Excellent essay (and, I assume, talk). This jumped out at me:
So it seems that there is the reverse problem on the real world developer side: we are solving problems, comparing and contrasting approaches and implementations, but we are either too lazy or too busy to sit down and write a proper paper about it
That would be invaluable, but I understand that they don't do it for the very same reason that OS researchers don't submit patches to the LKML: it's not what they're evaluated on.
If you've ever been frustrated by the disconnect between research and industry in the area of computing, read this essay.
yup agreed, and even if developers would like to write up their findings in an academic-style paper, they aren't likely to be accepted at top-ranked conferences, since they're so selective and only publish papers that are presented and polished in a very academic way
fortunately, i think now some good conferences have more 'applied' or 'industrial experience' tracks
I think just writing them up anywhere will get at least some attention, because academics often do tend to search for "what is industry doing on this?", and they have less stringent standards for publication venues when they're looking for an industry paper versus an academic paper--- it doesn't have to be in the top conferences, since it's not a scientific result that needs to be peer reviewed so much as a documentation that industry is doing things in a certain way, and why they decided to do so.
Linux is starting to have a few self-run conferences that publish papers, like the annual GCC developers' conference, which might be good places for that sort of thing. Old-school Unix vendors traditionally had their own journals for that purpose, e.g. the DEC Technical Journal, Sun Technical Journal, and a whole host of IBM journals, all of which got cited in academia reasonably often.
The thing is, what the author describes is science. They implemented a bunch of different options, evaluated them experimentally, and came to conclusions. But, they just use their conclusions to inform how implementation should proceed, they didn't tell everyone else about their conclusions. Publishing those results would be interesting to academics.
Also industry is profit driven. It is hard for an employer to justify spending time and money to get papers published when there are bugs to be fixed and products that have to roll out.
So it seems that there is the reverse problem on the real world developer side: we are solving problems, comparing and contrasting approaches and implementations, but we are either too lazy or too busy to sit down and write a proper paper about it
That would be invaluable, but I understand that they don't do it for the very same reason that OS researchers don't submit patches to the LKML: it's not what they're evaluated on.
If you've ever been frustrated by the disconnect between research and industry in the area of computing, read this essay.