Comment by giancarlostoro
11 days ago
> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers.
I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.
I think R&D for tax reasons needs to be changed, we had so many tech advancements used to this day from Bell Labs. Now only Microsoft, Google, Apple etc can afford to do R&D and so all the innovation is essentially only worth while to them if they can profit from it.
Granted I do think if you build something innovative you should be able to monetize it, but it takes investing a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money.
> I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.
From a statistical point of view, that's probably to be expected. Kind of like how open umbrellas get rained on more.
When a hard-to-hire minority gives way to a big growth in the workforce, by definition the majority arrive after the change.
One reason Bell Labs is remembered so fondly for the innovations is that they really only benefited the broader world once Bell was broken up.
I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the ones putting the upfront capital so early). Google also has the X moonshot lab that is trying to do similar things to Bell Labs. I think there’s just a lot of romanticism of the golden age when developments were relatively easier because we hadn’t exhausted the low hanging fruit of applied quantum and material sciences.
[I wish HN could host more long-running threads like SO as these topics require substantial back & forth]
Lasers? Information theory? Transistors?? Silicon tech in general? If you think hype-&-wishful-thinking-driven Google now or ever can be compared with Bell Labs.. you might just be a recent immigrant. The atmosphere at BL, I'm told, was way different. More an indefinite excitement (what can we do with quantum??) rather than the definite, closely guarded, superstition of Thiel ("quantum computing is the next big secret!!")
(Or maybe it's just that old subdued Jewish atheism of the East Coast vs the neurotic ambitious religiosity of California!)
I'm less biased against your low-hanging fruit framework.. still, I suspect that a rival framework based on the minimal attention paid to teaching undergrads at American universities would surpass it. I.e. materials science knowledge base has been spreading only about as quickly as the Baumol cost disease
2 other issues,
Even if there are low-hanging fruits in STEMM (of which I think there are still aplenty), infotech and especially advertising fruits are thought to be strewn all over the floor.
With AI, both thinkers & doers get into this weird emo haze of hubris+laziness, expecting neuro-furniture rearrangement to turn magically into paradigm shifts
There is also the negative effect of over-expensive ip blocking product development as no new product with unclear potential can take on prohibitive license costs.
Microsoft and Google are not representative of most companies.
They have to invest in the innovation. Investor returns for most other companies are based on copy and paste.
What about Meta^W Amazon*.. is their innovation too directed/constrained/product-based?
(I regret to inform you that HN are still withholding my comment upvote privileges)
*Because the gender of their founder is Kind Inventor
But then the ip-poachers wait for you at the gates. Investing into the new thing, in a world order where copying the new thing is the best game approach, makes R&D a looser strategy. You need temporary punishment tariffs on products that steal IPs to recuperate the investments and make it a bad strategy - or else..
Patents do not work - because the rule of law does not exists without the international order and goverments have a tendency to trade away such cases for protection of big players.
Literally patents.
But you have to take out a copy of the patent in EVERY country you want protection. Most companies don't do this and then whine about copies.
And lest someone whose never done it says they don't work: note how diligently generic drug companies wait for patents to expire.
What you’re describing is monstrously expensive, and doesn’t actually prevent IP violations, it just allows you to recover some of your losses, which is also expensive, and is unrealistic if the violators are fly-by-night operations.
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It's deep hubris in our leaders that assumes existing capital/values/structures/motivations are sufficient to allow newcomers ( & new generations) to contribute..
Tangentially, I have not personally tried, but it seems possible:
("Unintentionally moderate"[1-2] business thinkers like PG/YC partners do it all the time)
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
>Have to be an asshole or something
[2] https://archive.today/latest/coralcap.co/2022/02/why-japanes...
I wonder if we could reproduce the magic of Bell Labs by basically re-creating some Ma Bell style businesses: grant a profitable, but regulated monopoly that had the financial security to think long-term and be willing to fund out-of-the-box research to service internal needs or hypotheticals.
I mean, wasn't this ZIRP Google? Chrome, Android, Project Zero, etc.