5 ms·
I have a question for anyone in an R&D/Bell Labs-esque place - are there any good recommendations for similar places to work, particularly outside the US? "Old"
by user_7832 3y ago
I have a question for anyone in an R&D/Bell Labs-esque place - are there any good recommendations for similar places to work, particularly outside the US? "Old" Google apparently was, but going by what ex-googlers have been saying it hasn't been the case for a long while now.
- carterschonwald 3y agoI was wondering the same myself. Albeit in the us or nyc. :) I’ve had middling success creating opportunities but that’s very far from being in an environment where there so much interesting going on around you
- thatcat 3y agoFreelance product design is a good field for this type work, but you don't really see it concentrated into a unified r/d location like bell had often. Also @dsgnr you're posts are currently hell banned
- user_7832 3y agoThanks, product design is something I've also considered. I'd guess Apple/MS style companies are probably still the best bet, even though you're more restricted than what it probably was at Bell.
- ghaff 3y agoI'm sure a lot of people will reflexively run in the opposite direction but IBM still has a large research organization.
- carterschonwald 3y agoAlso their lab isn’t anywhere I’d want to live. Interestingly enough, a lot of senior ibm labs folks have joined jpmorgan or similar organizations over time
- compsciphd 3y agobetween westchester and nyc one has a lot of varying environments to live in if working at IBM Research. I used to commute up to it from Manhattan without any problem (nice reverse commute in general). Hawthorne (now closed) was a bit easier than Yorktown, but both were fairly easy (if memory serves me correct, yorktown was only an additional 15 minutes or so).
- dsgnr 3y agoAs a freelance product designer I'm always learning and always excited about work. There are so many interesting companies working on so many interesting problems.
- dleink 3y agoWhat takes up most of your time? Do you work with vendors to create and then produce the product or just do the design phase?
- dsgnr 3y agoIt depends on the needs of the client, and Ive done a little bit of everything from designing moulds and sourcing factories for physical products, to writing frontend code to help ship.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoMicrosoft Research, though it has a reputation for coming up with great ideas that somehow never end-up in a shipping Microsoft product.
- user_7832 3y agoThanks, I've found some of their design guidelines have legitimately changing my worldview (eg situational disabilities).
- esafak 3y agoFor some that's a plus!
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoFor me a negative: If I remember correctly, MSR worked on a practical implementation of Code-Contracts for C# which incorporated the (all-important) compile-time verification of method preconditions, postconditions, and class invariants (without the need for hand-written refinement-types, which is how we do things today): as I understand it, the compile-time part of system could support any assertion represented as a pure-function - think of it as C#'s take on Ada's assertions, improved tenfold, and it even shipped for a now-unsupported older version of C# and .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/debug-trace-profile/code-contracts https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/debug-tra... ...and it was axed in .NET Core back in 2016 and hasn't been seen since: https://github.com/microsoft/CodeContracts/issues/409 https://github.com/microsoft/CodeContracts/issues/409 Had Microsoft put more backing behind it, then C# could present itself as a language to supplant Ada in safety-critical applications, and replace C/C++ in other applications. I have hope the feature will come back one-day - there are whole slews of bugs that can be eliminated (such as when passing EF entity types around with unintentionally null member-properties).
- esafak 3y agoIsn't that replacement called F#?
- LeonardoTolstoy 3y agoIf you are in the UK Deepmind seemed to be that way to me when I applied. A lot of research groups doing hard research in a wide array of fields, cutting edge AI stuff, a core team of SEs developing in house programs for researchers, and research engineers for productionization. And no, I didn't get the job lol. I've heard mixed things about it as a company but GResearch (also UK) seemed like an interesting R&D software / math mix in the vein of investment banking. I applied there over ten years ago so YMMV at this point, who knows.
- chicagoengineer 3y agoI work at a very successful HFT. It’s a special place, but we’re not advancing the state of the art in fundamental science like the Bell Labs/Microsoft Researches of the world.
- user_7832 3y agoSorry, what's HFT?
- Nullabillity 3y agoHigh-frequency trading, I'd assume. Exploiting the stock market for profit.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoOr providing liquidity to reduce transaction costs for everyone.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoHow high are the costs and how much can you reduce them before you reach diminishing returns? Will it reach zero?
- 3y ago
- whimsicalism 3y agoAny prestige research lab - MS, Google, OAI, etc.
- user_7832 3y agoThanks, that seems to be the trend here
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoI'm not sure how many, if any, are doing blue sky research (vs product-directed "research") any more the way that Bell Labs, IBM Watson and Xerox Parc used to do. Look at what's going on with ML/AI - DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAIR now moved into a product group alongside Meta's GenAI group, Microsoft essentially outsourcing AI to OpenAI, OpenAI may as well call itself GPTCorp - a single-product commercial enterprise. I guess it's not surprising given how short term the thinking is of today's publicly traded companies.
- potatolicious 3y agoEh, I don't think today's scene is altogether that different from back then. In every case you have a research organization tied to an immensely profitable main enterprise. The vast majority of the work force works on the "product" side and only a small number of researchers are doing blue sky stuff. This describes Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, as well as modern counterparts like MSR and DeepMind. As always, only a very small portion of the work force gets to do blue sky stuff - the rest have to do the "mundane" bits of making money. Let's not be fooled by rose-tinted glasses here - even in its heyday Bell Labs was small fraction of the overall Bell operations, and likewise Xerox Parc an extremely prestigious but yet small slice of the overall enterprise.
- whimsicalism 3y ago> DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAI I don’t really agree that training massive causal LMs is a “product focus”. I agree that there is an increasing product focus in orgs like OAI, but a lot of that is coming from new growth rather than trading off with base research.
- jebarker 3y agoDisney Imagineering? I have no direct experience but I'm continually impressed by the technical innovations they make public and the effects they manage to achieve in their products.
- user_7832 3y agoThanks, that sounds interesting.
- fortran77 3y agoWorked for them for about 10 years. Fun place, but I'm not sure it'll ever be like the old days where research was done for research's sake. So many things are now off-the-shelf, and not much is invented in house.
- ycombinatrix 3y agoall they can do is mechanical engineering. anything they ship involving software is usually an abject failure.
- bargle0 3y agoWhat are you looking for? DOE national labs and similar institutions may fit the bill.
- deadly-penguin 3y agoA government, or government funded, research lab. Mostly they want research scientists, but engineers also work in those places.