Dennis Ritchie Home Page (2006)
I worked in Bell Labs from 2012 to 2018, unfortunately then it was a shadow of its former self. The MBAs had taken over.While there Weldon tried to pivot the place from being ‘like twitter’ to an incubator to a like a startup. He got an Apple Watch so we were going to be a wearables lab. He threw together a book on the supposed future of networks and conspired to get it to the NYT #1 by forcing us all to buy it.There were endless reorganisations. Disastrous leads parachuted in to wreck groups. Weldon played favourite to an alarming degree only to turn on them when they didn’t deliver on the aforementioned vapid promises.We had endless managers holding endless meetings telling the smart people what they should be doing and not listening to what the smart people wanted to or could do. All hands meetings telling us how great everything was while they were letting a third of us go.They engaged in vanity projects like putting a 4G network on the moon and getting us to build endless fake demos for technologies that didn’t exist and then acting surprised when told said technology didn’t exist.The funny thing was that the old timers over in Murray Hill just ignored all of this and continued to work away on their research untouchable like some prize zoo exhibit.It was a place full of the most wonderfully intelligent people managed by fools who wasted fortunes on flashy demos rather that let the smart people take the time to build something.