A couple extremes which might be exceptions to this include (a) content creation monetized across a large audience, and (b) internal/external consulting with a skillset core to your research.
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If the profitable work of (a + b) can take < 10–20h/w of work, I can perhaps imagine enough bandwidth for real research. But I'm not sure how big that market is or how widely applicable across domains.
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One boundary-condition route which seems relevant: many folks could work as an sweng for Google for ~5–10 years, then simply fund their own work indefinitely thereafter. A stable version of "drawing down savings for a few years."
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But I suspect that even in this ideal-seeming case with funding taken care of, the work would often naturally evolve to something more institutional: a "center," an "institute," a startup, etc—simply as an avenue for greater impact/insight. See also:
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I was briefly calling myself an independent researcher: somebody who self-funds spec R&D on their own ideas. In theory it’s something like indie-research : academic research :: blogging/self-publishing : traditional publishing.
But the idea doesn’t really work.
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That seems right! Do you have a rough guess as to what % of Google engineers could do that? Saving 200–400K/y to endow $100K in consumption over 5–10y is certainly doable, but I don't have a sense if that's 1% or 10% (or more) of engineers' compensation.
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Assuming 4% returns, target 2.5M savings. Levels.fyi suggests this would be challenging for a sr sweng (~10 years at 50% pre-tax savings), doable for a staff sweng (~7.5). I’d guess around 10% >= staff. Normally takes 5-10 yrs to reach.
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What about smoothing that sort of thing over time, with part time (for example) software engineering/part time research? Certainly there are some big potential obstacles (size/stability of the part-time "knowledge work" job market, financial incentives, maybe IP)
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- but I'm somewhat surprised that it isn't a more common path, based on my anecdotal sense of stated preferences of people in tech and academic research. At least if the major hurdle is time and not expensive research equipment. Are these obstacles just that insurmountable?
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Does time vs. pay just scale that nonlinearly? Split time has some downsides, but doesn't seem to be too different from many academic research positions in practice (with teaching, grants, administrative work, etc.), and might have upsides.
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In particular, seems like this sort of approach would widen the audience for funding mechanisms like prizes and mini grants
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Part-time consulting does seem to be a fairly popular route along these lines, but divided attention is extremely tricky.
Absolutely (I can attest) - though it does seem to be a built in feature of large parts of the modern research enterprise!