The NBA's Problem Is Economics, Not Basketball

Tech companies have the same problems as the NBA. there used to be career stars like Claude Shannon developing cultures of excellence out of teams like IBM, but just like Larry Bird and the Celtics, the free agent market and stars chasing the dollar has diminished the culture and thus the product.

Didn't Shannon play for Bell Labs? Not IBM?

Shannon worked for Bell Labs and then got traded to MIT.

Good call!

> but just like Larry Bird and the Celtics, the free agent market and stars chasing the dollar has diminished the culture and thus the product.

Um Larry bird never went the free agent route. He always played for the Celtics who drafted him. He's one person who doesn't fit your narrative.

This seems like very rose tinted glasses, and I think the summary is backwards. Shannon was an academic, and spent a little time at Bell Labs, but didn’t work at IBM. Business has always chased profits, by definition, it was absolutely no different in 1950. Bell & IBM had little pockets of ‘excellence’ in their research divisions that left behind a nice narrative of idyllic sounding work for a very few lucky people. But since then, the number of academics in tech has gone way up, the number of companies developing tech has gone way up, and the number of pockets where smart people can focus on inventing things is enormous today compared to 1950. I don’t believe either culture or product has diminished at all, I think it’s the opposite, things have gotten much better. Bell & IBM made telephones and accounting computers. Today we have games, AI, self-driving cars, mobile devices, the internet, digital arts, just to name a few. It might take time for the stories of the good places to work to percolate, but I think we have vastly more & bigger cultures of excellence today than Shannon ever dreamed of.

I appreciate your response, but I just don’t think any of the technologies you cite come close to the foundational technologies they rely upon like information theory or wire message transmission. Foundational technologies require time, culture and investment not just an influx of VC cash, and a few months of clever experimentation

That’s the point

Your top comment was about cultures of excellence in corporate research, and the economics of product development. Now we’re having a debate about the most impactful tech and/or researcher?

Nothing on my small list of examples was done on VC cash in a few months. And my list was not exhaustive (indicated by “just to name a few”), I’m leaving it up to you to name today’s impactful tech. You don’t think any foundational technology development is happening in the world today? Why? I disagree. Let’s add quantum, smartphones, CRISPR, 3d printing and bitcoin to the list. What is your criteria or metric for declaring information theory above AI? AI is building on theories of intelligence and thought and latent information content in ways Shannon never thought of. We don’t know which of today’s papers will have the most lasting impression yet, let’s revisit this question in the year 2070. I simply pointed out that places to do good research like Shannon was doing are far more common now than when he was doing it.

I think we basically agree on the need for long-term positions and cultures to develop things like CRISPR and Quantum. What my original post refers to is that the average FAANG employee stays at the company for a little over a year these are the free agency moves that hurt technology in innovations like the ones you mentioned..

Don’t conflate research with the average employee. There are still career tech stars and research groups today, in fact many, many more of them than in 1950. They aren’t average employees and never were, just like Shannon was not an average employee. The average employee in 1950 also changed jobs when it suited them.

Anyway, I don’t think it’s true that the average FAANG employee leaves in 1 year. Some people do job-hop looking for more pay or faster advancement, but everyone knows hopping too fast or too often is a red flag on a resume. I work in a big well known tech company amongst hundreds of career researchers, academics, and excellent developers, and your narrative doesn’t fit them at all. I’m aware of lots of other companies with similar situations.

Probably the biggest thing that’s happened between now and Shannon’s day is that corporate research pays so well and there’s so much of it now that researchers are flocking to corporate jobs and leaving academia. That isn’t necessarily a problem in terms of innovation, it might be a good thing on the whole, but it might be a problem for the university ecosystem.