People who are more familiar with Bell Labs — what was the compensation and life was like when one worked there? Were there any extremely alluring alternatives like FAANG of the day, where even a bottom line individual contributor can save a decent chunk of money after half a decade of work?
It’s hard to convince extremely talented and motivated people to go into research nowadays when ad-tech and adjacent products pay so much more. Can’t even blame them, as it’s extremely high risk with very low reward. Obviously there are a lot of exceptions, but still.
I dunno about that. I'm regularly _flabbergasted_ by what hackers will do just for fun, and how they run circles around an industry veteran like me.
Look at the modding scene for games (an extreme example being a 30 year old obscure German game called "Gothic" where the modding community is still building amazing stuff on top of this ancient piece of software). Look at 3D printing, or people dabbling with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Look at the Emacs community and all the packages people build with a level of attention to detail you rarely find in commercial software.
Those people are all doing it for fun. That's my dictionary definition of "extremely talented and motivated people". The world is big, and I figure those kinds of people would happily work in a place where they can put their talents to use full time for a livable wage. Provided they don't feel like they got the short end of the stick compared to their colleagues/managers, financially or otherwise, maybe.
Probably not in the average tech company bureaucracy with all the overhead, micro management, politics and user-hostile antics though.
It’s hard to convince extremely talented and motivated people to go into research nowadays when ad-tech and adjacent products pay so much more. Can’t even blame them, as it’s extremely high risk with very low reward. Obviously there are a lot of exceptions, but still.