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Comment by throwaw12 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how research works inside Product companies.

As an engineer working in a Product company, my focus switches between priorities set by PM and quarterly re-adjustments of the goals/strategies.

Can't imagine same thing can be done in research:

    * Hey, when are we releasing model for tracking any points?
    * Can you estimate how long it takes to fix the issue you found in tracking accuracy?

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I work as a researcher (ML for robotics) inside a product company so I can speak to this a little. The research I work on generally takes a year between conception and publication (three months of tinkering, six months of refinement and benchmarking, three months to write and submit a paper). Now, I work on more than one of these projects at a time but they all have a similar cadence (conference deadlines do that for you), and can be "measured" by management the same way a year-long engineering project is. The questions I'm asked (or ask myself) and the same as when I was a pure engineer. Are you making headway? Are you on schedule? Do you need help? Should this project be abandoned or rescoped if it's not succeeding? Etc.

Is Microsoft a Product company in your eyes? MSR has existed for a pretty long time and they seem to do a mix of self-directed research, publishing papers, etc, and talking to the other teams about the problems they have (eg excel getting FP or programming-by-example features had some MSR involvement. I don’t know how involved MSR were in stuff like some of the novel techniques used in bing or the RDMA-over-Ethernet things Microsoft tried to get to work in their datacentres (don’t recall if private or azure) – those things surely do count somewhat as research even if not MSR).

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