Just out of curiosity, what kind of development are you doing at the moment? Can imagine after so many years it gets harder to find a challenging project.
I was still working on symbolic AI but dropped it in 2021 in order to work on a more urgent problem, fighting climate change. So mostly it’s chemistry/engineering though there is also software to write.
Our standup was about building a test fixture for our lab.
The labs seemed to be renamed and organized from time to time so maybe there was politics I was too naive to see.
It was like google’s reputation 15-20 years ago: although Jeff ( my colleague today) and I didn’t work together we knew each other, also later knew each other from Stanford KSL/CSLI and later worked briefly together and work together today. I later worked for Doug Lenat at MCC (another research lab) whose office had been down hall from mine. And I still see other former PARC colleagues who are all over the Valley. So not an ivory tower.
That kind of "pure" research into aesthetics & synesthesia is more relevant today than ever ;)