by PaulDavisThe1st
2 subcomments
- 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.
by arexxbifs
1 subcomments
- 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."
by LPisGood
10 subcomments
- > 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?
by AcesoUnderGlass
3 subcomments
- 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.
- 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!
by incognito124
1 subcomments
- > 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
- 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?
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt
0 subcomment
- 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.
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