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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.)
They laid off two-thirds of the company. It would be odd if Research wasn't similarly decimated (triated?).
I wonder if the "Open Source" is picking up the slack in basic research these days. I don't think Universitys have been too productive in my lifetime.
- VNC - which is a multiplatform Remote administration tool.
- Text to speach.
- Multimodal data access
- Handwriting recognition.
- Wlan technologies
Probably many more which I cant even remember.There is no god
"We are playing to win," AT&T Labs President Hossein Eslambolchi told industry analysts in February.
Interesting way to go about it!
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He's an endowed prof at my alma mater www.tamu.edu. Hope this improves the CS program there.
When travelling, it's ok if the airlines lose your emotional baggage.
The brain drain from Industry to Universities has been going on for some time. For the past few years, the focus of Industry has been on developing marketable technologies, as would justify the investment of venture capitalists. Also with smaller companies working on bringing products to market faster, the pressure on bigger companies to preferentially fund tangible research has been more.
I don't know if research has suffered because of this - most basic research at American universities are funded by defense projects, and they are funded well. I'm not sure if this will produce the kind of innovative stuff that came out of Bell labs, but at least fundamental research is alive!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
IBM does a LOT of research, but only a small percentage of it is the type of basic research that leads to BIG jumps in technology. In other words they do process refinement and some materials science research but very little basic science research that leads to the kinds of discoveries that brought about optical lasers, the transistor, etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I blame it on Carrot Top and his annoying 1-800-CALL-ATT commercials. Heartless bastard
MoFscker
...isn't any one company or research centre closing or being made ineffective. Single institutions grow, evolve and die - they have their golden eras and their stagnant eras. When they're no longer useful or vibrant a new research centre crops up. Innovative scientific progress comes in jumps and spurts and doesn't follow a project plan.
.COM bust there's not been any funding for new research centres. There is therefore no chance for a new centre to have its creative spurt, and nowhere for today's creative minds to go.
The real tragedy is rather that with the
I don't think we should be trying to revive dying scientific centres at all, or singling out individual ones. Instead money should be going into research and development in general based on the merits of the research. Fix the general problem and give our best thinkers the chance to do their stuff.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
As the article points out, a lot of people are also moving into the academia, not necessarily back into the industry. Perhaps they're happier working in academic environments - atleast that way, they get to have their knowledge and findings out in the open.
However, what the article fails to mention is that a lot of corporate researchers like this guy are increasingly looking at the industry as a means of getting their research done.
This is an issue not just with AT&T, but lots of other research labs out there. If you look at some of the top conferences on AI, Graphics and the like (SIGGRAPH for instance) - you have an alarmingly high percentage of people performing cutting edge work from Microsoft Research.
So, it does look like MS-R is becoming a destination for a lot of good researchers out there - however, the collective prowess of other places like IBM, Intel and Xerox might just be able to bring in a balance.
The good thing is that this brings money for research and researchers. The bad thing is that all the patents of tomorrow in a lot of the cool technologies will be 0wnzer0ed by MSFT - where would that lead OpenSource in terms of a future - if all the technology that is to come is patented?
Its a double edged sword.
Well, this is a very common problem. I remember when I went for interviews in 2000...all the reps at Raytheon and Boeing were saying how a huge part of their workforce was going to retire, and all that knowledge was going to walk right out the door.
Clearly, your hiring patterns have to be continuous. You can sit out economic cycles, but you can't sit out entire generations.
It's a nice idea - every company has their own pure research division to solve all those interesting problems, and the IP stays within the company... except, very few companies can afford to do this.
Then again, look at what's come out of these sorts of pure research labs: C, UNIX, WIMP interfaces, etc., even Java, to some extent, could well be considered the output of such a process.
These aren't technologies you can bottle and sell. The value of these sorts of things is the productivity gains they provide. That's not to say the bottle and sell it approach hasn't been tried, but in the end the real meat is often in the abstract ideas, and even with the current patent system you can't patent purely abstract concepts. That is, all these ideas have been cloned, reinvented, or otherwise copied in one form or another.
Which brings me to my point - if you can't bottle it and sell it, if your competitors are just going to end up making a near duplicate anyway, why are you trying to fund this research lab all by yourself? No one doubts the quality of the work that can come out of these places, so why aren't there more cases of a group of various companuies banding together to fund a research group*? I'm not even talking about joining up with your direct competition - surely it wouldn't be that hard to have a group of companies that are not directly competing yet are all interested in managing to bring about a new, better, computer interface etc.
This "go it alone" attitude is sinking a lot of potentially incredibly valuable research simply because companies don't seem to be able to cooperate.
Jedidiah
* Note, for instance, that OSDL is exactly this sort of thing. A research group funded by a wide range of backers all interested in pushing forward computing. And it seems to be a model that's working well!
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At least the research in university isn't (as) tainted as in the industry. If we can get the top researcher to make great and open contributions to the science, it's all the better.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Well, researchers are often paying their own way except if they are one of the chairs, which they are offered some complimentary registration fee. Some of bonafide conferences actually pay their expenses if they are invited.
Honestly, researcher communities (especially the academic ones) are disdainful to the "achievements" of "industrial research". The reject rates on industrial papers have been pretty high (usually more than 50%). This is because that the "innovations" of industrial "research" are more or less either one or some of the following: rehashing old ideas, implementing old ideas with new looks / new aspects / into new problems which often not worth mentioning, combining several old ideas in some obvious ways.
Well, this is not to say that industrial papers are crap, but of course there are some excellent industry researchers, which are usually ex-professors which are already well known before they enter the industries. However, research is like a big gamble: either you win big or you lose big. Given the current situation of the economy, it's more likely you lose big because of "lack of genuinely new ideas" and you can never get a guarantee that your research group is actually producing the great useful results for your company. It's a whole lot better for the company to actually scour the conferences, spot the prominent person with the right ideas, and then "steal" them so that they can implement the said idea for your company. This is exactly what Microsoft has been doing in the past years.
Since I never attended trade/business oriented conferences, I can't comment on those. Moreover, these conferences are usually way more expensive than the academia ones (thousands of $$ vs hundreds of $$).
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It's the Carly Fiorina touch.
I'm sure she offed much of the Labs because there was no short-term sales potential for a lot of what they were doing. And as a sales dweeb, that's all she can understand.
(See also Compaq, Alpha CPUs, HP, Itaniuam servers, the HP 3000 series etc)
I swear that woman and Celine Dion are the evillest twins on earth.
To have ambition was my ambition.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
I remember, back in 1987 or so, getting a good look at a computer industry study that showed gross revenues, margins, and so forth for pretty mich all of the companies in what one would consider "the computer industry" of the time. It also showed how much they spent on R&D.
Sperry spent a decent amount; so did Cray, and Hewlett Packard, and AT&T, and NCR, and so forth.
IBM spent more on R&D than the rest of them put together.
In fact, IBM spent more on R&D than the gross revenues of the second-largest company. Not the profits, mind you -- the gross revenues.
That was the single most gobsmacking business statistic that I heard until the one a couple of years ago about how Microsoft could purchase the airline industry out of its cash reserves -- twice .
Like aerospace and military, the telecoms industry did push early days computers. However it has been the industrial sector and since then the consumer sector which has driven the smaller, faster and cheaper computing.
For example, one might argue that modems were a spin off from Rockwell aerospace. However, that would have left us with 300 baud modems the size of a PC. It took the comsumer age to drive us to 56k Compact Flash format modems.
We have a lot to thank the pioneers for, but after a while they get beyond their usefulness/effectiveness.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I was at conference at Bell Labs/Lucent not too long ago and I think part of what is happening is a natural shift in what matters in corporate research. I got the sense that Bell Labs was shifting slightly from its physics/hardware roots to math/algorithms/software future. They still do physics, but they also do proportionally more R&D in the idea/software space. (Disclaimer: I didn't see any budget figures or top secret stuff, so who knows what they really goes on in Murray Hill)
I'm not saying that we should stop R&D on hardware, solid state physics and materials, only that new software and software-related tools would help everyone get the most out of the current portfolio of hardware technologies. Given that we just discussed "Why Programming Still Stinks" and have not discussed "Why Hardware Still Stinks," I would suggest that the bigger research opportunites are in software.
I also suspect that software is more commercialization-friendly. If you look at research advances in hardware/materials it takes 20 years before it makes it out of the lab. By the time a fundamentally new invention is in mass-production its is off-patent. I know BellLabs invented the transistor and the laser, but I wonder what fraction of semiconductor and laser industry's profits actually went to BellLabs/AT&T. In contrast, software can be more self contained and follow a much faster adoption curve.
In summary, I would say that scientists and engineers already have a reasonably good handle on atoms and that the real R&D opportunities are in getting better with bits.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
As a former labs person, one who was included in last years outsourcing, it is not a surprise to see this happen. For right or wrong the new management has chosen this path and they are succeeding in an alarming rate. What they are succeeding at I have no idea beside the destruction of the Labs and the company as a whole. Am I a bitter ex-employee? sure... but that doesn't change the fact that that it is happening.
The president of the labs is to credit or blame as you see fit. He has a strategy and he is going about it quickly. Is it a good strategy? Time will tell, but it is not one I believe in, nor do I believe in their president, even when I was a loyal employee. He is downsizing research and development and trying to buy off the shelf products for a company that really has no peer in size. Let's face it, the reason why AT&T had to develop all of their own stuff internally was because there was no one on the outside developing towards that market and could achieve the quality that was desired. They have special needs that outside vendors, for the most part, can't fill, but they try and stick the square peg into the round hole.
This is just the tip of the iceberg: for the past hundred years or more, the rest of the industrialized world looked to the United States for advanced research, innovative ideas and new technologies, if not new products. Now we are being surpassed on nearly every level, and we have no-one to blame but ourselves. Time for us to get the lead out, get back to work, and start competing again. I'm sick and tired of hearing about how we can't compete with near-slave labor, how India has raised so many super-smart engineers and scientists that we don't have any hope ... that's baloney. We are the ones that proved to the rest of the world that there is a better way, that abject poverty need not be the lot of the average human being. I simply don't believe that after a mere two hundred-odd years America has peaked: we can get back on track if we accept a few facts.
The Japanese have always looked at business as a kind of battleground. China and India are taking much the same tack with us. Now that's fine: there's nothing wrong with stiff competition, in and of itself. If you understand that and work hard to improve your own operations, everyone wins.
The problem is we, as a nation, haven't fully realized that we're smack in the middle of an economic war. Certainly our corporate leaders have not: they are, in fact, actively giving aid and comfort to the enemy! Were they in the military, they would be summarily executed for profiteering. These people, as well as many members of the government, need to be made aware of some things. For example, I don't believe that good business practices should involve the total destruction of one's own workforce (and just incidentally, one's best customers) nor should it involve massive transfers of technology and proprietary information to foreign "partners". Partners who, I might add, are more than likely to simply take that information while giving nothing in return. Protectionism (in the sense of the government dropping huge tariffs on foreign suppliers) is not a real answer, but on the other hand simply giving away everything you have of value, everything you have spent years and billions of dollars to develop, is just plain stupid. Yet that is precisely what is going on.
I'm sure that most of us know of companies that took their manufacturing and/or engineering operations to China, say, and then found themselves to be nothing but hollowed-out marketing organizations totally dependent upon foreign suppliers. We allow this to happen, because they don't perceive "good business" in the same way the Western world does, and we don't understand that. At all. That doesn't mean we can't do business with China to the benefit of all, but we simply have to learn how to do it.
I'm reminded of Yamamoto's words after the attack on Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant." Well, I think it is past time that America woke up from it's decades long slumber and started to compete again. It can be done: we just have to convince each other of that fact, be willing to accept significant changes in the way we do business, and convince Congress to let us do it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
When AT&T was "The Phone Company", it funded bell labs with an internal "tax". That means that every department in the company would take 10% off the top of what they brought in and send it to bell labs. It was very well funded and the R&D consistently paid off.
Now the stock market is a major player in moving money in and out of compaines and they don't like research. It even appears that most of the major funds consider it a bad gamble in most cases. The side effects of the short sighted profit is that the US economy is loosing 1.3 billion dollars a day and the pyramid scheme that used to prop up some of the economy is falling apart.
Congress needs to start intorducing tax cuts for real R&D.
The lay offs at bell-labs have had a massive negative imapact on plan9.
Rob Pike has gone to google for instance
Stories of them taking out 75% of the light bulbs in the labs to save money.
We're down to three devs from the labs working on plan9, mostly in their own time.
So sad, Lucent have bungled it.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I worked at Bell Labs in Columbus, OH for ten years when I first got out of school. Great place, interesting work, and lots of very smart people. Most of the folks I knew there are gone. When AT&T split into AT&T / Lucent, the Columbus Labs went with Lucent. The management of Lucent then proceeded to run the company into the ground. The dotcom bust and telecom implosion (i.e. Worldcom) didn't help either.
Today the Lucent branch of Bell Labs is a shadow of it's former greatness. It's ranks have been decimated, and most of what's left is being shipped overseas. A rather sad and undeserving epitaph for what was once one of America's premier R&D institutions.
P.S. For any BTL alumni out there - I worked in area 59 - on speech recognition in Conversant, and then on DCS (the Display Construnction Set) - a UIMS for network management.
[Insert pithy quote here]
First, most industrial conference fees are not in the thousands of dollars. About five hundred is more typical. These conferences do, after all, want good attendance. Second, it is rather unusual for employees to pay their own way to conferences, especially out of town ones (which most are). Third, research is by no means all or nothing. Most of it is incremental improvememnt on existing science, and gives a corresponding return on investment. Sometimes a radicial advancement is made, and this can make headlines, but that is the exception, not the rule. Fourth, you accuse companies of "stealing" ideas at conferences. Well that's the whole idea, ding dong. When one presents a paper at a conference, it's to disseminate ideas. People are supposed to "steal" them, and I take great pride when people steal mine.
I am a software developer and researcher in geophysics. In that community at least, the top researchers are about evenly divided between industry and academic, and no, the industrial researchers are NOT mostly ex-professors.
I have never detected any disdain for industry researchers from university researchers - indeed there are many consortiums between them. I suspect most academics are jealous of industrial researchers because they often have better financial backing and are involved in more "real world" problems. I also think industrial researchers are jealous of academics because they have more time and freedom to tackle basic, pure research. Together they make a powerful combination.
So far as your assessment of the quality of conference papers from industry is concerned, it's just complete garbage. Free enterprize is a highly stimulating environment that attracts talented people, and the papers reflect that. The weakest papers, I'm afraid, tend to be from graduate students, although I have seen many excellent ones. Sometimes, too, overtly commercial papers get presented, although conferences fight to minimize this.
Your rant is misinformed pretty well from top to bottom. I can't imagine why you would make such nonsense up, but it has no relation to reality.
As for the end of Bell Labs: I'm just suprised it didn't happen 20 years ago, when AT&T stopped being a legal monopoly, and had to start acting like a business.
We lost a lot when that happened. Not just all the cool computer science and communications tech. Lots of pure science too.
And a nasty change in the way the phone business worked. In the old days, telephone equiment was made by well-paid, well-treated workers in the U.S. and Canada. And made to last. And when it finally did wear out, it was shipped back to Western Electric factories, where it was thoroughly recycled. Now phone hardware is made by underpaid peons in overseas sweatshops, designed to last a year or two, and finally tossed in a landifll.
But, as the Libertarians love to say, There Is No Free Lunch. (Which is not strictly true, but that's another story.) The price of AT&T's huge contributions to science and expense-blind corporate citizenship was immense. Phone calls were expensive, and telephone equipment could only be leased (it was illegal to sell it) at high rates. Forget going out and buying a cheap modem -- if you wanted to do dialup, you had to lease a "data set" (a huge, clunky slow terminal-modem combination) for a horrendous rate. Not that modems weren't availabe -- starting in the 70s, they were, and cost less to buy than a month's lease on a data set. But it was illegal to hook them directly to the phone system (they might break something!). Which is how the acoustic coupler got invented.
There are what, 100 million internet-connected computers and devices in the US? Probably a similar number of cell phones. Back in the 70s, when the Bell System was at its peak that's how many phones there were total. And only a tiny number of them were mobile or used to transmit data. I can't imagine such a geological shift in technology with AT&T continuing its total dominance of the communications marketplace. And without AT&T, no Bell Labs.
Anyhow, the point of all this is that (a) Lucent got the lion's share of Bell Labs in the '96 spinoff, including the name; and (b) the "real" Bell Labs has been downsized just as badly as its former sibling at AT&T, although Lucent is slightly ahead of the business curve and is hopefully through the worst of the cost-cutting. (Lucent was also first in line when it was time to go over the cliff, of course, so being ahead of the curve doesn't always work to your advantage.)
(The obligatory disclaimer: I work for Lucent, but I'm not even vaguely attempting to speak on their behalf. I'm sure AT&T veterans would tell the tale differently, emphasizing the heroic role of AT&T Labs in the liberation of Stalingrad or some such, but this is what passes for corporate history in my weak and enfeebled mind.)
Microsoft pours billions into research each year and from what I can tell they have not produced a product for MS or even a seminal non-commercial work.
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;)
Speech to text is still being worked on
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