apple along in its pursuit of that goal.
via Bloomberg
HTC’s top Vive designer is leaving to work on Google Daydream – The Verge (Jan 26, 2017)
It’s musical chairs week in VR, with Hugo Barra leaving Xiaomi to head VR at Facebook, and now an HTC designer moving to Google to work on Daydream VR there. This is one of the hottest areas in tech, and it’s therefore no surprise that it would prompt moves between companies as ambitious people try to find roles in the sector. For HTC, which continues to struggle mightily on the smartphone front and has only a side business in VR, it may become increasingly difficult to attract and retain talent in the face of an onslaught from some of the biggest names in the business.
via The Verge
Tesla sues ex-Autopilot director for taking proprietary info, poaching employees – TechCrunch (Jan 26, 2017)
Things are getting nasty between Tesla and one of its prominent former employees, Sterling Anderson, who used to run its Autopilot program. The lawsuit alleges that Anderson both took proprietary data from Tesla when he left and that he tried to poach additional Tesla employees to work on his new venture with Chris Urmson, formerly of Google’s autonomous driving unit. This lawsuit just highlights how competitive the space has become, and how eagerly many different companies including established carmakers, smaller carmakers like Tesla, big tech companies like Apple and Google (and Uber), and startups like Anderson and Urmson’s new venture Aurora are pursuing it. We’re going to see a lot of ugliness, and certainly plenty more hiring and poaching between these various companies, over the coming years.
via TechCrunch