> and jealousy and a bit of dread for not being a part of something similar anymore.
In some corridor, somewhere in the world, the next Bell Labs is currently under way and others will read books about it in the future. You just have to figure out where it is :)
Quote: "The problem is that these huge cylinders, which can cost between $500,000 and $1 million each, are custom-made, and researchers say that only a few companies, like BlueFors in Finland and Oxford Instruments in the UK, are producing high-quality ones."
There, the next unicorn - why only UK & Finland and not a Silicon Valley start-up as well? In the end it's just tech that requires investment, and God help us, there are plenty of venture capitalists looking for next unicorn. I mean the quantum computing field is so hot these days that everyday you find a new article about it.
> IBM, Bell Labs, GE; who else should be on that list?
Intel felt quite a bit like IBM during my time there circa 2010.
I wasn't familiar with this quote, but wow was that my experience at large tech orgs. I wish I would have known this about 15 years ago, as perhaps I would have done a better job picking orgs to work at early in my career instead of being so frustrated.
> NeXT was like graduate school, bringing together a high concentration of some of the brightest and most innovative technical minds
This line really interests me. As someone graduating pretty soon - are there tech companies out there that that still have this culture? Everything seems marketing / product focused today. Besides going to graduate school, does anyone here feel like they are at a company like this?
> Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are the poster children for successful corporate R&D labs, but I wonder if, to some extent, they were in the right place at the right time? The dawn of modern computing and digital telephony provided rich soil for impactful research.
I think this is part of it. But als,o there were just so few companies who were doing serious R&D for technology. Breakthroughs were new and unique. These days there are so many different companies constantly innovating that breakthroughs are the expectation/norm.
Not at Bell Labs but I was already making progress individually using the approach he is talking about. As much as I could come up with on my own, I didn't know who Hamming was either.
But every single word of it rings true when you look at it.
This kind of thing is from a lost culture but regardless it can be found broadly useful in the 21st century.
> The obsession with status and notoriety and money to the complete exclusion of intellectual curiosity.
To me this resonates with the idea that FAANGs swallow up promising engineers and have them work on mundane problems to help generate revenue.
Certainly there are novel or interesting problems to be solved even in these mundane areas, but I wonder what we may be leaving on the table as a species - if many of these brilliant people were to focus their energies on other problems or research, what could we achieve?
Tangentially, are there positive (but not necessarily profitable) uses for the pile of cash that big tech is just sitting on?
> Firstly, technology moves fast but business's move slow.
True. This is one thing that gives me hope at the moment, especially since my country is notoriously slow in adopting technological chance anyway, lol. It's easy to forget that not everyone lives and works at the bleeding edge.
> If you are the one leading the charge then you're probably not the one they are going to get rid of when they start needing less developers.
Yeah, I am very curious and eager to learn by nature, and I grasp new concepts and their relationships to other topics quickly (other's words, not mine), but I've been burned before, so I've become more cautious. I don't fit the profile of a typical nerd so I lack credibility right off the bat even though I have outperformed self-proclaimed seniors on more than one occasion. I've found myself naturally unafraid of taking charge but sometimes people won't let you. For example, I was working on a project where I was technological lead and the dude from another agency we were working with (and kinda dependent on) was referring to me as (non-technical) "project manager" constantly and refused to talk to me about technical matters. Things like this have happened with middle-aged men quite often, who tend to dominate the field where I live. Sorry for the tangent but it might explain some of my cautiousness.
> But it's his dream and that's what he decide was best for him.
Glad to hear it felt right for him. I feel I'm not in a position where I can afford following my dream at the moment.
Charles Bolden runs NASA, represents a broadly optimistic about technology and globalization.
Peter Thiel represents the view of many people in Silicon Valley, which is that there are dark clouds on the horizon because we have relied on globalization to deliver growth for too long, and have (despite all the 'talk') neglected striving for improvements in technological change.
> true innovation is really hard and takes a lot of time and resources
It's like Bell Labs, but instead of helping the phone system make money, we help free software take over the world. That's a really interesting idea. I wonder how the technical staff are going to avoid starvation?
> Makes me wonder if the next tech giant is being founded right now in some garage.
There probably is. And now what? Don't go scouting all the garages in Da Valley just-yet, as basements/coffee shops/coworking spaces/campus dorms are The New Garage 2.0.
In some corridor, somewhere in the world, the next Bell Labs is currently under way and others will read books about it in the future. You just have to figure out where it is :)
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