Landscape of Industrial Computer Science Research in 2019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20955775
by linguae • 7 years ago
1 0 7 years ago

A decade ago there were a few corporate labs that focused on medium-term applied computer science research, such as HP Labs, the IBM Almaden Research Center, Sun Labs, Intel Research, and others. In recent years, however, I have not heard much about these types of labs, and I'm seeing more of my colleagues who have PhDs work as software engineers rather than as researchers. It seems that a lot of newer companies have moved away from the IBM/HP model of research and have instead adopted Google's approach to research outlined in a paper called "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research," where researchers work on immediate projects rather than on medium-term or long-term research and where other activities such as writing papers are de-emphasized (although many excellent papers have come out of Google).

I'm wondering what are the career prospects for graduate students who still want to pursue medium- and long-term research in an industry environment that seems to emphasize immediate development.

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