Nice article, bad title. I worked at Holmdel and other locations for 10 years in development, not research, and it was very far from boring.
The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
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Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#12I worked for a while as a contract tech writer at Lucent (the spun-off version of Bell Labs after the AT&T split) in the 90s. It was an interesting company to work for, although the biggest memories I have are of the hardbound notebooks they had which had page numbers (something I didn’t see again until I came across Leuchtturm notebooks decades later), winning the contest for longest commute during bike-to-work week (I biked from my apartment on the Near North Side of Chicago to suburban Lisle, a distance of about 30 miles), a discussion about whether bananas were technically fruits (I remember people coming to the incorrect decision they weren’t, not realizing that the black spots in the middle of the banana are seeds) and a trainer who gave the writers a course on cell phone technology going into great detail about his ham radio hobby. It was a great company to work at, but the commute was pretty awful and I ended up moving on after a year there.
Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#13Great story. It seems such a luxury to have a decent well-paying job with real stability, 9-to-5 work hours, and enough interesting projects to sink your teeth in.
Is this something you only find in corporate or academic labs?
Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#14I remember going to Holmdel to install our network backup product (which later became something named ABARS in AT&T if I remember well), in the 80s. For this young French Unix geek, this was like walking into the Olympe, among the gods :) Edit: Souvenirs, souvenirs. I remember how impressive the atrium was, nothing like it in France at the time (or now probably). However I was working in a basement room, which was incidentally full of Cisco routers. If I had seized the hint and bought a bit of stock, I'd be a richer man... Our software had a memory usage issue on the big Bell Labs file systems, and the very nice AT&T manager insisted that I would not be allowed to go back to France until I fixed the issue. This was a trivial linear reallocation problem, but there was obviously no Stack Overflow at the time so I had to invent exponential reallocation on the spot to get home. I still have the UUCP email paths to our correspondents in my mail archive.
Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#15Great story. It seems such a luxury to have a decent well-paying job with real stability, 9-to-5 work hours, and enough interesting projects to sink your teeth in. Is this something you only find in corporate or academic labs?
It barely exists in corporate or academic labs anymore tbh. Or at least, what you're describing has been what I've been looking for in my 10-year corporate career, and I've never found it nor met anyone who has
Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#16Great story. It seems such a luxury to have a decent well-paying job with real stability, 9-to-5 work hours, and enough interesting projects to sink your teeth in. Is this something you only find in corporate or academic labs?
US Government contractors have a requirement for average hours worked, by salaried workers, to be no more than ~40 hours / week (might be But I go home at 5pm every day.
Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#17Design of Experiments? Boring? I'm glad she's showing her passion – I've reviewed applications for people with just "data science" experience, versus people with additional research design experience, and their "traditional" training ended contributing so much more to our resource-constrained environment with small customer samples.
At one point, when I worked in an area with many pilot fabs, Intel was haemorraging technicians with practical experience working with statistical quality control, but didn't necessarily have a lot of formal education on their CVs. Their loss...
Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#18I was looking at that building interior and the (faux) leather seats built into the concrete that surrounds the sunken waiting area, and it got me thinking about perception and how much of our reality is a sort of mind game we engage in. Back in the day, that space must have felt like a sort of corporate power display with edgy futuristic vibes. The secretaries sat in the middle area and (mostly) men in dark suits an…
> their reality is substantially created in the mind and merely girded by the physicality of the object
many such cases (all such cases)
Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#19I worked for a while as a contract tech writer at Lucent (the spun-off version of Bell Labs after the AT&T split) in the 90s. It was an interesting company to work for, although the biggest memories I have are of the hardbound notebooks they had which had page numbers (something I didn’t see again until I came across Leuchtturm notebooks decades later), winning the contest for longest commute during bike-to-work week…
As a college graduate desperate for a Usenet feed, ihnp4 was a godsend.
They just knocked down the front half of that building to make a data center, which is now being fought by the locals.
Re: The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
#20I was looking at that building interior and the (faux) leather seats built into the concrete that surrounds the sunken waiting area, and it got me thinking about perception and how much of our reality is a sort of mind game we engage in. Back in the day, that space must have felt like a sort of corporate power display with edgy futuristic vibes. The secretaries sat in the middle area and (mostly) men in dark suits an…
You used a lot of fancy words to say "fashions in interior design change over time," making much of little in the process.