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> At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that is not economically viable. But, you can't transfer that knowledge, or at least most of it. You are also now 50 years old, give or take.

> Back in the day when lots of people worked on hard technology, they were paid well to work on the problem

is the model closer to "tenured research scientist" rather than "startup founder or employee"?

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It's 1/2 way between. Back in the day all the big "tech" firms had long term R&D. You could spend years working on tech with no commercial viability as long as you could keep making better demos. You were most likely an employee with a PhD and a pension.

But then wall street started demanding quarterly growth and they all cut their R&D departments.

Think Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

I wonder how different interviews were back then by comparison.

Reputation. Who you knew and who knew you.

And by extension, where you got your PhD and who your advisors were and who they knew.

> Back in the day all the big "tech" firms had long term R&D.

Isn't this true of many large companies today? I don't see Alphabet making any returns on X anytime soon.

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