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I got an offer from MSR a while back. I remember asking, "so... how do you guys ship?" and they actually thought this was funny, laughing and laughing. "That's so cute!"

Because for them, it was an impossibility.

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Why would you expect a research lab to ship a product? Seems like you were interviewing with the wrong group.

A research lab shouldn't directly ship products, but there should be a path from research to productization. MSR seems to mostly lack this path.

It depends on the group. When I interviewed there recently, one of my interviewers was there in exactly this capacity (taking research into products).

It's also a non-goal. I used to work there. It was hard to see stuff ship since researchers seemed incentivized on some value of 'prominence' (research community and MS-internal).

Even in the cases where they productize it - the Program Manager on the product team is not going to get a bonus by taking on some new project in MSR in addition to the commitments filed last year.

So researchers get on just fine without slaying dragons to ship. More cool papers to publish anyway.

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