> People who have done well at math competitions (USAMO, IMO, PUTNAM), competition programming (ACM, USACO, codejam, topcoder), science fairs (ISEF, STS), or capture the flag (DEFCON, secuinside, GITS). Those competitions don't just select for ability, they also select for quickness. We are in a very competitive space.

...it's absurdly low. Companies like Google hand out close to $200k total, liquid compensation to new grads who haven't placed in any of those competitions. The people who have ranked in any of those (especially the math ones, and doubly so the Putnam) can easily write their ticket to a job paying double $130k right out of college.

Anyone with that kind of competitive math/programming experience and real world machine learning engineering experience could earn triple that range if they wanted to. That's a ridiculously small and competitive set of candidates to be targeting. It's also not necessary, because strong performance on the e.g. IMO doesn't a priori map to outperformance, on a per dollar basis, writing autonomous driving logic.

Basically: no it's not competitive for San Diego, Comma is asking for wildly overqualified people to sacrifice significant amounts of money to work there, and it's not clear they should be using those kinds of qualifications as a filtering criteria in the first place.

This kind of cargo culting does not inspire confidence in their recruiting.