Can you give some details on what you do?  I think it&#x27;s pretty interesting (and rare) that you can make consulting money by taking a paper and turning it into an implementation.  What field are you in, who do you work with, etc.?  Are you independent?<p>I&#x27;m doing the same sort of thing at Google.  I&#x27;ve been a software engineer for 13 years or so and I switched over to a research group in 2014.  There is definitely a culture difference, even though Google is one of the places which has the least &quot;pure&quot; research.  All research teams have software engineers pretty much, and they mostly work with the same codebase that engineers do.