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Apple Car Team Loses Yet Another Key Employee as Turnover Continues

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Apple has long been rumored to be planning an electric vehicle, but the team working on the project has reportedly faced many struggles over the years, including development challenges and the loss of some key employees.

Apple-car-wheel-icon-feature-purple.jpg

One of the latest departures is CJ Moore, who has left Apple to join autonomous vehicle technology company Luminar. In a press release shared by Bloomberg, Luminar said Moore will lead the company's global software development team. Moore had served as a director of autonomous systems at Apple since August, after working on autopilot software at Tesla for nearly seven years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The so-called "Apple Car" team has seen several departures and hires as turnover continues. Apple's director of machine learning Ian Goodfellow recently moved to Google, for example, while longtime Ford engineer Desi Ujkashevic joined Apple.

In late 2021, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple was aiming to develop an electric vehicle with full self-driving functionality that does not require human intervention, with the project being led by Apple executive Kevin Lynch. Gurman said Apple's ideal car would have no steering wheel and pedals for a hands-off driving experience. Apple's vehicle is expected to launch around 2025 at the earliest.

Article Link: Apple Car Team Loses Yet Another Key Employee as Turnover Continues
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/25/apple-car-team-loses-cj-moore/
I think generally we are used to development cycles of mobile devices. Even then those take several years from start to finish. Cars are heavily regulated and are heavily dependent on safety implementations. Plus coming up with the whole manufacturing system is a huge undertaking. All of that is without even trying to make any sort of fancy smart car. And Apple is obviously trying to go above and beyond with their car, so this is not unexpected. It’s going to take it many years more years before we have a car.

So I’m not too surprised that apple is losing employees. This is a heavily competitive market right now.
 
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I bet this will be an add-on solution for certain cars to give it some degree of autonomous control, and not a full fledged car.

Imagine some device that mounts to the roof of your car with dozens of cameras and sensors - it works with the software in the car that can already do basic steering like lane control and adaptive cruise control to give your car an autonomous capability, while tying everything together into the apple ecosystem. Cost? $4999, plus $50 for the dongle
 
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No steering wheel nor pedals? The thing couldn't survive a single software bug. Good luck with that, Apple.
 
macduke said:
To be honest, anyone who is a former Tesla autopilot engineer probably isn't the best hire. How late is that tech now?
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You think there are many engineers with actual experience in current self driving technology to go around?
 
I don't understand how this keeps happening. You would think that Apple is in the absolute perfect position to attract and retain the most incredible talent. They can pay high salaries, provide attractive stock option grants, allocate huge budgets and freedom to projects. How do they fail to create a compelling overall package (not just financially) that makes people stay?
 
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antnythr said:
The guy left Apple after less than a year. Sounds like a dumpster fire at Apple with so many big names leaving.
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I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a dumpster fire. I’ve seen those at corporations multiple times. That said let’s just say (without disclosing sources) that the recent spate of departures is not going unnoticed by other employees and much of it seems to be firmly linked to an arbitrary “must work in office so many days a week” rule that Apple senior management seems desperate to impose. Even new requisitions are putting these requirements in the hiring documents and that’s making it harder for Apple to find new talent than would otherwise be the case.

If they change their stance on this it will likely slow the bleeding currently experienced.
 
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alexe said:
I don't understand how this keeps happening. You would think that Apple is in the absolute perfect position to attract and retain the most incredible talent. They can pay high salaries, provide attractive stock option grants, allocate huge budgets and freedom to projects. How do they fail to create a compelling overall package (not just financially) that makes people stay?
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By having arbitrary work from the office policies in place to try and force the pandemic into some sort of paychological retreat. If people don’t feel comfortable for health reasons or just don’t feel comfortable working in an office setting for other reasons then Apple should seriously consider their stance.
 
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I predict Apple's self-driving cars, when released, will bring them more class-action lawsuits than all of their other products combined. Self-driving cars will almost certainly reduce the total number of road-related deaths by a lot, but they will introduce some new kinds of accidents in the process (software & machine learning related etc.). The lawyers will have a field day picking the meat off the bones of the pioneers of this technology.
 
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alexe said:
I don't understand how this keeps happening. You would think that Apple is in the absolute perfect position to attract and retain the most incredible talent. They can pay high salaries, provide attractive stock option grants, allocate huge budgets and freedom to projects. How do they fail to create a compelling overall package (not just financially) that makes people stay?
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Apple does not pay at the top of market in Silicon Valley, specially when compared to Google/Meta/Amazon/... for most rank and file new hires... Historically the reason given for this is that you should be glad to work for them and have them in your resume. This could have been true back in 2010 but seems like a weak sell in 2022.

Add to that, Apple is restricting his talent pool to a commuting radius from Cupertino when the rest of the industry is moving on to distributed teams where location is not so important.
 
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atomic.flip said:
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a dumpster fire. I’ve seen those at corporations multiple times. That said let’s just say (without disclosing sources) that the recent spate of departures is not going unnoticed by other employees and much of it seems to be firmly linked to an arbitrary “must work in office so many days a week” rule that Apple senior management seems desperate to impose. Even new requisitions are putting these requirements in the hiring documents and that’s making it harder for Apple to find new talent than would otherwise be the case.

If they change their stance on this it will likely slow the bleeding currently experienced.
Click to expand...

they are definitely considering it - they recently sent out a survey to employees and people who applied for jobs with them asking all about WFH.
 
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