[nextos]

Is it less glamorous? As an academic, my impression is that lots of innovation is now done at industrial labs.

In general, Academia lacks sufficient resources and appropriate structures for dedicated efforts.

Pay is abysmal and politics is toxic. Both scare away lots of technical talent.

[yodsanklai]

Maybe it's my own bias (after working for a big tech company for 5 years), but it's certainly not the dream job I thought it would be. Soulless corporations with questionable impact on society, lot of turnover, increasing pressure every year, fear of layoffs. Even the tech isn't that exciting, there's lots of tedious work, technical debt, hacked solutions, no time for researching and building quality solution.

That being said, it's certainly different for researchers. I can imagine that being a researcher at Google is more fun than being a median SWE in another FAANG. But still, I find these companies less enticing in general, even the products tend to degrade as they keep pushing the monetization.

[linguae]

I’m an ex-industry researcher with experience at FAANGs, albeit as a software engineering intern (Google) and a production engineer (Facebook).

I think it depends on the interests of the researcher. If a researcher is comfortable being a “brain for hire” who is comfortable solving research problems that are driven by business needs and where there needs to be short-term or medium-term results, then I think there are plenty of opportunities at large companies, including the FAANGs. I find research more fun than software engineering, but researchers are far from immune from pressures to ship.

If a researcher is more interested in curiosity-driven work and who wants to work on a longer time frame, I’m afraid that there’s no place in industry, except for maybe Microsoft Research (which I’ve heard changed under Satya Nadella), that supports such work. The days of Bob Taylor-era Xerox PARC and Unix-era Bell Labs ended many decades ago, and while there were still curiosity-driven labs in industry well into the 2010s, I have witnessed the remainder of these old-style labs change their missions to become much more focused on immediate and near-immediate business needs.

[gr_throwaway_9]

My experience as an L5 Google Research research scientist is that I have a lot of freedom as long as I can show I've made progress on one or two things the company cares about at each annual review. IMO, this is about as much research freedom as is reasonable for me to request.