Bell Labs Org Chart (1980) | Hacker News Reader

Bell Labs Org Chart (1980)

neil.computer

172 pointsneilpanchal71 comments

This really confirmed visually for me something that I started to think was just in my head: I miss working with adults.

Since I've been in tech over 35 was "old", even among "senior" leadership. I had memories of when this wasn't the case (I even worked in a old style office where literally everyone had their own office with a door), but I thought maybe it was just a function of me being much younger then.

What's remarkable in these images is that there is a range of ages and at the same time it's obviously not a gerontocracy. I can't remember the last time I worked with someone that had gray hair.

The last several teams I've worked with I remember a constant sense of everyone trying to figure out what to do. When you look at resumes you can see why, nearly everyone has worked at one or two places and only worked for at most 5 years. On any of these teams everyone would still be considered "kids" with a lot to learn about patience and how to solve hard problems.

I seriously wonder what has happened to older people in tech, and sometimes wonder if one day I'll be taken out back and find out.

A big factor is the rise of VC doing spike projects. We fund a group of very young, energetic people, gas them up on an idea, and burn them to validate a concept. Sometimes they make out well, and sometimes they fail completely, and sometimes they get fully screwed by liquidation preferences and other ridiculousness. It rises to the level of exploitation in a lot of cases.

many of us are still here, and wonder why these young'uns are reinventing the wheel everytime :-P

Other times, I wished to go back to the simpler days of X windows, latex/postscript, instead of this newfangled another-react-framework-that-promises-to-make-things-easier ala xkcd 927

Others of us became disenchanted and moved on.

I'm a data science department head. I've been trained to divide the world into supervised and unsupervised learning problems. Over the past few years, I've started reading old books, and it's amazing how clever pre-WWW computer scientists were. A few pages of Knuth can reveal a deterministic and fast-running algorithm for a problem that I would otherwise approach with some ML library.

I think there's more than just ageism involved as to why there aren't more older folks in tech.

I think a major reason is simple demographics. There weren't a lot of folks graduating with CS degrees in the 90's, and quite few before that. There simply weren't a lot of older folks to hire.

That said, I've been fortunate in my career. I currently work for a FAANG/MAANA company. I'm in my mid-40's, and many of my colleagues and report chain are older than myself.

At a former employer I still keep in touch with, the software team has 1 in their 50's, 1 in their 60's, and 1 in their 70's. They all have other engineering or physics degrees.

Not only are they not all in their 20s, they also sport some ladies. And if I'm not mistaken, they all appear to be my fellow nerds. No tech bros in the bunch. I bet their office gatherings didn't involve shotskis or beer pong!

Praise be to COVID, the returner of offices with doors! I really missed mine. No views of the mountains anymore from my middle of the country office window, but I'll accept it. Also, praise almighty COVID for delivering me from office drinking games.

That jumped out at me, too.

I worked at an R&D lab on the East Coast early in my career, and there was such a great mix of young and old engineers. Many of the older engineers were legends and they knew so much. The pay wasn’t great by Silicon Valley standards, but nobody seemed to mind, perhaps because the work was fulfilling and they knew they weren’t viewed as disposable. Of course, costs of living were much lower too.

Fast forward fifteen years and I work at a Silicon Valley software company staffed by a constantly churning roster of 20-somethings. I’m the old man in my late thirties. It really is bizarre.

It could be you are at the wrong firm. I’ve purposefully made “some gray hair in the exec suite” as a corporate criteria, and it’s worked out.

Electronic design automation skews older, we have more gray hair than most tech.

The median Netflix employee is definitely close to 40, and probably still up there if you only look at individual contributors.

A lot of older engineers go into management, because as much lip service companies pay to "equal tracks for engineering and management", it's way easier to move up in management than engineering.

That being said, I've worked with a lot of Amazon engineers in their 40s and 50s, and same at Netflix, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

So it seems like the big companies that can pay the big salaries are where a lot of older engineers end up. That and hardware engineering. The places that actually make chips or software to design chips seem to have a lot of older engineers.

> I seriously wonder what has happened to older people in tech, and sometimes wonder if one day I'll be taken out back and find out.

Assuming moderate financial literacy, haven’t they all switched careers or retired?

I think the job market has just grown so much that their share in it gets diluted so strongly. Trying to hire senior engineers is harder than hiring juniors

> On any of these teams everyone would still be considered "kids" with

Yeah, this is a problem. And theyre all senior engineers because they shipped some k8s integration junk at their previous gig.

Wonder how this started... someone must have identified the talent inefficiency and realized there are young people out there with massive talent doing non senior level work. They optimized for this and just as netflix is running out of subscribers so is true that this talent pool can also be exhausted. A bunch of me-too companies wanted in on the cheap talent gravy train, started age discriminating and it was too late. but worse, didn't know why they were doing it.

I worked at Bell Labs from mid-1980 until 1990 as a contractor - termed "Resident Visitor" in the org chart. I don't recall our department title but we were at the Indian Hill facility near Naperville IL and worked on the 3B-20D reliable processor and operating system that was supposed to be the core of switching systems. I remember a lot more women in our department in both tech and management roles than the department in the directory. The Research Department in Murray Hill NJ would be the interesting org chart with all the big names of Unix legend. The offices for individual contributors were two persons sharing with kind of T-shaped desk arrangement that made playing backgammon at lunchtime very convenient.

From the text:

> I can't name a single thing from Google X or Amazon 126, Apple or Microsoft Research departments.

This is a very narrow way of looking at who's making things of value.

Let's take a single example out of those companies mentioned: Apple's iPhone and the demand it generated for smartphones, pushed many industries to invest in research, development and mass production of high resolution, low cost, low power screens, low power (and now even faster than desktop workstations) compute in small form factor SoC, ever so small low noise and high resolution camera sensors and lenses, faster, higher bandwidth, cheaper and more widely accessible cell networks, and so on and on and on...

Take any single one of the above components/infrastructure and one can list 100 products of value stemming from its cheap and widespread availability. Apple didn't just make a phone, it changed computing forever (something Jobs would probably say on stage) in span of a few years.

Also, did you forget https://research.google/ or just ignored it? There are mind numbing number of research papers *with* corresponding global scale real products used by millions/billions of people, that based on those research.

I am sick of people glorifying the past when today, right under their noses, exists orders of magnitude greater research and innovation. Their title may not be sweet and straightforward like "invention of the telephone" but that's how progress works — the more you move forward, the more nuanced and specific things get.

Agreed.

> Perhaps a faint idea of drones deliveries, balloon weather projects, AR/VR tech, failed chat apps, quantum something, and a lot of PR.

This line dismisses the huge achievements in quantum engineering as "quantum something" and, just for example, ignores other high profile breakthroughs like AlphaGo and AlphaFold. I'd also say that many of the profound inventions invented at Bell Labs would not be fully appreciated until decades later, and will be the same case with today's research.

> Apple didn't just make a phone, it changed computing forever

I though that smartphones were a kind of inevitable outcome of technological advancement, and that many other similar products where already out there.

I have to agree that Apple's marketing was spot on, as it still works to this date.

Marketing is not why the iPhone took off, there is substance there even if you don't agree. A full UNIX kernel, capacitive touchscreen, low latency / high perf OS, 3rd party apps and a bunch of UX innovations. Yes everything existed individually but so did all the parts to make most groundbreaking products.

The capacitive touch screen and its features were the one thing that catalyzed the revolution. OS-wise, many competing phones were more high performance/low latency, and the app store didn't exist for years.

So LG could have become Apple but for some poor UI decisions and worse marketing - they released their own capacitive-screen phone, the LG Prada, a month _before_ Apple, but cheaped out on the UI development: no on-screen keyboard, and not using the touch screen to its potential with scroll/page-turn gestures.

That's a circular argument and easy to say with hindsight. Apple is where it is precisely because it invested in making it happen.

iPhone was a triumph of product engineering. I had a Palm Windows Mobile device that was awesome in 2004. It gave me superpowers.

But, iPhone just hit it out of the park on a bunch of different levels. From the architecture, the software, UX and having the balls to tell Verizon to fuck off, they hit a home run.

The reason we know so much about bell labs is the same reason you know about certain peoples eating habits - they tell you.

AT&T was a ruthless monopoly. The mythical image of bell labs was crafted and maintained partially to keep congress and regulators at bay.

I think you’re very naive as to how revolutionary the discoveries and inventions of Bell Labs truly were. Apple is not doing any fundamental research the way Bell Labs did. Every piece of electronics today uses transistors originally patented by BL. Bell Labs in 80 is like Microsoft 10 years ago. What real inventions had they come up with then? They’ve been a monopoly for 25+ years and what have they produced?

There’s lots of ground breaking work being done at labs today, I just don’t think they’ll be winning Nobels like Bell Labs was. Bell Labs has 9 Nobel prizes. Make a measurable claim on how many google research will get, and I’ll wager against it.

> Every piece of electronics today uses transistors originally patented by BL

And understanding quantum mechanics really enabled transistors, so the folks making the transistor didn't really do anything fundamental. Oh, and calculus in mathematics enabled understanding of quantum mechanics really, so all the physicist did was put a bunch of math symbols together, mathematics is the real innovation here — you see where I'm going with this?

A "Center" was managed by a third level manager titled "Director" with "Department Heads" and group "Supervisors" reporting to them. An alternative organizational name was the "Laboratory", also managed by a "Director".

Above that were "Divisions" managed by "Executive Directors". Divisions were in "Areas" managed by Vice Presidents, and Vice Presidents reported to Executive Vice Presidents and then to Presidents.

This appears to be a Center which prepared the official design documentation that was sent to the engineer for manufacture at Western Electric who would then work out the manufacturing processes need to produce the equipment for the telephone companies. It appears to have supported the Transmission area and the Customer Premises equipment area.

The Idea Factory, written by John Gertner, covers the almost inconceivable amount of innovation that came out of Bell Labs from the turn of last century to the 1980s. The names of the people who worked there reads like a text of 20th century physics, electrical engineering, and computer science.

Working on ideas for an organisational design research project I was taken aback by the realisation that the old directories in my organisation were a treasure trove of information on what the organisation was, and how peoples careers evolved in the past. Very upsettingly this treasure trail stopped in 1999 when the intranet took it all online and the data vanished. Does training a cohort have any impact on attrition and career development - we shall never know, short of running a 20 year project. The observational data is gone.

So either, this was a very progressive place or it is sad when the directors had a woman directly next to them but without even a role (like secretary or assistant). Seems like the gender was then enough to classify as an assistant on the higher roles.

Sad.

And second thing: A printed org chart with pictures in it. As if they had a stable work culture for more than one months ... oh wait ... that was normal once ;)

No one had titles/roles next to their name.

The contemporary obsession with identity is ... Sad.

It's remarkable how much cash Big Tech has and how little they do with it. They could start massive R&D centers that do fundamental research like Bell Labs. If they return cash to shareholders as stock buybacks, they'd self-indict they're no longer growing. Want innovation in USA? Big Corp needs to invest and employees need to pressure them because shareholders sure as hell wouldn't. Big Tech has little national interest, they're all global international corporations [1] – I really don't mean to start a national interst comment war, I am pointing out that they can invest if they so desire to. As of Nov, Apple has $190B, Alphabet $168B, Microsoft $137B and Amazon $86B in cash [2].

[1] This story got little coverage. $275 Billion. That's more than what Intel just announced yesterday to invest in Ohio. I consider 'The Information' best in class of SV reporting, yet not a peep from any major news source afaik: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...

[2] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...

Well Microsoft has 68 Billion less now.... ;)

but I agree with your comment, most of Silicon Valley has been Anti-American for a number of decades now. They just want to extract from America

Why should they necessarily put the sole R&D center in America? They are all international companies, unlike the old AT&T.

Indeed. Almost all the industrial research companies have a lab outside the U.S. for maximizing talent acquisition and for other useful things like local funding and tax reasons.

I would not say they need to put all of them, but some of them would be useful.

I do wonder if people would have the same opinion is they were putting those research dollars Russia, or North Korea, etc?

Apple directly employs 80,000 people in the USA, and I believe pays the highest tax amount of any single US corporation. What are you even talking about?

How many of those are in Bell Labs style R&D.

Also paying taxes is not being pro-america, or patriotic, or anything like that.

You can have lots of employees, pay lots of taxes and still be anti-american

Hell I believe the income tax is theft so highlighting how much apple pays in taxes even if your statement is true has nothing to do with what I am talking about

I think MSR and Google Brain are counter examples, in that, they do a lot of research and put it in public domain.

Apple doesn’t do much of this —- they’ve never really done it. It makes one wonder why.

Apple used to have a group doing basic CS research in the MSR vein in the 80’s and 90’s. IIRC, Steve killed it when he came back in ‘97 because Apple was literally running out of money and they needed to concentrate resources on resurrecting the basic product lines to have any future at all.

Things like lasers and the discovery Cosmic Background Radiation come from Bell Labs. And oh yeah, they also did this little operating system and a quirky successful programming language, but that's far from the only thing that was (and is) done at Bell Labs.

Microsoft Research and Google Brain are much more focused on computer stuff and future product development. That's all fine, but really in a different class. I don't think we'll see them get a Nobel Prize for fundamental discoveries in physics, chemistry, biology, etc. anytime soon.

I wonder how much of this is pragmatism. The current method of growth seems to be acquisition vs. funding in-house R&D. This makes a certain amount of sense because it means ideas have longer to be validated before committing funds to them.

I think the centralized Bell Labs approach affords long-term research whereas startups are narrowly focused, interested in exit, strapped up and duct-taped underneath – 'like building an airplane while it is flying', inexperienced, VC-pressured, and less resourceful. Good point though, that's where Big Tech spends cash - acquisition. I was searching a bit more and Big Tech has been doing a bit of stock buybacks as well.

That would cut into MBA bonuses. Open-ended research is a cost center.

Bell Telephone had a government monopoly on their primary line of business. They had the luxury of being able to spend money on pure research without worrying about the competition.

Big Tech is essentially constantly fighting to not appear as monopolies. They for all intents and purposes, monopolies or duopolies.

> In a 449-page report that was presented by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic leadership, lawmakers said the four companies had turned from “scrappy” start-ups into “the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” The lawmakers said the companies had abused their dominant positions, setting and often dictating prices and rules for commerce, search, advertising, social networking and publishing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/technology/congress-big-t...

This is nonsense because, in the same era, IBM, HP and others (later Sun) ran R&D labs that published some of the most highly-regarded research journals available anywhere.

Times have changed a lot for the clothing as well. The suits with shirt and ties are mostly replaced by t-shirts and hoodies, and I haven't seen a tie in Google Research.

There's a career hack there - go into work in a suit and tie and stand out from the crowd!

hope you don't mind me sharing this to a mostly disused subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BellLabs/comments/sagzx8/scans_of_a...

if anyone would like to adopt the subreddit let me know, I'll turn over moderation to anyone interested in preserving this history.

There are sure a lot of art and drafting groups in that book. I wonder how much of it would now be done by CAD software used directly by circuit designers.

Bell has a great historical material just watch the redesign presentation of Saul Basso in the 70s! [0] I had so many marketing meetings with worse presentations just a week ago.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI

Interesting how the organization was broken out.

What is the difference between "Engineering Information" and "Computer and Engineering Information" groups?

Bell, at the time, had a lot of non-computer pursuits like switches and microwave antennas. Engineering was a lot more than writing code back then.

I work at AT&T Labs, one of Bell's heritor institutions, and we still do work that intersects with switches & telephony hardware

> Engineering was a lot more than writing code back then.

(It still is!)

I found my father-in-law, and I found a guy I went to school with. The former worked in Columbus, Ohio, and the latter was also from Ohio. I wouldn't be surprised if all of Department 375 was in Columbus.

Neat bit of history! I'd have enjoyed seeing one of these for whatever group dmr et al. was in (doesn't seem to be in this one of the "Design Engineering Center 375").

The title got my hopes up that it was all of Bell Labs :(.

DMR's lab number in that era would have been 1127, the famous Computing Science Research Center, for those of you who remember email addresses on "research" (not research.somecompany.com, just "research"). The actual research branch of Bell Labs was area 11, so lab 1127 was two levels down in the org chart. Area 11 itself was headed by Arno Penzias, famous for (with Bob Wilson) co-discovering the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation after finding they couldn't get the last bits of electrical noise out of their microwave antenna output no matter how often they cleaned the bird poop off of it, so they had to look for other sources. He and Wilson won the 1978 physics Nobel for that.

I believe I saw a single female manager. I would imagine that was about average representationally for tech companies of that era?

This company had higher standards for their org chart than our modern production systems. Sheesh, what happened. Sad.

What do the prefixes before the names mean?

First/middle initial

The second line is what they go by

So Robert S. Williams might be:

R. S. Williams

Bob

>excellent albeit slightly inaccurate summary

First I'm hearing about the inaccuracies. Any more information about that?

Wondering the same. I really enjoyed that book.

I enjoyed the book very much, later found this review [1] that highlights some issues with it. I've updated the article with a link to the review.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R10ZINB4B9O5I3

By chance, has anyone OCR'd it to make the text searchable?

Here's a copy that has been OCRed by ABBYY. https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/m-various/bell-labs-direct...

If you’re on an iOS device, Safari will search the text in the images which I thought was quite neat.

https://ibb.co/7j8kgvs

This looks a lot like a face book.

Who is D. Millerick Dan?

Ken?

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