AT&T Labs' Brain Drain

Frisky070802 writes "The Newark Star-Ledger has an article on the brain drain at AT&T Labs, which laid off close to half its researchers two years ago this month, another good fraction last spring, and has lost many of the rest through voluntary departures. The article claims that only Microsoft might have the money to fund basic research as Bell Labs did years ago, though many (including me) would put IBM in the same camp. It cites problems at AT&T, ranging from researchers paying their own way to present at conferences to a loss of free espresso and bottled water. Many luminaries, such as Lorrie Faith Cranor, Avi Rubin, and Bjarne Stroustrup, are quoted --- with Stroustrup saying the lab was "mugged" by Wall Street. (Rumor has it that the losses haven't stemmed, with more top-notch researchers going to academia in the coming months.)" (Non-registration ZIP and age demographic collection.)

Comments

Lucent relationship?

[-tji]

Wasn't the group that was spun off as Lucent originally part of AT&T Labs? If so, that had to be a huge change when they went on their own. How did they decide what stayed in AT&T and what went to Lucent?

Re:What do you expect?

[Zeinfeld]

MS Windows is a perfect pure example of this paradigm. Bill Gates wanted every feature developed only if it could be profitable. It was not profitable to make a good OS because that would cost more money.

You would think from this statement that UNIX had been a model of O/S design rather than a poorly documented hack job. Back in the day we used to have a unix haters list at MIT. nobody could believe that something so pathetic was winning.

MS Windows did not have true multitasking at the start because Intel botched the 286 design. Unlike the Motorola 68K which supported multitasking and protected memory but for some reason Apple decided not to use them.

What I think we are seeing here is projection from a bunch of people who fear their skills may loose value. It was the same with the Cobol coders, MVS jockeys etc. Whatever they know they call 'good design'.

OK so Microsoft is accused of 'copying', well what the heck has open source done that is so amazingly original? First you write a copy of a twenty year operating system, then you write a copy of a ten year old user interface to run on top of it.

Fact is that there are not all that many new ideas in the computer industry and once an idea gets hold in one form the execution almost never gets improved. Spreadsheets are an example of this, all of them show the same limited base concepts that were in Visicalc twenty five years ago.

The most glaring example are databases. SQL is a horrible language. It is completely incompatible with modern programming languages. But we end up having to use it because its the only scalable persistence model you can buy support for. So you write your applications three times, once in Java, a second time in SQL and then get the SQL part to talk to the Java part.

Rather than spending time praising ourselves about how wonderful the stuff is lets just admit that it is all a steaming pile, it all stinks.