I just came from a discussion in another thread with widely different opinions. This should have it's own poll. Is it still considered an elite group with top talent, on par with Facebook and google, or is it's reputation fading? Discuss away
Went to a few demo parties set up by MSR folks for their pet projects. It blew my freaking mind what these people build for fun. I mean you could create million dollar businesses from what they prototyped. And they are pet project, something done over lunch time in a few months by a few people, etc. These guys are incredible. I have never in my life felt as humbled as I did during these demos, haha. It is unfortunate their projects don’t get the exposure and funding they deserve within the company. They still have to sell the idea to the right product owners and that is the biggest hurdle.
Ha this bs. I had the unfortunate opportunity to touch some code from msr. It probably depends on the team but those guys write code at a high school level, and a lot of their stuff lack theoretical foundation ... i.e. they hack shit up and do trial and err until it kinda sorta works. It’s a good thing they only had to demo. I went to their robotics showcase. It’s a joke. I build better stuff in my garage in my spare time. These guys have free reign and all their time to work on these things... “All the good people left” is right. First DL results at msr with hinton. Those guys are no longer at msr. Resnet for image reco. Also left. ML for ranking. Also left. ... The list goes on and on.
Is it phd-only?
I imagine their reputation among engineers is different than their reputation among researchers in the relevant fields. MSR's reputation among the former group is going to always lag the latter because of lack of exposure or being impressed by titles/complicated math/jargon/etc.
You are from msft yourself and probably know after Satya took over, he changed the way msr works, still good place to work and write paper, but not as research focused as it used be. They have to show real product impact to justify the project instead of writing papers. The integration with Bing was another step to become more applied