Editorial Note
I’ve had this post in my queue for over a month because just as I was about to publish it, the link to Tasbolatov’s post stopped working. It’s just now come back on line so I’m happy to be able to finally publish it.
I’ve been a long time admirer of Bell Labs and the culture that they engendered. It was a marvelous thing and for a while I dreamed about being part of it. We nerds tend to identify Bell Labs with the CSRC and Unix but it was so much more. They did, after all, invent the transistor, the laser, and surprisingly the “modern” vacuum tube, as well as many other things that we now take for granted.
If you’re interested the history of Bell Labs and their many accomplishments, this post by Sabyrzhan Tasbolatov is a nice, short summary that explores the major Bell Labs achievements and the people behind them. It’s an impressive list.
Even more interesting to me is the article by Areoform that considers Why Bell Labs Worked. If you’ve been around Irreal for a while you know that I have little patience with (non-engineering) management meddling in Engineering activities. It’s easy to think that I’m being naive and that of course management needs to keep a tight reign on the engineers to make sure there’s no slacking off and that company goals are being actively pursued.
I maintain, as I always have, that this is special pleading from the control freaks and is actually counterproductive. The Labs stand as a blazing refutation of the nonsense from the special pleaders. They accomplished achievement after wonderful achievement without micromanaging or meddling from the suits.
Marvin Kelly, the man who built Bell Labs, felt that
[I]t wasn’t Kelly’s job to micromanage people. Yes, they worked for him, but in his model, he wasn’t their employer — he was their patron.
That attitude made all the difference but, of course, according to the control freaks it couldn’t possibly work.
A case could be made, I suppose, that AT&T enjoyed a privileged position due to their status as a legal monopoly and I suppose it did help prevent the suits from constantly asking, “What have you done for me lately?” but at the end of the day, the Bell Labs approach produced far more than the “realistic” approach favored by current day management.