Everyone Wants To Do Research

A number of friends have professed to me recently about interest in doing more research. My observation is that it seems more popular to do research now that at any other time in my undergrad. Indeed I'm part of this. My work has gradually shifted farther and farther back the stack, from frontend to full stack to research engineering.

I think the most important reason why this is happening is the dominance of the AI labs in industry. The current AI labs of the day are not only incredibly interesting places to work, but offer positions that are extremely well compensated. In a word, they are becoming more and more prestigious, and doing research is a signal for the labs, though far from the only reason why people may want to do research.

Another major allure of doing research is that you feel like you are at the frontier, that you are doing something that nobody has ever done before. Most people want to work on the cutting edge.

One should always be wary of prestige, but I personally think this shift is a good thing. If we can shift more people away from working in quant or consulting, that is a great thing. We should try to do new, hard things and encourage people to create real value!