A win for Pittsburgh

On a national scale, tech workers have always been mobile, gathering offers and choosing the best job and city for them, said Brian Kennedy, senior vice president for operations and government affairs for the Pittsburgh Technology Council.

But it’s new for Pittsburgh to be the venue.

“The fact that this talent is so scarce is exactly why Pittsburgh is winning,” Mr. Kennedy said. He said companies like Ford and Uber recognized the alignment of Carnegie Mellon’s long history of robotics research with their feverish pursuit of an autonomous vehicle.

“CMU is so dominant in the development of this specific type of talent that few regions could hope to challenge us on this battlefield,” he said.

Martial Hebert, director of CMU’s Robotics Institute, called Ford’s venture “another indication of the robotics field becoming more and more mature.”

“We are no longer a weird, specialty field,” Mr. Hebert said, pointing out that the academic program, founded in 1979, has grown to enroll roughly 340 graduate students and 100 undergraduates. “We’re really producing a workforce at the scale that is comparable to any other industry.”

The median pay for computer and information research scientists, a category that includes roboticists, was $110,620 a year in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The government projects those jobs to grow by 11 percent in the next 10 years, higher than the 7 percent job growth rate across all occupations.

Though CMU’s program is one of the largest robotics research organizations in the world, Mr. Hebert expects it to have to grow to meet demand. “It will be difficult, but we have the knowhow, and that know-how was built over many years,” he said.

Source: Argo company website; LinkedIn

No non-compete clause

With Argo having posted 10 job advertisements and a Pittsburgh-based internship, it is unclear how large the pool of talent is for Pittsburgh’s constellation of start-ups, which use autonomous technologies to develop, build and market a variety of products.

In early 2015, Uber’s research facility opened with 40 CMU researchers, leading to allegations of talent poaching and fears that CMU’s research efforts would be hobbled. (CMU insisted it was just fine and that the university expects to lose academic researchers to companies.)

At Carnegie Robotics, founded by CMU researchers who wanted to take products to market, about a half dozen employees were hired away by Uber, Mr. DiAntonio said. He took the helm of Carnegie Robotics when former president and CEO John Bares left to lead Uber’s research center.

Yet some of the people who flocked to Uber have since decided to do something else.

According to multiple people familiar with Uber’s contracts, the terms of employment generally don’t come with non-compete clauses that would restrict engineers from packing up and taking their talents elsewhere. Uber declined to comment for this story.

Mr. DiAntonio said he has adjusted his recruiting pitch to help grow his company of 70 employees, about 40 of whom are engineers. He touts the fact that Carnegie Robotics uses autonomous technology to push a variety of products into the market each year, like a mine-detection device for the military or an autonomous cleaner for commercial buildings.

“I can’t offer salaries and the very high up-side stock options,” he said. However, “To the extent you like working on different problems with different technical challenges, this is going to appeal to you.”

That vision helped bring back David LaRose, who was lured away in 2015, leaving his chief technology officer post at Carnegie Robotics to become an engineering lead with Uber. Mr. LaRose, who started back at Carnegie Robotics just two weeks ago, said he had no personal problem with Uber but left for reasons of personal fulfillment.

“If I put the rest of my life in self-driving technology, my achievement might be that cars arrive five minutes earlier,” Mr. LaRose said. “I think my personal impact right now can be bigger in an application area that hasn’t caught fire yet.”

Identified Technologies, which develops autonomous drones for energy companies to survey their large sites, also landed a former Uber engineer recently with a similar approach.

“There aren’t a whole lot of companies in autonomous drones,” said Barry Rabkin, the chief marketing