Comment by user_7832
2 years ago
I have a question for anyone in an R&D/Bell Labs-esque place - are there any good recommendations for similar places to work, particularly outside the US? "Old" Google apparently was, but going by what ex-googlers have been saying it hasn't been the case for a long while now.
If you are in the UK Deepmind seemed to be that way to me when I applied. A lot of research groups doing hard research in a wide array of fields, cutting edge AI stuff, a core team of SEs developing in house programs for researchers, and research engineers for productionization. And no, I didn't get the job lol.
I've heard mixed things about it as a company but GResearch (also UK) seemed like an interesting R&D software / math mix in the vein of investment banking. I applied there over ten years ago so YMMV at this point, who knows.
I work at a very successful HFT. It’s a special place, but we’re not advancing the state of the art in fundamental science like the Bell Labs/Microsoft Researches of the world.
Sorry, what's HFT?
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Citadel or Jump?
What are you advancing?
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Thanks for your suggestions! I'm currently in The Netherlands but I'll keep these in mind (though they sound more "math-ey" than engineering-ey but that's fine).
>though they sound more "math-ey" than engineering-ey
Isn't math necessary for most real-world engineering, and even in CS research? And what were you expecting? You asked for a cutting edge Bell-Labs type of R&D place, and that's what research is all about, even in CS.
You'll work with a lot of new yet-unproven theoretical concepts for which you need a lot of math to prove they have a high chance of working in practice and being better than existing solutions, before someone approves budget for the costly development and implementation of an actual product.
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Microsoft Research, though it has a reputation for coming up with great ideas that somehow never end-up in a shipping Microsoft product.
Thanks, I've found some of their design guidelines have legitimately changing my worldview (eg situational disabilities).
For some that's a plus!
For me a negative:
If I remember correctly, MSR worked on a practical implementation of Code-Contracts for C# which incorporated the (all-important) compile-time verification of method preconditions, postconditions, and class invariants (without the need for hand-written refinement-types, which is how we do things today): as I understand it, the compile-time part of system could support any assertion represented as a pure-function - think of it as C#'s take on Ada's assertions, improved tenfold, and it even shipped for a now-unsupported older version of C# and .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/debug-tra...
...and it was axed in .NET Core back in 2016 and hasn't been seen since: https://github.com/microsoft/CodeContracts/issues/409
Had Microsoft put more backing behind it, then C# could present itself as a language to supplant Ada in safety-critical applications, and replace C/C++ in other applications.
I have hope the feature will come back one-day - there are whole slews of bugs that can be eliminated (such as when passing EF entity types around with unintentionally null member-properties).
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Disney Imagineering? I have no direct experience but I'm continually impressed by the technical innovations they make public and the effects they manage to achieve in their products.
Worked for them for about 10 years. Fun place, but I'm not sure it'll ever be like the old days where research was done for research's sake. So many things are now off-the-shelf, and not much is invented in house.
all they can do is mechanical engineering. anything they ship involving software is usually an abject failure.
Thanks, that sounds interesting.
I was wondering the same myself. Albeit in the us or nyc. :)
I’ve had middling success creating opportunities but that’s very far from being in an environment where there so much interesting going on around you
I'm sure a lot of people will reflexively run in the opposite direction but IBM still has a large research organization.
Also their lab isn’t anywhere I’d want to live.
Interestingly enough, a lot of senior ibm labs folks have joined jpmorgan or similar organizations over time
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Freelance product design is a good field for this type work, but you don't really see it concentrated into a unified r/d location like bell had often.
Also @dsgnr you're posts are currently hell banned
Thanks, product design is something I've also considered. I'd guess Apple/MS style companies are probably still the best bet, even though you're more restricted than what it probably was at Bell.
A government, or government funded, research lab. Mostly they want research scientists, but engineers also work in those places.
What are you looking for? DOE national labs and similar institutions may fit the bill.
Any prestige research lab - MS, Google, OAI, etc.
I'm not sure how many, if any, are doing blue sky research (vs product-directed "research") any more the way that Bell Labs, IBM Watson and Xerox Parc used to do.
Look at what's going on with ML/AI - DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAIR now moved into a product group alongside Meta's GenAI group, Microsoft essentially outsourcing AI to OpenAI, OpenAI may as well call itself GPTCorp - a single-product commercial enterprise.
I guess it's not surprising given how short term the thinking is of today's publicly traded companies.
The reason Bell Telephone built that organization is that they had a government-sanctioned monopoly on local phone service, and to justify the continuation of this, they wanted to find ways to show they were contributing to society.
Could someone like Google or Microsoft build a Bell Labs today? Yes, almost certainly, but there's no financial incentive to do so. And the shareholders would not be pleased if you told them you were going to spend their money on something with no connection to the business.
A bigger question for the present is: why are the universities failing so badly? Their incentives have not changed, but we don't get the kind of innovative research we got out of Bell Labs. I don't know what the answer to that is.
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Eh, I don't think today's scene is altogether that different from back then. In every case you have a research organization tied to an immensely profitable main enterprise. The vast majority of the work force works on the "product" side and only a small number of researchers are doing blue sky stuff.
This describes Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, as well as modern counterparts like MSR and DeepMind. As always, only a very small portion of the work force gets to do blue sky stuff - the rest have to do the "mundane" bits of making money.
Let's not be fooled by rose-tinted glasses here - even in its heyday Bell Labs was small fraction of the overall Bell operations, and likewise Xerox Parc an extremely prestigious but yet small slice of the overall enterprise.
> DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAI
I don’t really agree that training massive causal LMs is a “product focus”.
I agree that there is an increasing product focus in orgs like OAI, but a lot of that is coming from new growth rather than trading off with base research.
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This is not an accurate portayal of these labs. They're all still doing blue sky research.
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Thanks, that seems to be the trend here
As a freelance product designer I'm always learning and always excited about work. There are so many interesting companies working on so many interesting problems.
What takes up most of your time? Do you work with vendors to create and then produce the product or just do the design phase?
It depends on the needs of the client, and Ive done a little bit of everything from designing moulds and sourcing factories for physical products, to writing frontend code to help ship.