During my teenage and college years in the 2000s, I was inspired by what I’ve read about Bell Labs, and I wanted to work as a computer science researcher in industry. I’ve also been inspired by Xerox PARC’s 1970s and 1980s researchers. I pursued that goal, and I’ve worked for a few industrial research labs before I switched careers to full-time community college teaching a few months ago.
One thing I lament is the decline of long-term, unfettered research across the industry. I’ve witnessed more companies switching to research management models where management exerts more control over the research directions of their employees, where research directions can abruptly change due to management decisions, and where there is an increased focus on profitability. I feel this short-term approach will cost society in the long term, since current funding models promote evolutionary work rather than riskier, potentially revolutionary work.
As someone who wanted to become a researcher out of curiosity and exploration, I feel alienated in this world where industry researchers are harangued about “delivering value,” and where academic researchers are pressured to raise grant money and to publish. I quit and switched to a full teaching career at a community college. I enjoy teaching, and while I miss the day-to-day lifestyle of research, I still plan to do research during my summer and winter breaks out of curiosity and not for career advancement.
It would be great if there were more opportunities for researchers to pursue their interests. Sadly, though, barring a cultural change, the only avenues I see for curiosity-driven researchers are becoming independently wealthy, living like a monk, or finding a job with ample free time. I’m fortunate to have the latter situation where I have 16 weeks per year that I could devote outside my job.
Okay, I'm really in a sad mood, so: tell me there will be places like that, again, somewhere, ever ?
We need this. Like, really, we need someone to have created the xerox part of the 21st century, somewhere about 20 years ago.
I honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know.
I know, I know, DeepMind and OpenAI and xAI are supposed to fix climate change any time soon, and cure cancer while they invent cold fusion etc, etc... and it's only because I'm a pessimistic myopist that I can only see them writing fake essays and generating spam, bad me.
Still. Assuming I'm really grumpy and want to talk about people doing research that affects the physical world in positive way - who's doing that on the scale of PARC or Bell ?
Everyone wants Bell Labs, but not the thing that made it possible — high corporate profit taxes. They were making bucket loads of monopoly money and had to put it somewhere or taxes would it away.
> RCA Laboratories/the Sarnoff Research Center is surely one of the most important of the American corporate labs with similarities to Bell Labs. (It features prominently in Bob Johnstone's We Were Burninghttps://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... : it has a big role in the history of the Japanese semiconductor industry, in large part because of its roles in the development of the transistor and the LCD and its thirst for patent-licensing money.)
>> In Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik argues that by the 1990s PARC was no longer engaged in such unrestricted research decoupled from product development.
> According to Hiltzik and most other sources, the PARC Computer Science Lab's salad days were over as early as 1983, when Bob Taylor was forced to leave, while the work of the other PARC labs focussed on physics and materials science wasn't as notable in the period up to then.
Seriously: if this kind of thing interests you at all, go and read We Were Burning.
linguae ·7 days ago
One thing I lament is the decline of long-term, unfettered research across the industry. I’ve witnessed more companies switching to research management models where management exerts more control over the research directions of their employees, where research directions can abruptly change due to management decisions, and where there is an increased focus on profitability. I feel this short-term approach will cost society in the long term, since current funding models promote evolutionary work rather than riskier, potentially revolutionary work.
As someone who wanted to become a researcher out of curiosity and exploration, I feel alienated in this world where industry researchers are harangued about “delivering value,” and where academic researchers are pressured to raise grant money and to publish. I quit and switched to a full teaching career at a community college. I enjoy teaching, and while I miss the day-to-day lifestyle of research, I still plan to do research during my summer and winter breaks out of curiosity and not for career advancement.
It would be great if there were more opportunities for researchers to pursue their interests. Sadly, though, barring a cultural change, the only avenues I see for curiosity-driven researchers are becoming independently wealthy, living like a monk, or finding a job with ample free time. I’m fortunate to have the latter situation where I have 16 weeks per year that I could devote outside my job.
Show replies
phtrivier ·7 days ago
We need this. Like, really, we need someone to have created the xerox part of the 21st century, somewhere about 20 years ago.
I honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know.
I know, I know, DeepMind and OpenAI and xAI are supposed to fix climate change any time soon, and cure cancer while they invent cold fusion etc, etc... and it's only because I'm a pessimistic myopist that I can only see them writing fake essays and generating spam, bad me.
Still. Assuming I'm really grumpy and want to talk about people doing research that affects the physical world in positive way - who's doing that on the scale of PARC or Bell ?
Show replies
Swizec ·7 days ago
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kranke155 ·7 days ago
And it was all done, apparently, at least in the beginning, because they hired smart people and they let them do what they wanted.
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leoc ·7 days ago
> RCA Laboratories/the Sarnoff Research Center is surely one of the most important of the American corporate labs with similarities to Bell Labs. (It features prominently in Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... : it has a big role in the history of the Japanese semiconductor industry, in large part because of its roles in the development of the transistor and the LCD and its thirst for patent-licensing money.)
>> In Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik argues that by the 1990s PARC was no longer engaged in such unrestricted research decoupled from product development.
> According to Hiltzik and most other sources, the PARC Computer Science Lab's salad days were over as early as 1983, when Bob Taylor was forced to leave, while the work of the other PARC labs focussed on physics and materials science wasn't as notable in the period up to then.
Seriously: if this kind of thing interests you at all, go and read We Were Burning.