The independent researcher
I&#x27;ve done an enormous amount of independent (and fairly successful) computer science research over the last two decades. Computer science is amenable to it if you are willing to make a large investment of time. The challenge is that making this research useful to <i>other</i> people requires an even bigger investment of time, which creates a somewhat adverse incentive.<p>At least for me, there is one giant gap I&#x27;ve ever never been able to cross. I am willing to spend an inordinate amount of time solving interesting theory problems and doing novel algorithm design work <i>because it is useful to some cutting edge software problem I am working on</i>. However, I have almost zero incentive to spend the significant amount of time to publish any of my research, whereas academics do. My time is enormously oversubscribed as it is. My benefit is that I can reduce it to practice and build software that does things no one else can do (and I enjoy the research generally). I know a few other people in the same boat; great researchers, no time or incentive to publish.<p>I&#x27;ve never been able to reconcile this. There is a similar analogue in open sourcing software. Open sourcing your software often <i>increases</i> the amount of time you need to invest in it in practice, which disincentives people with limited time to open source code (and after they already invested their extra time creating the code in the first place) that they otherwise would be amenable to open sourcing.