[einpoklum]

> full freedom to work on whatever interests them, and no need to deliver > value to the employer...

That was an exaggeration. No employee has full freedom, and I am sure it was expected that you do something which within some period of time, even if not immediately, has prospects for productization; or that when something becomes productizable, you would then divert some of your efforts towards that.

[bartwr]

It wasn't an exaggeration! :) The shock of many of my colleagues (often not even junior... sometimes professors who decided to join the industry) "wait, I need to talk to product teams and ask them about their needs, requirements, trade-offs, and performance budgets and cannot just show them my 'amazing' new toy experiment I wrote a paper about that costs 1000x their whole budget and works 50% of time, and they won't jump to putting it into production?" was real. :) They don't want to think about products and talk to product teams (but get evaluated based on research that gets into products and makes a difference there), just do Ivory tower own research.

One of many reasons why Google invented Transformers and many components of GPT pre-trainint, but ChatGPT caught them "by surprise" many years later.

[SoftTalker]

Well there are a few. The Distinguished Scientists at Microsoft Research probably get to work on whatever interests them. But that is a completely different situation from a new Ph.D. joining a typical private company.

[arugulum]

I believe the above post was highlighting that as a misconception young people may have, not saying it is the case.