Just looking around for potential new places to work, and was curious to hear from Lyft L5 people.
I interviewed there recently and they have very poor infrastructure and overall way behind others in the industry. They told me they are expecting partnership from A German OEM but never saw news. They need lot of investment. I doubt Lyft can provide needed money
Aurora and Argo all the way for growth
I got an offer from Perception team in late 2018. The person leading the team had 1 and 1/2 years prior work experience with no experience with end to end product development. He had a good academic background but I felt the leadership lacked maturity in leading teams of that kind. I didn’t feel that convinced with their approach. This year Magna has terminated collaboration with Lyft L5. Overall Lyft L5 is way behind other players in AV like Waymo, Cruise, Argo, Aurora, etc. I personally liked Argo’s Perception team a lot more; I would say Cruise had similar characteristics as Lyft L5.
I had a very similar interview experience and glad didn't go there. They seem to underestimate the reality of execution and effort it takes to productize.
Nobody cares.
Can confirm that. I know quite a few people there and their leadership clearly has 0 idea where they should go and how much they need to put resources on which part of the stack. The perception lead mentioned in the earlier post recently got promoted to director, with total 4 yoe in the industry.!!! Such a joke
I am really surprised he is a director now! I don’t think just number of years of experience should be the main criterion for judging ones capability but still I do feel some things come with experience and working on a real product. The person who was the manager of the head of the perception (he was head of autonomous software or something similar) told me directly that he doesn’t have any background in robotics, motion planning, Computer vision, control, etc (key components of AV software, he was a ML guy with background in finance and I don’t know if he is still around) and he expects the leads of individual sub teams to provide guidance. Not sure if this kind of total hands off management style is ideal in this scenario either!
I agree. Yes, shouldn’t judge according to the number of years but the pcp stack there can’t even detect curbs... the head of autonomy is still there. And yes, I agree he has no background in anything related to AV and neither does his manager...
It is probably not a good idea to ask about culture or growth shortly after layoffs. There will be some disappointed ex/current employees with friends and family around. I had offers from google and fb before joining Lyft. My experience is great with all with all three companies.
Why don’t you contradict with other answers above?
The L5 leadership lacks relevant domain expertise for sure. Two years ago, an eng director said L5 had a huge advantage against Waymo because Waymo wasted 10 years building non deep learning systems and we were using deep learning from the get go. Another engineering director said beacuse AI has exceeded human level performance in object dectection, level 5 autonomy is achievable now. Pretty weird logic.
Don’t waste your time - you’re better off working elsewhere
Are you in L5?
Probs good til u get laid off...then 0 growth