3 ms·

I would be more interested in the bright minds that had the wisdom to find work outside Microsoft. Nothing against MS, but if half of your peers are going to th

by mahmud 16y ago

I would be more interested in the bright minds that had the wisdom to find work outside Microsoft. Nothing against MS, but if half of your peers are going to the same blackhole, and you choose not to follow suit, you're either a smart fella with better options, or you're not good enough. Assuming a 50-50 distribution; I am interested in that 25% that's both good enough, and chose to break rank. Because I have a good intuition that consensus always breeds mediocrity, never something exceptional.

cageface 16y ago
I have been surprised at how little of the genuinely innovative things people are doing in Microsoft Research seem to make it into their products, but there are a lot of very interesting projects going on in their research groups nonetheless. I can also understand the appeal of MS research. Academic CS presents a lot of distractions - the constant scrabble for funding, teaching responsibilities, campus politics etc. There are plenty of high-caliber brains in MS research. I don't think Simon Peyton-Jones, for instance, would have any trouble finding a post in any CS department.
- jackfoxy 16y ago
  I'm disappointed there is no "Express" release of the latest F#. There are a couple of different hack approaches, but a .NET 4.0 F# Express would sure be nice to play with. Apparently MS has no plans for this.
- mahmud 16y ago
  SPJ is at Microsoft, and so are Jim Larus and Leslie Lamport. But you know what? For a behemoth that allegedly swallowed half of the computing minds in Europe, and god knows how many in the U.S., it's very sad that I can name only three top researchers, and I have absolutely no idea what they're working on. I see more development coming out of the Factor camp, and Factor is pretty much a 25 year old guy in a basement. Lest you think I am picking on Microsoft, I haven't been too happy with the Google language R&D labs as well. They took out billions in cash and replicated Bell Labs, circa 1986.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    By the way, just think of the few recent pieces of software that made the most impact on industry; Clojure, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, jQuery,etc. All the works of random sole hackers, the last two pretty much standard resume pieces for any web developer. None of these guys existed on the map until they changed the industry with a Changelog. And because of that, I have every reason to believe that the next great engineer-aesthete is faceless today, and bumming around on friends' couches and handouts; not someone being cultivated with corporate endowments and backing.
    - cageface 16y ago
      I hope you're right honestly. The vision of the heroic hacker is much more appealing to me than that of big, bureaucratic, corporate research departments. Certainly the things small independent teams have accomplished lately is impressive. I wonder though if there are some projects that just require more elaborate support structures. It's difficult for me to imagine that ghc or the scala compiler or postgresql could have been hacked together on the clojure model.

by mahmud 16y ago

cageface 16y ago

I have been surprised at how little of the genuinely innovative things people are doing in Microsoft Research seem to make it into their products, but there are a lot of very interesting projects going on in their research groups nonetheless. I can also understand the appeal of MS research. Academic CS presents a lot of distractions - the constant scrabble for funding, teaching responsibilities, campus politics etc. There are plenty of high-caliber brains in MS research. I don't think Simon Peyton-Jones, for instance, would have any trouble finding a post in any CS department.

jackfoxy 16y ago
I'm disappointed there is no "Express" release of the latest F#. There are a couple of different hack approaches, but a .NET 4.0 F# Express would sure be nice to play with. Apparently MS has no plans for this.
mahmud 16y ago
SPJ is at Microsoft, and so are Jim Larus and Leslie Lamport. But you know what? For a behemoth that allegedly swallowed half of the computing minds in Europe, and god knows how many in the U.S., it's very sad that I can name only three top researchers, and I have absolutely no idea what they're working on. I see more development coming out of the Factor camp, and Factor is pretty much a 25 year old guy in a basement. Lest you think I am picking on Microsoft, I haven't been too happy with the Google language R&D labs as well. They took out billions in cash and replicated Bell Labs, circa 1986.
- mahmud 16y ago
  By the way, just think of the few recent pieces of software that made the most impact on industry; Clojure, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, jQuery,etc. All the works of random sole hackers, the last two pretty much standard resume pieces for any web developer. None of these guys existed on the map until they changed the industry with a Changelog. And because of that, I have every reason to believe that the next great engineer-aesthete is faceless today, and bumming around on friends' couches and handouts; not someone being cultivated with corporate endowments and backing.
  - cageface 16y ago
    I hope you're right honestly. The vision of the heroic hacker is much more appealing to me than that of big, bureaucratic, corporate research departments. Certainly the things small independent teams have accomplished lately is impressive. I wonder though if there are some projects that just require more elaborate support structures. It's difficult for me to imagine that ghc or the scala compiler or postgresql could have been hacked together on the clojure model.