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

For those about to rock, we salute you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Talent leak drains AT&T think tank Once a bastion of cutting-edge research, it's lost its star power Sunday, March 21, 2004 BY KEVIN COUGHLIN Star-Ledger Staff When AT&T Labs was carved from Bell Labs in the 1995 breakup of AT&T , the telecom giant set lofty goals for its new research arm. "Our mission, in my view, is to invent the future of communications," proclaimed Alexander "Sandy" Fraser, who pushed to create AT&T Labs. Today, many of AT&T's top scientists still chase that dream -- somewhere else. They strive to invent the future in the shiniest ivory towers and hottest tech companies, from MIT to Microsoft, from the Pentagon to Google. Some 200 scientists -- nearly half the core research staff -- were let go from AT&T Labs in Florham Park in January 2002 amid sweeping corporate cuts throughout AT&T. Since then an all-star collection of researchers has bolted from the labs. The fate of AT&T Labs mirrors changing fortunes at AT&T, an American icon squeezed by bad investments and bad timing. More importantly, some scientists say, it raises tough questions about the direction of industrial research and America's future as an innovator. At AT&T Labs, the brain drain is so severe, observed Michael Kearns, now at the University of Pennsylvania, that his former employer's motto should be "404 Not Found" -- the error message that greets many searches on the labs' Web site. Defectors point to the loss of esteemed colleagues, cuts in long-range research and restrictions on travel, media contacts and publication of scholarly articles. The place has had three different vice presidents of research within the past year. For some researchers, the last straw was having to pay their own way to present scientific papers at prestigious conferences. For others, it was the elimination of free espresso and bottled water at the leafy Florham Park campus, once the estate of Vanderbilt descendants. Yet many remember the brief heyday of AT&T Labs, during the euphoria of the Internet boom, as the most thrilling time of their careers. For them, the exodus is a tragedy. "We had a national gem," said Avi Rubin, who exposed flaws in electronic voting systems last year as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. "To see it melt away is very painful," said Andrew Odlyzko, who sensed trouble brewing in 2001 and left to head a digital technology center at the University of Minnesota. While turmoil at AT&T Labs is a bonanza for places like Columbia University and the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, scientists say it underscores the decline of "blue-sky" research -- science for science's sake -- at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, IBM, General Electric and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Gone from AT&T Labs, or nearly so, are groups highly regarded for their long-term studies in artificial intelligence and machine learning, network security and cryptography, algorithms and theoretical computer science, and statistics. AT&T research operations in Cambridge, England, and at the University of California, Berkeley are gone, too. The National Science Foundation says federal support for basic science has waned, as well, since 1980. "It's an open question where the next big ideas and discoveries will come from," said Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future. A former adviser to AT&T Labs, Saffo warned that corporate America's "relentless race for short-term value is killing our future ... AT&T Labs was a national crown jewel -- and it's been terribly devalued." "If you're focusing on research that's short-term, to impact products in a year or two, there are all kinds of world-changing discoveries that you simply miss," said Maria Klawe, president of the Association for Computing Machinery and dean of engineering at Princeton University. Princeton has cherry-picked at least two AT&T Labs scientists since 2002; Klawe interviewed another this month. The university even created an institute for materials sciences last year specificall

Re:For those about to rock, we salute you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reduntant? My Aunt Fanny!

This needs to be heard.

Talent leak drains AT&T think tank Once a bastion of cutting-edge research, it's lost its star power Sunday, March 21, 2004 BY KEVIN COUGHLIN Star-Ledger Staff When AT&T Labs was carved from Bell Labs in the 1995 breakup of AT&T , the telecom giant set lofty goals for its new research arm. "Our mission, in my view, is to invent the future of communications," proclaimed Alexander "Sandy" Fraser, who pushed to create AT&T Labs. Today, many of AT&T's top scientists still chase that dream -- somewhere else. They strive to invent the future in the shiniest ivory towers and hottest tech companies, from MIT to Microsoft, from the Pentagon to Google. Some 200 scientists -- nearly half the core research staff -- were let go from AT&T Labs in Florham Park in January 2002 amid sweeping corporate cuts throughout AT&T. Since then an all-star collection of researchers has bolted from the labs. The fate of AT&T Labs mirrors changing fortunes at AT&T, an American icon squeezed by bad investments and bad timing. More importantly, some scientists say, it raises tough questions about the direction of industrial research and America's future as an innovator. At AT&T Labs, the brain drain is so severe, observed Michael Kearns, now at the University of Pennsylvania, that his former employer's motto should be "404 Not Found" -- the error message that greets many searches on the labs' Web site. Defectors point to the loss of esteemed colleagues, cuts in long-range research and restrictions on travel, media contacts and publication of scholarly articles. The place has had three different vice presidents of research within the past year. For some researchers, the last straw was having to pay their own way to present scientific papers at prestigious conferences. For others, it was the elimination of free espresso and bottled water at the leafy Florham Park campus, once the estate of Vanderbilt descendants. Yet many remember the brief heyday of AT&T Labs, during the euphoria of the Internet boom, as the most thrilling time of their careers. For them, the exodus is a tragedy. "We had a national gem," said Avi Rubin, who exposed flaws in electronic voting systems last year as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. "To see it melt away is very painful," said Andrew Odlyzko, who sensed trouble brewing in 2001 and left to head a digital technology center at the University of Minnesota. While turmoil at AT&T Labs is a bonanza for places like Columbia University and the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, scientists say it underscores the decline of "blue-sky" research -- science for science's sake -- at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, IBM, General Electric and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Gone from AT&T Labs, or nearly so, are groups highly regarded for their long-term studies in artificial intelligence and machine learning, network security and cryptography, algorithms and theoretical computer science, and statistics. AT&T research operations in Cambridge, England, and at the University of California, Berkeley are gone, too. The National Science Foundation says federal support for basic science has waned, as well, since 1980. "It's an open question where the next big ideas and discoveries will come from," said Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future. A former adviser to AT&T Labs, Saffo warned that corporate America's "relentless race for short-term value is killing our future ... AT&T Labs was a national crown jewel -- and it's been terribly devalued." "If you're focusing on research that's short-term, to impact products in a year or two, there are all kinds of world-changing discoveries that you simply miss," said Maria Klawe, president of the Association for Computing Machinery and dean of engineering at Princeton University. Princeton has cherry-picked at least two AT&T Labs scientists since 2002; Klawe interviewed another this month. The university even created an insti

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.