The Factory of Ideas: Working at Bell Labs [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Factory of Ideas: Working at Bell Labs [video]

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I was a much later generation (late 90s), but the end of the video has kind of a funny discussion on motivation: When you arrive at Bell and have access to a collection of amazing resources and amazing people and very few constraints, it's fairly unimaginable that you would piss that opportunity away.

The similarly named book "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner is a great read on the history of Bell Labs if you're interested in learning more.

I didn't know Brian Kernighan was RaspberryPi fan:

http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/babbage-bear

Great interview, the next video should be awesome as well.

I have a PhD and work at a top CS research lab. Been there for almost 7 years. I feel like a peon .. I have 3 people who tell me what to do. I have to work with people from every time zone and who don't speak proper English and have thick accents. I am not a native speaker btw. The old days of monopoly sponsored research are gone. The new reality sucks. Things aren't a whole lot better in academia from the people I have spoken to. Oh ... and I make low six figures in the US. It is better to just become a programmer.

low 6 figures as in 400k and below or as in 140k and below?

> I make low six figures in the US

Even in the good old days, people at Bell Labs were paid decently, but less than if they had gone into industry to really try to make money.

> Been there for almost 7 years. I feel like a peon .. I have 3 people who tell me what to do.

Well that part is different, in the old days they had more autonomy.

Wow, must have been awesome.

Found this cool timeline of programming languages: http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.h...

Open allocation at its best...

We need more of this to counter the MBA/Business closed allocation model.

I think the key came from this video in the first few minutes, when Kernighan talked about a Government Controlled Monopoly where Bell Labs got predictable fixed funding from ATT. I think this is the only way Open Allocation can work on such a scale.

Not really, companies like Apple/Microsoft are sitting on so much cash they can literally piss away billions on R&D and it would never threaten their viability (how much did Microsoft just write off on failed Nokia deal ?) - but it seems that modern corporate doesn't see this as valuable approach - I can only speculate why.

To be fair, that's what Apple did in the late 80s/early 90s, and it damned near killed them.

And Microsoft has been literally been pissing away billions on R&D for the last 10 years.

Sure but we are talking about Bell labs organizational structure - I haven't heard Microsoft doing such a thing in their R&D - I'd be interested to know if I'm wrong on this actually.

Bell Labs was massive. It had 11,000 people who were involved in pretty much every nukes and cranny ranging from cosmology to transistors to UNIX. Microsoft research probably comes closest to modern equivalent of Bell Labs and it has only 1000 people. So Bell Labs was like 10 MSR combined in to one!

It's really a pity we don't have anything like Bell Labs any more even though profits have grown by leaps and bound. As it is investors would be more than happy to shutdown something like MSR and constantly force the company to "justify" its existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Origin_and_historica...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research

I don't know if it's an entirely fair comparison to go by body count. Things have gotten a lot more efficient since the Bell Labs days. Even Richard Hamming stated "when I first started working there was a woman who walked around handing out the coffee and donuts, now a machine does that and her job no longer exists."

Some people claim that a basic income would lead to people doing nothing useful. Examples like these would seem to indicate otherwise.

I'm not certain that you can extrapolate the behaviors of highly-paid, highly educated engineers with the hypothetical behaviors of the typical person getting a subsistence allowance from the government.

> highly-paid

and you're saying BI wouldn't help with that?

> highly educated engineers

how do you think they got there? by being forced to be a wage slave, working long hours to come home completely burned out every night?

> and you're saying BI wouldn't help with that?

I think someone only earning BI probably wouldn't have the resources or motivation to do Bell Labs-style research.

> how do you think they got there? by being forced to be a wage slave, working long hours to come home completely burned out every night?

Unless you're implying that all of a sudden with the help of basic income, people's interests and preferences will change and result in a glut of engineering talent I don't see how it's at all relevant.

I don't read teddyh as saying that BI would lead to a boon in engineering research in particular. Rather, the example of the OP suggests that monetary incentives and short-term performance monitoring are not the only way (or even a good way) to encourage creative, productive work.

> I think someone only earning BI probably wouldn't have the resources or motivation to do Bell Labs-style research.

It's sure as hell better than earning $0, being forced to work some shit job 60 hrs a week at a SV startup providing SaaS full of proprietary software that will circle the drain in a few years, receiving money from a VC that truly doesn't give a shit about the greater good.

Instead said person could work 15hrs at that shit startup to live more comfortably, and spend the rest of their time working on ffmpeg or something. It doesn't have to always be Bell Labs tier.

> Unless you're implying that all of a sudden with the help of basic income, people's interests and preferences will change and result in a glut of engineering talent I don't see how it's at all relevant.

With BI many people will no longer be tied down to the rat race and will actually be able to work on themselves. It has nothing to do with interests and preferences. Time is money.

Incentivize completion of higher education & collaborative research projects?

Basic income could have qualifications attached to avoid the fears of what opponents would claim to be lazy or "leaches" of resources.

Of course figuring out how to balance the stipulations of such qualifications for BI, affordable public education, and public research & development projects against claims of abuse akin to the prison labor [1][2] or bloat of tuition from the near endless supply of student loans will likely be an interesting problem to solve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoner...

If basic income has qualifications, it is no longer basic income. That’s the whole point of basic income.

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