Comment by saboot
3 years ago
Every once in a while these articles about Bell Labs or Google X, etc. come up, and I'm always amazed that our national network of government funded research labs are never brought up.
Quantum Computing, new encryption methods, neuromorphic computing, tons of cool stuff. All stuff being worked on by some of the smartest people, at our national labs. Some are more security focused than others (Sandia, Los ALamos) but others (LBNL, LLNL) are very diverse in their research areas.
And they collaborate with businesses to bring their work into the real world.
Are they just not well known enough? It's a great alternative to universities that is more research focused, publication track records aren't as important.
The national labs do pretty cool stuff, but I don't think it was as freeform as the original ARPA with Licklider and Bell Labs research. My understand is that the success of those programs where that they funded ideas and people and not projects. Nowadays, that is extremely rare, and for the most part, the national labs are highly focused on projects. There is not much speculative research on things that could fail. Really, the same goes for a lot of academia.
That's not to say that the projects at the national labs aren't interesting. They're very interesting, difficult, and challenging. But it would be nice if cells within them had much longer time-frames of ten years and beyond for transformational technology.
The other issue is that ARPA, Bell Labs, PARC Research, and the like were also catalyzed by their time. They were absolutely ahead of their time with the solutions they came up with, but the 20th century was ripe for the picking for transformational technologies.
I have worked at a National Lab previously. For the computational field I worked in BigTech and most startups pay much more and have better access to resources.
If you’re a decent programmer at a National Lab now you can work on interesting problems at a startup for likely double your current salary. You can also immediately spin up and spend $500 in AWS without anyone batting an eye, at a National lab you’ll generally only have access to one type of compute (supercluster) and you have to wait days or weeks for your turn.
I think this is one major difference between the golden age of Bell Labs and now. I think if you want to recreate that you have to try and at least compete on the hiring playing field that BigTech is.
The national labs are a huge asset I wish more people knew about. You get to work on interesting, meaningful projects, are given access to all the expertise, training, and development resources you could reasonably want, and have a relatively secure job with a good work-life balance.
I often talk to graduate students in STEM fields about their career prospects, many of whom are interested in software development, but are disillusioned with the career paths academia, FAANG, and the standard tech companies have to offer. Many of them just aren't aware of what the labs have to offer when I bring it up, unless their faculty advisor is in some way involved.
I looked into working at a national lab after grad school. It seemed like way too many of the openings were post doc positions with a two year contract that was supposed to come with a research proposal. No thanks. I have no interest in spending two months writing a proposal so I can make a 60k salary for two years and then get let go. It's hard to be disillusioned about FAANG when that's the alternative.
Yikes, it sounds like they want a huge contract workforce of dubious quality.
When Bell Labs was doing cool stuff, few people knew about them.
It's only retrospectively that they are famous, because we have all those historical tech figures that went there and got blown away. Then this bubble expended, and year later, it became public, common knowledge.
It may happen the same way for the places you are talking about.
> And they collaborate with businesses to bring their work into the real world.
and they collaborate with nearby schools: i took physics in high school at Fermilab, for example, and it was super inspiring and accessible.