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I'm going to ignore "being an artist" and "being a writer" and assume you want to work on technical things. I'm also going to ignore academia because that opens a whole new can of worms about what it means to be independent within academia, how to achieve that independence, whether it is worth it, etc. But you should note that I think most people who want to work in the "independent, technical, research-first" mode would traditionally pursue academia. Anyway, examples:
Colin Percival runs Tarsnap by himself, and it turns a profit. As another commenter mentioned, there are independent game developers who get to do technically interesting work (e.g. Marc Ten Bosch, who got a SIGGRAPH paper out along the way while making Miegakure, or Jonathan Blow, who is building a programming language [although his team grows and shrinks, so he must be acting in a management capacity, or at least like a film director]). Sylph Bioscience is a lean team of three that seems to me to be doing very interesting work (and I don't think any of them have "traditional" educational backgrounds, though I might be wrong). Matt Keeter works a day job and pumped out a SIGGRAPH paper largely for fun. You can do consulting, freelance, contract work, etc. etc. until you land on what you want. You can start some technical product with the aim to sell it in its entirety ASAP to some other entity (though of course the less work you put in on the "business-bits," the less you'll be selling that product for). It's going to be harder to find these things or make them happen, and often they may not be very financially attractive compared to more standard paths (nor are they necessarily stable), but it seems that autonomy and creative control don't come for free in this life: you have to trade off money, time, stability, and status to do things in this manner. |