There has been way too much industry hype about self driving cars couple years back when Lyft started Level 5 division. Unfortunately, as we all know now, reality doesn't match expectation for this industry. Have you noticed there is no company who has yet to roll out a rider ready AV car without a backup safety driver?
The management team (directors and above) are almost entirely made up of men who have no domain expertise in autonomous vehicles, machine learning or robotics. They are buddies from their previous companies who failed to define and communicate any vision for the self-driving division. The Level 5 management team lacks technical understanding and sets unrealistic deadlines on vaguely-defined milestones. Sadly, the narrative about our strategy changes every 3 months so if you are less luck, most of engineers' work become throwaway work. Teams are running around in a circle, working on nebulous and technically unattainable projects that resemble pyramid schemes. We have a hard time hiring good people because all the competent folks are going to the AV leaders (Waymo, Tesla etc) who are actually ran and started by domain experts in self-driving.
The stress level is very high in some groups due to the realistic deadlines and pressure.
