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> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing

This was addressed in the article

> Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"

also this hilarious quote from Richard Hamming:

> "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as [Tukey] did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!

Yeah, that's the point of my next sentence. Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?

I think an answer to that was a lot clearer in the 1960's when going from idea to product was much harder.

"The only secret worth keeping is out: the damn things work".

What products could Shanon have made only knowing information theory? Or CSRO knowing only ODFM solved multipath? Did Bob Metcalf make more money when everyone had Ethernet or if he'd licensed it much more exclusively?

It's very hard for a single fundamental result to be a durable competitive advantage compared to wider licensing on nicer terms. That's particularly true when much else goes into the product.

Shannon did a lot more than just information theory. In fact, anyone who fits the autonomy persona does because that was part of the definition.

Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company.

If you see these idols through their singular achievements, then yes of course it's hard to imagine them outside the context of a lab, but rarely are these innovators one trick ponies.

By the way, Bob Metcalfe did indeed start his own company and became pretty successful in doing so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Artificial_Inte...

Maybe the 2025 Bell Labs is the wider ecosystem of VCs and free floating innovators who end up starting startups instead of doing things in house.

I do think there is a lot less low hanging fruit which makes the comparison apples and oranges. Google is like Bell Labs today, and what did they invent? LLMs? Compare that to information theory, the transistor, Unix, etc.

> Maybe the 2025 Bell Labs is the wider ecosystem of VCs and free floating innovators who end up starting startups instead of doing things in house.

Yep, agree with this statement. That's exactly what I think happened.

I have no idea what Bell Labs was like on the inside, but the startups I've been involved in didn't leave a lot of room for experimentation, trying and failing.

Quite the opposite, always a mad rush towards profit at any cost.

> Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company.

That almost seems like a problem! We shouldn't reward a prospective Claude Shannon for moving away from fundamental breakthroughs in favor of applied research that can go into a product. We're really failing to incentivize discovering fundamentals like information theory.

Bob Metcalfe made a lot of money by making Ethernet ubiquitous. He didn't capture a lot of the value because it cannot be captured.

>Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?

When an employer or occupation provides a fully respectable career for life, that's your job and it's fully respectable to have that be your life's work from that point onward, plus information theory doesn't represent the full 1% of what Shannon had to offer anyway :)

> Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?

Why would someone who is not motivated by financial gain care?

> I was motivated more by curiosity. I was never motivated by the desire for money, financial gain. I wasn't trying to do something big so that I could get a bigger salary.

— Claude Shannon

This has not been my experience at all. I worked on a team with substantial autonomy and agency for a few years, and most people—not everyone, sure, but almost—naturally rose to the occasion.

People want to do good work and people want to feel like they're doing good work. If you create an environment where they feel trusted and safe, they will rise to your expectations.

I had way more trouble with people working too hard but with misaligned ideas of what "good" meant—and stepping on each other's toes—than with anyone slacking off. It's easy to work around somebody who is merely ineffectual!

And, sure, a bunch of stuff people tried did not work out. But the things that did more than made up for it. Programming and quantitative modeling are inherently high-leverage activities; unless leadership manages out all the leverage in the name of predictability, the hits are going to more than make to for the flubs.

Doing work on a team isn't really what the article is discussing though. I'm referring to the very research-y skunkworks-style autonomy.

I am well aware that people in companies can work effectively on teams and that people rise to the occasion in that context. If it didn't work, companies wouldn't hire. But that's not what the article is about.

> it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy

Interesting, this is something that I'd love to do! I'm already planning on pursuing custom chip design for molecular simulation, but I don't really want to handle the business side of things. I'd much rather work in a paid lab than get rich and sell it off. Plus, you can do so much more with a team vs being independent.

I was also homeschooled though (unschooling and tjed philosophy) so I've always been picking my own projects. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of generalist researchers comes down to education (another thing I'd love to pursue).

“Smart people don’t need organizations anymore.” I get it—going solo is more appealing now than ever. But I can’t help thinking: some things really only happen in a kind of shared magnetic field. Not because you can’t do it alone, but because that moment when another smart person lights you up— that doesn’t happen in solo mode.

Yeah I completely agree. I see it more like the benefits of going solo have eclipsed the benefits of a team in an organization.

I don't think it's a strictly better environment but in many dimensions going solo is now better than any company. I do often long for that shared magnetic field though.

Eh. AI can empower the solo worker more than anyone else.

> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing.

This is 1) untrue, and 2) exactly the kind of cynical "humans-are-untrustworthy" thinking that is one of the reasons why Bell Labs don't exist today.

> After all, why wouldn't they? If they're putting in the innovation the equity is worth way more than a paycheck.

Because not everyone is driven by a need to make tons of money or the promise of a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. If they're well compensated and have enough to live comfortably (and/or care for their family) while being able to use their talents and innovate within their field, that itself is sufficient. This perverted VC-fueled mantra of "I must continually maximize the amount of money I make from my efforts at the expense of all else" is also part of the reason we don't have Bell Labs today.

> it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy (if you disagree ...)

I'm one of those people, but given the thinking that you articulate in your post, I'm not surprised you're unable to hire such people.

Coming at it the other way, someone is intellectually and philosophically free if they choose to be that way, full stop. They bend their neck to the yoke of an organization in order to gain what they could not gain themselves without access to capital.

For a small few, they can access capital and work for equity while themselves being maintained as they work. But I think it's very common that smart people chafe at the restrictions of their organization, not being able to find a more favorable situation.

Hypothetical slackers didn't stop great work from coming out of the lab. I'm not sure why today would be any different.

Hiring smart people who want freedom and autonomy is easy. Just give them freedom, autonomy, stability, and a good enough salary. The hard part is getting them to contribute to your business. Maybe they will contribute if they find it interesting. But if you expect them to contribute, you are clearly not giving them autonomy.

Many of the smartest people I know are good at ignoring bureaucratic requirements, or at least handling them with the minimum effort necessary. And that often includes business, which many of them see as a subcategory of bureaucracy.