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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.

Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.

Yeah, no thanks.

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I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don't see immediate impact doesn't mean it isn't there

I'm not saying that people shouldn't do basic research, far from it, more that I learned that given the way basic research actually works then I had relatively little interest in actually doing it myself.

This is definitely false in many cases.

Source: I’ve worked on both.

Sure, I'm glad people do that work. But it's not for me.

> Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app.

Those aren't the only two options and even they were, it isn't always true.

That particular argument also falls flat, at least with the given information, since there have been plenty of industry partners in defining the USB specs.

My guess is that if you want to be paid full-time to work on USB, you'll probably find more (and better-paid) positions in industry.

Yeah, but outside a borderline prodigy or no lifing to get the knowlegde and experience or a lucky recruitment at some university event, I doubt the industry was letting fresh new grads work on something like the USB spec.

There may have been junior people on the teams at the various companies like Intel that developed and implemented the spec. No, those junior people probably weren't really developing the spec. (The person at Intel who is most credited for the spec with his team was already pretty senior and later became an Intel Fellow.) I also sort of doubt a university group in Utah was a major contributor--although I could be wrong.

I admit I might've got the details wrong. The gist of the anecdote is the best response he had to me wanting to do impactful work was, "some people who didn't even go to this school were a part of something you've heard of ten years ago," which I didn't find terribly compelling.

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