
The Factory of Ideas: Working at Bell Labs [video] - hwstar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFK6RG47bww
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jpmattia
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.

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iamjs
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.

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tambourine_man
I didn't know Brian Kernighan was RaspberryPi fan:

[http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/babbage-
bear](http://swag.raspberrypi.org/products/babbage-bear)

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

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throwthrow123
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.

~~~
Ologn
> 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.

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kirk21
Wow, must have been awesome.

Found this cool timeline of programming languages:
[http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.h...](http://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1KcZdsCI3G832QTfx3kCn8zcxi8jH2qFWttB-
xuPjYTM&font=Default&lang=en&height=650)

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hwstar
Open allocation at its best...

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

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greenNote
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.

~~~
moonchrome
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.

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

~~~
sytelus
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/Bell_Labs#Origin_and_historical_locations)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research)

~~~
burger_moon
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."

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

~~~
joshuapants
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.

~~~
nosuchthing
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States)

[2] [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-
prisoner...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoners-
make-victorias-secret)

~~~
teddyh
If basic income has qualifications, it is no longer basic income. That’s the
_whole point_ of basic income.

