

R, D and in between - itamarb
http://itamarbe.svbtle.com/r-d-and-in-between

======
Nursie
Having worked in a company that had such a split before, I'll admit to having
been a bit resentful of being on the 'D' side.

In many cases someone would decide that a particular problem (not a bug, but
maybe something like optimisation of threading strategy for scalability)
needed the 'R' folks to look into it. Invariably what came back weeks later
was something that I could have come up with in an afternoon, but without a
PhD I wasn't considered clever enough to put forward such stuff.

Still, apparently when the money was tight the Rs were the first to get
axed...

------
cven714
I feel silly for expecting this to be about the languages.

~~~
d23
Politics here. I guess ambiguity is a mirror.

------
joshdev
I agree that there is value in having a team handle both the research &
development phases. That said, you may not need the full team to handle
research. Not all team members may be interested in research related tasks or
have the discipline to execute effectively on them.

From a company standpoint the challenge is to make the research phase
valuable, even when the results are not positive. With limited resources, it
is tough to balance too much or too little research. As the phase is harder to
plan for, you are usually stuck with some timeboxed effort. There is immense
pressure for that timeboxed effort to provide some direction for moving
forward.

