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The Factory of Ideas: Working at Bell Labs [video]
- hwstar 11y agoOpen allocation at its best... We need more of this to counter the MBA/Business closed allocation model.
- greenNote 11y agoI think the key came from this video in the first few minutes, when Kernighan talked about a Government Controlled Monopoly where Bell Labs got predictable fixed funding from ATT. I think this is the only way Open Allocation can work on such a scale.
- moonchrome 11y agoNot really, companies like Apple/Microsoft are sitting on so much cash they can literally piss away billions on R&D and it would never threaten their viability (how much did Microsoft just write off on failed Nokia deal ?) - but it seems that modern corporate doesn't see this as valuable approach - I can only speculate why.
- angersock 11y agoTo be fair, that's what Apple did in the late 80s/early 90s, and it damned near killed them.
- herge 11y agoAnd Microsoft has been literally been pissing away billions on R&D for the last 10 years.
- moonchrome 11y agoSure but we are talking about Bell labs organizational structure - I haven't heard Microsoft doing such a thing in their R&D - I'd be interested to know if I'm wrong on this actually.
- sytelus 11y agoBell Labs was massive. It had 11,000 people who were involved in pretty much every nukes and cranny ranging from cosmology to transistors to UNIX. Microsoft research probably comes closest to modern equivalent of Bell Labs and it has only 1000 people. So Bell Labs was like 10 MSR combined in to one! It's really a pity we don't have anything like Bell Labs any more even though profits have grown by leaps and bound. As it is investors would be more than happy to shutdown something like MSR and constantly force the company to "justify" its existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Origin_and_historical_locations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Origin_and_historica... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
- burger_moon 11y agoI don't know if it's an entirely fair comparison to go by body count. Things have gotten a lot more efficient since the Bell Labs days. Even Richard Hamming stated "when I first started working there was a woman who walked around handing out the coffee and donuts, now a machine does that and her job no longer exists."
- iamjs 11y agoThe similarly named book "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner is a great read on the history of Bell Labs if you're interested in learning more.
- jpmattia 11y agoI was a much later generation (late 90s), but the end of the video has kind of a funny discussion on motivation: When you arrive at Bell and have access to a collection of amazing resources and amazing people and very few constraints, it's fairly unimaginable that you would piss that opportunity away.
- teddyh 11y agoSome people claim that a basic income would lead to people doing nothing useful. Examples like these would seem to indicate otherwise.
- joshuapants 11y agoI'm not certain that you can extrapolate the behaviors of highly-paid, highly educated engineers with the hypothetical behaviors of the typical person getting a subsistence allowance from the government.
- pikachu_is_cool 11y ago> highly-paid and you're saying BI wouldn't help with that? > highly educated engineers how do you think they got there? by being forced to be a wage slave, working long hours to come home completely burned out every night?
- joshuapants 11y ago> and you're saying BI wouldn't help with that? I think someone only earning BI probably wouldn't have the resources or motivation to do Bell Labs-style research. > how do you think they got there? by being forced to be a wage slave, working long hours to come home completely burned out every night? Unless you're implying that all of a sudden with the help of basic income, people's interests and preferences will change and result in a glut of engineering talent I don't see how it's at all relevant.
- chockablock 11y agoI don't read teddyh as saying that BI would lead to a boon in engineering research in particular. Rather, the example of the OP suggests that monetary incentives and short-term performance monitoring are not the only way (or even a good way) to encourage creative, productive work.
- pikachu_is_cool 11y ago
- throwthrow123 11y agoI have a PhD and work at a top CS research lab. Been there for almost 7 years. I feel like a peon .. I have 3 people who tell me what to do. I have to work with people from every time zone and who don't speak proper English and have thick accents. I am not a native speaker btw. The old days of monopoly sponsored research are gone. The new reality sucks. Things aren't a whole lot better in academia from the people I have spoken to. Oh ... and I make low six figures in the US. It is better to just become a programmer.
- shawndumas 11y agolow 6 figures as in 400k and below or as in 140k and below?
- Ologn 11y ago> I make low six figures in the US Even in the good old days, people at Bell Labs were paid decently, but less than if they had gone into industry to really try to make money. > Been there for almost 7 years. I feel like a peon .. I have 3 people who tell me what to do. Well that part is different, in the old days they had more autonomy.
- kirk21 11y agoWow, must have been awesome. Found this cool timeline of programming languages: http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1KcZdsCI3G832QTfx3kCn8zcxi8jH2qFWttB-xuPjYTM&font=Default&lang=en&height=650 http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.h...
- tambourine_man 11y agoI didn't know Brian Kernighan was RaspberryPi fan: http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/babbage-bear http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/babbage-bear Great interview, the next video should be awesome as well.