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He's still mostly right about academia - over half the projects in your list are by Google. The best many universities can offer in the area of CS is to be a tr
by red_admiral 8y ago
He's still mostly right about academia - over half the projects in your list are by Google. The best many universities can offer in the area of CS is to be a training school for the places where the real work is done.
I hear lots of anecdotes from colleagues about academic research conferences in certain areas like "big data" where people are excitedly talking about "new" things that industry did years ago, but didn't publish in an academic journal. And then there's the people claiming they're doing "big data" because there's slightly over a million rows in their MySQL database.
- jamesblonde 8y agoAll state-of-the-art in Big Data from universities. Spark from UC Berkeley. Flink from TU Berlin. HopsFS from KTH Stockholm.
- pjmlp 8y agoMost of the "industry" work on compilers and graphics wouldn't be possible with the actual research that was done by the universities. Yes the industry does pump a lot of money into research, but the people doing the real work are mostly doing some Msc or Phd at university XYZ. So it goes both ways. Just to cite the two areas that are my main hobby when doing computing related stuff outside boring enterprise work. As for OS, the universities are the only place left it seems, as all major vendors are very carefull when it doesn't bring short term profits, e.g. Midori.
- kragen 8y agoIn that paper, Pike wasn't talking about academia (primarily or exclusively) in the first place. I think when he wrote that paper he had spent his entire career at Bell Labs. He was lamenting the decline of the systems-research praxis that he, and his lab, had been such an important part of for so many years. There's an excellent reason he's working at Google now.