[HN Gopher] The Boring Part of Bell Labs
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The Boring Part of Bell Labs
Author : AcesoUnderGlass
Score : 168 points
Date : 2025-11-19 19:47 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (elizabethvannostrand.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (elizabethvannostrand.substack.com)
| AcesoUnderGlass wrote:
| Bell Labs is best known for inventing things like the solar cell
| and transistor, but that's a small part of their work. Bell Labs
| had a whole applied division dedicated to phone company science.
| This article digs into the details of what it was like to work at
| Bell Labs, but not _the_ Bell Labs.
| j2kun wrote:
| "the" Bell Labs was effectively gone by the 1970's anyway. So
| the Bell Labs described in this article was "the" Bell Labs
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| That didnt stop the flow of Nobels
|
| For work done after 1970 - optical tweezers,laser cooling,
| quantum hall, superres microscopy, quantum dots (NP 2023)
|
| Not to forget Shor and Grover (1990s!)
|
| Holmdel had the antenna of Penzias/Wilson
|
| For me, this marked the end of Bell Labs (Murray Hill):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal#Beginning_o.
| ..
|
| Not sure what the bottleneck was: https://www.forbes.com/site
| s/josipamajic/2025/11/19/science-...
| retrac wrote:
| The Bell System was, in modern parlance, fully vertically
| integrated. They didn't own the mines that the copper for the
| conductors was extracted from. And they didn't cast the copper
| ingots. Though they were interested in the metallurgy. Because
| they drew their own wire. And cables. And transformers. And
| vacuum tubes. And so on. It was all in-house. They even treated
| their own telephone poles. So something like a practical survey
| of various types of preservative treatments for wood was in the
| remit of Bell Labs just like the physics of a vacuum tube.
| Almost everything in science was in the remit when they had
| such a broad mandate. The Bell System had elements that almost
| resembled a kind of state within a state. (Part of why it was
| killed off -- antitrust violations.)
| LPisGood wrote:
| > Bell Labs' One Year On Campus program, in which they paid new-
| grad employees to earn a master's degree on the topic of Bell's
| choosing
|
| I wonder why companies don't do this anymore. Is it something to
| do with the monopoly AT&T held, is it related to corporate tax
| structures, is it related to how easy it is to find PhD graduates
| who studied similar topics of interest, or is it something else
| entirely?
| majormajor wrote:
| >I wonder why companies don't do this anymore. Is it something
| to do with the monopoly AT&T held, is it related to corporate
| tax structures, is it related to how easy it is to find PhD
| graduates who studied similar topics of interest, or is it
| something else entirely?
|
| Companies do a lot less to retain employees - fewer pensions,
| fewer accrued benefits and perks - so it's much less attractive
| to train when you are assuming attrition instead.
| caminante wrote:
| No way...
|
| Even guys get parental leave, now!
|
| I know too many people that've gotten fancy EMBAs paid for by
| the company as retention/networking tools along with the
| countless others (read: majority) that don't use the annual
| tuition reimbursement available to all employees.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even if the company is subsidizing, earning a degree while
| working is a pretty substantial time commitment even as a
| part-time thing though some people obviously do it.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| I don't think companies pay for you to go do an MS or a PhD
| full-time on company dime. At that time AT&T was a monopoly and
| may have had money to burn on this. There also may not have
| been expectations of hyper-growth from the stock market that
| exist today.
|
| AT&T still pays for various MS courses (mostly MSCS, MS data
| science and cybersecurity) you can do on a part-time basis.
| It's quite easy to get the tuition reimbursement for it.
| jhbadger wrote:
| In general, nobody needs to pay someone to do a PhD, at least
| in a scientific or engineering field -- even in the US, the
| country where education generally costs the most -- typically
| PhD students get free tuition as well as a living stipend.
| Masters students, granted typically don't get this benefit --
| but in the US that's typically a terminal degree -- unlike in
| many countries you don't do a Masters and then a PhD -- you
| do one or the other.
| ghaff wrote:
| Depending on the program it's not that uncommon to get a
| Masters as a step on a path to earning a PhD.
| jhbadger wrote:
| True, I think technically I got one when I passed my
| prelims -- they do that so if people end up dropping out
| before completing their dissertation they have something
| at least. But what I mean is in the US dedicated Masters
| programs are largely set up for people in industry to
| advance their careers and the schools see the program as
| a way to raise funds.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't disagree. When I got my Masters in engineering I
| had zero plans to continue to a PhD which would have been
| fairly uncommon where I went to engineering grad school
| in any case. I did eventually end up with another Masters
| but, in that case, a PhD would also have been uncommon
| unless I was on an academia track which I wasn't.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Aren't those stipends skewed toward Ph.D students intending
| to pursue an academic career? I seem to recall hearing
| rumors that admitting that one's intent was to go into
| industry after getting a Ph.D would be viewed unfavorably
| in grad school applications and by advisors. Perhaps it's
| only at R1 universities?
| orochimaaru wrote:
| Not in the US. Most PhDs in the US I believe just go over
| to big tech, not into academia. Bell Labs had the unique
| situation where a lot of their researchers moved between
| academia and industry. I don't think that occurs a whole
| lot anymore.
| caminante wrote:
| The answer to your question seems straight-forward: they still
| do.
|
| 1. Companies have tuition reimbursement for general employees,
| but it's usually nominal at $5k/year and part-time education is
| implied.
|
| 2. Executive MBAs and more selective executive seminars are
| covered by companies so the focus will be better. These aren't
| cheap (easily $125k/year) and might come with early exit
| penalties. I'd be surprised if the Bells lab offer didn't have
| similar clawbacks.
|
| 3. Tuition in 1970 isn't what it is now! Wayyyy cheaper!
| rectalogic wrote:
| > I'd be surprised if the Bells lab offer didn't have similar
| clawbacks.
|
| Bellcore inherited the year on campus program from Bell Labs.
| There were no clawbacks and no requirement to even return to
| work for Bellcore after graduation.
| ghaff wrote:
| Masters programs in engineering certainly have costs for
| full-time residential programs. But actual tuition isn't
| necessarily that much.
|
| As you say, executive MBA programs are costly and the
| assumption is almost certainly that a company is paying for
| it for select senior people being groomed for executive
| roles. They're often full-time but of relatively limited
| duration.
| silisili wrote:
| One common theme is that companies used to treat good employees
| as assets. Now they treat all employees as liabilities.
|
| What changed? A lot. The underlying theme across all companies,
| to both employees and customers, has been "see how much abuse
| they'll take before they leave", which sadly has had marvelous
| results because the answer is... a lot. Notice that at least
| half of the largest companies by market cap have no actual
| support at all.
|
| Add in that tuition has exploded, it became cheaper and quicker
| just to import people than to train them.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| But even if companies decided to see how much abuse employees
| would take, that doesn't explain this. The point of the
| master's program wasn't to reward the employee; it was to
| make the employee more valuable for the company.
|
| I think the issue is that companies no longer trust their
| ability to retain their more valuable employees. Why pay to
| make the employee more valuable for someone else?
| bottd wrote:
| This is somewhat self-fulfilling is it not? I fear my
| valuable employee may leave, so to protect myself in this
| situation I withhold resources I could have granted them.
| Said employees later realize they could get better and
| leave.
| ghaff wrote:
| It is in many cases. Short tenures often become
| normalized all the way around so companies tend to expect
| employees not to stick around too long and employees have
| a mindset that frequent job hunting is just what you do.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It may be an overall increase in economic anxiety, even at
| the corporate level. At one time, AT&T could probably not
| imagine their status would ever really change; today, you'd
| be foolish to be running almost any company in the US
| economy and think that the company's position in 10 years
| is likely to be similar to the one it has today. Making
| longer term investments in employee skills is almost
| certainly concomittant with the idea of tackling their
| income needs/desires/wants, and that looks intimidating
| when you don't have faith that your company will still be
| growing 5 years from now.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Upper level is generally trying to figure out how to pad
| their golden parachute for the next quarter.
| palmotea wrote:
| > What changed? A lot. The underlying theme across all
| companies, to both employees and customers, has been "see how
| much abuse they'll take before they leave", which sadly has
| had marvelous results because the answer is... a lot. Notice
| that at least half of the largest companies by market cap
| have no actual support at all.
|
| That's probably a direct consequence of the (Milton) Friedman
| doctrine taking hold
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine), which has
| made capitalism much less friendly to customers and employees
| in order maximize shareholder rewards.
|
| For customers and employees, this kind of capitalism
| "optimizes" your situation until it's as bad as you can take
| without quitting. If you're genuinely happy, that's a glitch
| that's in the process of being worked out.
| kentlyons wrote:
| This is very common in Europe. PhDs are sponsored by a given
| company
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| The company I work pays normal salaries for their PhD students.
|
| That pretty much standard in Germany in industrial research
| departments.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >The company I work pays normal salaries for their PhD
| students.
|
| Which is uncommon. BMW used to list their salaries for PhD
| students, which were fixed at 36.000 a year, which are wages
| you would expect for working at a grocery store.
| constantcrying wrote:
| This is still very common in Germany. Many companies,
| especially large ones, offer Master/bachelor thesis, which are
| supervised by a professor at an university, but the student is
| employed full time for the duration of the thesis.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| The Overton Window for what is acceptable company behaviour has
| slid very far to "maximizing near-term profits at all costs".
| You see this is in a lot of areas:
|
| - Employee training and retention. Employers would rather
| aggressively churn the cheapest employees they can get, rather
| than cultivating experienced employees.
|
| - Just-in-time inventory. Businesses want to have as little
| inventory as possible, which means any supply chain disruption
| causes ripples down the line.
|
| - Advertising. Everything is stuffed full of ads now, including
| your smart appliances.
|
| The reason companies get away with this is that all big
| companies have more or less colluded to behave the same way.
| The managerial class has said "we can have terrible customer
| service because _everyone_ has terrible customer service". Your
| product can be full of ads and break every 3 years because
| _every_ product is like that.
|
| You might ask "why doesn't one competitor break the pattern and
| do a good job to gain market share?". The answer is that they
| do, and then they get bigger and more financialized. The
| capital required to do a good job requires them to take
| investment, and once the growth narrative has ended they're
| pressured to squeeze profits out of their customers.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Add in that any new competitors get attacked with patents and
| IP law making very risky to have a cheaper well made product.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _I wonder why companies don't do this anymore._ "
|
| Because we're not in the gargantuan post-WW2 economic boom
| combined with the electronics-ization / mainframe
| computerization tech boom anymore. It's easy to treat employees
| generously when revenue growth just keeps happening almost on
| its own.
|
| And STEM degrees or even possessing any undergraduate degree
| was much less common than they are today. The article says "
| _Over 130 people signed up for the One Year On Campus program
| in 1970._ ", which is a pittance in a corporation with over a
| million employees at its peak. Unsurprisingly, people who
| specialties make them more difficult to replace get treated
| more favorably.
| sevensor wrote:
| This honestly does not sound boring in the least. Statistical
| design of experiments is super interesting. You can tune your
| experiments to get the most useful information within your
| experimental budget. If you've ever run a physical real world
| experiment, you'll understand how much time and expense is
| involved in doing it at a plant level. The ability to be
| economical here is so important!
| jonxcxx wrote:
| Totally agree! DOE is way underrated. Once you've had to run
| real experiments (especially at scale), you really appreciate
| how much time and money a good experimental design can save.
| It's one of those areas where a bit of math makes a huge
| practical difference.
| Shugyousha wrote:
| I agree! Science is about experiments to verify hypotheses.
| Design of Experiments seems like a fundamental part of that.
| That's also why the quote below made me laugh.
|
| > What if you don't care about efficiency or causality?
|
| "Yeah, what about if you don't care about money/time and are
| happy with finding a correlation only?!!?"
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| She has some heritige there. If your near ancestors are academic
| it much be such a lift in terms of advice and connections.
| Espepecially ex Bell labs and the TV patent.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| 1975: "One of our salaried PhD-level engineers designed this
| custom slide rule so that you guys can do cost estimates when
| speaking to customers on site."
|
| 2025: "We spent a bajillion dollars on a custom LLM chatbot so
| that you guys can get hallucinated product specs when speaking to
| customers on Zoom."
| pixl97 wrote:
| That slide rule got replaced by software at least two decades
| ago and probably far more. The engineering staff got quartered
| and the sales staff tripled, QA was fired, and stock buybacks
| are the name of the game.
| incognito124 wrote:
| > There was a separate building in the area that did research in
| radio telescopes. This was an outgrowth of research that
| investigated some odd radio interference with communication, that
| turned out to be astronomical. I was never in that building.
|
| Wonder if that's the detection of CMBR
| Isamu wrote:
| Yeah the accidental discovery of the background radiation that
| they eventually traced to big bang predictions. It's a good
| story about following through with your experimental results.
| boringco wrote:
| So fractional factorial design using orthogonal arrays / design
| matrices is the way to go? That's interesting, but I'll need help
| applying this.
|
| When I saw the title, I thought this could be about boring holes,
| but it was really using the word "boring" to talk about something
| interesting. And perhaps it's about digging for oil
| metaphorically?
| grengier wrote:
| I suggest "Design and Analysis of Experiments" by Montgomery.
|
| https://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/sites/default/files/douglas_c._mo...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I worked at Bell Labs Holmdel for precisely 10 days. It's a
| memory I am glad I have, because it was what persuaded me to
| never, ever work for a large corporation ever again, and very
| specifically, to never ever work in an interior, windowless
| office.
|
| My assigned task: there was a constant in the C code that ran
| their telephone exchange hardware which controlled how many
| forwarding hops were allowed. I was taked with changing it from
| 32 to 64. The allotted time for this task was 1 week.
|
| While I appreciate the committment to quality assurance/testing,
| the idea that I could have spent my life working in such an
| environment fills me with shudders.
|
| My brief time there was ended when I rolled my then-wife's car 3
| times on the way down to the Outer Banks (NC), broke my arm and
| could no longer commute between Phila. and Holmdel. Lessons
| learned, for sure, and appreciated, but not necessarily in a good
| way.
| kixiQu wrote:
| 1 week is fascinating. Was it like - the missing piece was
| modern version control/CD? What kind of testing would need
| that? (We have configs at work where the system interactions
| are so unknowable and the financial implications of reduced
| efficiency so profound that we have to run multi-week A/B tests
| to change values) Was it some kind of pathological
| documentation culture?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| AFAIR, there were two aspects to testing. The code change
| itself obviously only took tens of minutes, if that. First
| round of testing was just the build test, and that was fully
| automated but I think there were independent builds for
| multiple different hardware variations and so the total time
| for that was several days. Then there was actual use-case
| testing ... I wasn't involved in that at all, but was told it
| would also take several days of actual testing by a QA team.
| scrlk wrote:
| Reminds me of this HN comment about working on the Oracle
| RDBMS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
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