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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I miss when companies invested in R&D. Just think if companies paid you 1-2 hours of your day to do either R&D or open source projects, how many advancements we could have. Theres all sorts of open source projects stalled because not enough time or money.

I imagine some might fix bugs management isnt prioritizing, or performance issues, and so on.

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It does happen like that, lot's of departments within big companies have R&D focus with time dedicated to development/discovery. The problem is that the output is captured. If it doesn't end up in a product, the general public will never know

Unfortunately the tax treatment no longer incentivizes this. Accounting practices that in the past allowed for this activity to be booked as an asset are no longer in use. Lower corporate rates no longer necessitate liability offsets that in the past fueled r&d budgets. Instead we have stock buy backs! Yippee!

Apparently Disney is playing the long game.

It still happens, but it’s getting more challenging due to outsourcing of manufacturing.

tech companies still invest in R&D, but that's mostly adtech these days

that sounds really sad

agreed... we should rename it sadtech

Closest to R&D we're getting is hackathons and the like, and in practice it's trying out new technology that someone else developed; coming up and developing something new in IT is really difficult, and said development takes time for which you need buy-in first.

That said, I'm sure there's still dedicated R&D at companies like Google and the like. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Hopefully its not wasted on someone replacing Google Talk, Hangouts, Allo and whatever else is left.

While I agree with the sentiment in your first paragraph, I think the idea of the second sounds like either working sub-optimally (fixing bugs that don’t need fixing) or else too much management ineptitude to overcome by fixing critical bugs for a couple hours per day that management just wants to ignore.

Every bug needs fixing. Some are just more profitable to fix.

The number of dumb bugs that make your company look incompetent, but never get fixed because fixing non-critical bugs is always low priority, is insane.

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