Advice about Starting a Company

2 points

6 years ago

I work for an industrial research lab in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately the COVID-19 situation has introduced a lot of uncertainty regarding my future career. My concern is due to the decline in industrial research labs (see https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-rd-lab/ and https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-research-labs.html), I won't be able to transition to another research job if I get laid off from my job. While I enjoy coding, I don't want to work as a software engineer. When I was looking for a job two years ago, I had a difficult time getting hired for software engineering positions due to the Leetcode challenges and also because most of my previous experience has been as a researcher writing prototype-level code instead of production-level code.

I've thought about becoming an independent researcher and developer where I do publishable research as a side hobby while engaging in some type of money-making project to cover my living expenses. The hard part for me is coming up with a money-making project that I am interested in. I'm passionate about systems software and programming languages, and there are some open-source projects that I want to build. For example, a side project I'm working on is a desktop environment for Linux and the BSDs that is written in Common Lisp and is inspired by OpenDoc, Smalltalk, and Lisp machines, including some of my own ideas. However, I have no idea of how I could make a living from such a project. It seems that all of the ideas I could think of are research ideas or ideas of software that is hard to monetize such as operating systems and desktop environments.

I'm wondering if there is anyone else in this situation, and I'm wondering what advice you could give.

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