Alan Kay on the title “member of the technical staff”
Alan Kay on where “member of the technical staff” came from:
(I had forgotten that my boss a long time ago, who taught me object thinking, worked with Alan Kay!)
This idea was from Bob Taylor (the former deputy director of ARPA IPTO, who set up the computing research part of Parc).
Part of his plan was to only accept top people, and to set up a culture of rather independent points of view which would nonetheless encourage them to cooperate when this was a good idea. (He had numerous other good ideas, and most of his ideas worked very well.)
His idea about “Member of Research Staff” being the only title was (a) to emphasize the non-hierarchical (“no managagement levels”, etc.) organization, and (b) as he put it, to have “Member of Research Staff, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center” be the most coveted achievement in computing in the world. (I think he succeded with both of these goals.)
It’s worth remembering that (a) Bob Taylor had been a research psychologist, and was not a computer guy, and (b) that he never set a goal — he always let the technical people find and choose the problems (this was inherited from ARPA IPTO) — he viewed himself as an “impressario” (his term) because his notion of his role was as a “talent wrangler”.
It should also be said that he paid for most of our Ph Ds when he was at ARPA, and so knew pretty much all of us, and how we thought, acted, and interacted. So he was able to stack the deck with people he thought would go along with his theories about process.
This all worked out well, and very much along the lines he had chosen. For this (a) Xerox eventually fired him, and (b) he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1999.
See also this previous post: Member of the UX Staff