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Nothing against research universities as good stuff does occur there, but it just seems like it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. I

Nothing against research universities as good stuff does occur there, but it just seems like it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. I think it helps to have scientists and engineers closer to the problem and who don't have to spend a huge amount of their time writing grants and training grad students.

terminalshort 1y ago
And you can have a career track that normal people will actually want. The whole phd -> postdoc -> (maybe) tenured professor thing is such misery that I never even gave it a thought as a career.
cjbgkagh 1y ago
Having worked in corporate labs they really were great and it's a shame they're disappearing. It's not only share buybacks, I would include offshoring, DEI, and a consolidation of management power as major factors in the destruction these labs. The pipeline has been so bad for so long now that it would take a miracle to get things started again. The last org I worked at offshored the most promising work to China. Due to some high up international agreement the company had to spend $X on offshored workers so not only were they considered cheap they were considered free because the money had to be spent anyway and was coming out of someone else's budget. I was working at a Research Org when the DEI push came through and it was a absolute disaster. A lot of projects ended their internship programs and avoided hiring in order to minimize the exposure. The bargain was always, you can have 6 seats but 50% need to be women and 50% need to be minorities, and since everyone got the push at the same time it meant that due to the intense competition for the same people you'd end up really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel. That made a lot of initiatives unviable. I wasn't working at Yahoo Research but as I heard it was canned following a management rift. They were already bleeding talent for a while but had retained some good people that stayed out of comfort and inertia. The smart people cultivated in research orgs tend to be a competing source of power and management hates that.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
  I'm not really seeing how the blacks and women ruined corporate research, can you expand on that more? Are you saying they were all retarded and without enough white, Asian, and Indian men nothing could be accomplished?
  - cjbgkagh 1y ago
    Since they don't make up 50% of the pipeline the enforced restriction necessitates hiring further down the ability rank even if you are to assume that all races and all sexes have the same ability / aptitude. And it also means for every non-minority male you need a minority female and those are very hard to get.
  - cocoto 1y ago
    If for instance higher ups from all companies require you to hire only whites with straight blond hair, a certain weight/size and with green eyes, you will quickly need to hire the bottom of the barrel of this group to expand your teams.
    - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - cjbgkagh 1y ago
        Numbers were not invented, they were tied to management bonuses, numbers lower than that negatively impacted bonuses. Inhouse counsel were much more worried about disparate impact lawsuits than race quota lawsuits. There are many reasons why I, and others like me, can't post personal anecdotes publicly. Not absolutely everything was great before DEI, and DEI is not the only problem. I gave a number of other problems that have diminished the efficacy of research orgs. Corporate labs have now gotten so bad that I can outcompete them as an individual which would have been much more difficult in the past.
ModernMech 1y ago
> it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. A loss for whom? Society? Of course, and that's exactly why they don't happen anymore -- because while they were a boon for society they were a terrible bet for the company. And when a company has a choice between doing good for their bottom line or doing good for society, 100% of the time they choose their bottom line. I mean, look at the legacy of Xerox Parc from Xerox's perspective. They invited this guy in, Steve Jobs, and he commercialized their ideas. Today Xerox is worth pennies on the dollar compared to their height, doing none of what Xerox Parc researched. Apple ate their lunch. The ROI for Xerox Parc was terrible for Xerox. For all the amazing stuff they did, they were not rewarded by the marketplace for it, they didn't produce better products for themselves, they just did other companies' R&D. That's where universities come in, and where they are vital. If you take them out, their role will not be filled by corporations, because corpos can't stomach the kind of dollars needed to do fundamental research. Only the government can stomach that, and if somehow the voters are convinced all this isn't worth funding, it just won't happen at any level.
- 7thaccount 1y ago
  The corps won't stomach it anymore at the scale they formerly did, but at one point they did. It could happen again some day...just a lot would have to change. Parc just didn't capitalize on what they had. I know the Alto was expensive, but still seems like a huge shame.
- nobodyandproud 1y ago
  All of your failure examples are failures of management and “leadership”.
- rmccue 1y ago
  This implies Xerox got no return on their research, and simply let Apple take their research, which isn't true. Rather, it was part of the investment deal they made with Apple [1]: > Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.” Xerox clearly undervalued the research they were producing, but it wasn't like they just gave it away entirely. Per [2] the valuation of those shares in 2018 would be $1.2 billion had they not sold them - undervalued in hindsight, but not nothing. Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research. [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth [2]: https://researchnarrative.com/thinkerry/the-company-that-could-have-been-apple/ https://researchnarrative.com/thinkerry/the-company-that-cou...
moffkalast 1y ago
Yeah if you go check almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century it usually starts with "some guy was working in a corporate lab with an unlimited budget". We're stagnating as a species a lot more, but at least the shareholders got a payout for their hard work of doing literally nothing. Rent seeking at its worst.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Yes, let's not pay out the investors. That's how you get lots of funding.
  - moffkalast 1y ago
    You get funding by inventing and selling shit people need, not by pretending to be something people want. At least in a sane world it would be.
  - kochikame 1y ago
    There needs to be a balance
- mexicocitinluez 1y ago
  lol hwut? Except for DNA, CRISPR, WWW, mRNA, the manhattan project, ARPA, GPS, etc
- anonymousDan 1y ago
  Umm, no. Maybe they have better PR departments than universities but this is clearly nonsense.
  - mexicocitinluez 1y ago
    God, the irony in saying "All major research is done by companies" while typing your message out to post ON THE INTERNET. LOL.
    - philipallstar 1y ago

terminalshort 1y ago

And you can have a career track that normal people will actually want. The whole phd -> postdoc -> (maybe) tenured professor thing is such misery that I never even gave it a thought as a career.

cjbgkagh 1y ago

Having worked in corporate labs they really were great and it's a shame they're disappearing. It's not only share buybacks, I would include offshoring, DEI, and a consolidation of management power as major factors in the destruction these labs. The pipeline has been so bad for so long now that it would take a miracle to get things started again. The last org I worked at offshored the most promising work to China. Due to some high up international agreement the company had to spend $X on offshored workers so not only were they considered cheap they were considered free because the money had to be spent anyway and was coming out of someone else's budget. I was working at a Research Org when the DEI push came through and it was a absolute disaster. A lot of projects ended their internship programs and avoided hiring in order to minimize the exposure. The bargain was always, you can have 6 seats but 50% need to be women and 50% need to be minorities, and since everyone got the push at the same time it meant that due to the intense competition for the same people you'd end up really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel. That made a lot of initiatives unviable. I wasn't working at Yahoo Research but as I heard it was canned following a management rift. They were already bleeding talent for a while but had retained some good people that stayed out of comfort and inertia. The smart people cultivated in research orgs tend to be a competing source of power and management hates that.

fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
I'm not really seeing how the blacks and women ruined corporate research, can you expand on that more? Are you saying they were all retarded and without enough white, Asian, and Indian men nothing could be accomplished?
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  Since they don't make up 50% of the pipeline the enforced restriction necessitates hiring further down the ability rank even if you are to assume that all races and all sexes have the same ability / aptitude. And it also means for every non-minority male you need a minority female and those are very hard to get.
- cocoto 1y ago
  If for instance higher ups from all companies require you to hire only whites with straight blond hair, a certain weight/size and with green eyes, you will quickly need to hire the bottom of the barrel of this group to expand your teams.
  - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      Numbers were not invented, they were tied to management bonuses, numbers lower than that negatively impacted bonuses. Inhouse counsel were much more worried about disparate impact lawsuits than race quota lawsuits. There are many reasons why I, and others like me, can't post personal anecdotes publicly. Not absolutely everything was great before DEI, and DEI is not the only problem. I gave a number of other problems that have diminished the efficacy of research orgs. Corporate labs have now gotten so bad that I can outcompete them as an individual which would have been much more difficult in the past.

ModernMech 1y ago

> it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. A loss for whom? Society? Of course, and that's exactly why they don't happen anymore -- because while they were a boon for society they were a terrible bet for the company. And when a company has a choice between doing good for their bottom line or doing good for society, 100% of the time they choose their bottom line. I mean, look at the legacy of Xerox Parc from Xerox's perspective. They invited this guy in, Steve Jobs, and he commercialized their ideas. Today Xerox is worth pennies on the dollar compared to their height, doing none of what Xerox Parc researched. Apple ate their lunch. The ROI for Xerox Parc was terrible for Xerox. For all the amazing stuff they did, they were not rewarded by the marketplace for it, they didn't produce better products for themselves, they just did other companies' R&D. That's where universities come in, and where they are vital. If you take them out, their role will not be filled by corporations, because corpos can't stomach the kind of dollars needed to do fundamental research. Only the government can stomach that, and if somehow the voters are convinced all this isn't worth funding, it just won't happen at any level.

7thaccount 1y ago
The corps won't stomach it anymore at the scale they formerly did, but at one point they did. It could happen again some day...just a lot would have to change. Parc just didn't capitalize on what they had. I know the Alto was expensive, but still seems like a huge shame.
nobodyandproud 1y ago
All of your failure examples are failures of management and “leadership”.
rmccue 1y ago
This implies Xerox got no return on their research, and simply let Apple take their research, which isn't true. Rather, it was part of the investment deal they made with Apple [1]: > Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.” Xerox clearly undervalued the research they were producing, but it wasn't like they just gave it away entirely. Per [2] the valuation of those shares in 2018 would be $1.2 billion had they not sold them - undervalued in hindsight, but not nothing. Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research. [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth [2]: https://researchnarrative.com/thinkerry/the-company-that-could-have-been-apple/ https://researchnarrative.com/thinkerry/the-company-that-cou...

moffkalast 1y ago

Yeah if you go check almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century it usually starts with "some guy was working in a corporate lab with an unlimited budget". We're stagnating as a species a lot more, but at least the shareholders got a payout for their hard work of doing literally nothing. Rent seeking at its worst.

terminalshort 1y ago
Yes, let's not pay out the investors. That's how you get lots of funding.
- moffkalast 1y ago
  You get funding by inventing and selling shit people need, not by pretending to be something people want. At least in a sane world it would be.
- kochikame 1y ago
  There needs to be a balance
mexicocitinluez 1y ago
lol hwut? Except for DNA, CRISPR, WWW, mRNA, the manhattan project, ARPA, GPS, etc
anonymousDan 1y ago
Umm, no. Maybe they have better PR departments than universities but this is clearly nonsense.
- mexicocitinluez 1y ago
  God, the irony in saying "All major research is done by companies" while typing your message out to post ON THE INTERNET. LOL.
  - philipallstar 1y ago