Do you have any thoughts on how to get started on this road? I feel like I missed the boat sometimes, though I'm using doing interesting-ish work professionally and in open source. I'm not interested in chasing the framework-of-the-week, I want to work on tools that advance how we think about software.
This may be something I do later in life, but I feel very wired for R&D + tooling, and a bit locked out of these types of jobs without a PhD.
Its never too late to get started down the PhD road. At least in my department, most PhD canidates aren't fresh out of school, they've usually taken at least a year or two and worked in industry of some sort and then applied.
My own experience: I had had no research experience in school and worked in industry for a bit before decided that it bored me to death, but I felt shut out from PhDs at the time. I started looking into research that might be interesting and sent out a bunch of emails to professors at universities explaining who I was, my goals and asking if they were looking for a research tech or anything. I probably sent out like 30 letters, got a handful or responses. I took a bit of a pay cut, but I got a fantastic job that I loved as a research programmer for a professor. I worked there for a while, worked on some interesting research, read a ton of papers, got a handful of co-authors on papers, and then was able to apply to grad programs with a strong application.
Pick a specific area, read lots of papers, find out what the bleeding edge statements 'we can do X' and 'Y would be nice and seems within reach but we're not doing it now' are there.
Do something interesting and novel based on that - not neccessarily a detailed implementation, but at least a quick&dirty proof of concept; and then also describe and publish it as a formal paper, it's not particularly much work compared to actually doing the stuff. For example, if you "want to work on tools that advance how we think about software" then picking some specific narrow area of how, say, Bret Victor's concepts could/should be implemented in real practice would be an interesting topic.
All of this can be done w/o a PhD as a hobby/side-project, and such a project+publication would also be a ticket to a decent PhD spot.
mattgreenrocks it's never too late! But, I agree without a PhD R&D jobs are difficult to come by.
It sounds like you know what you want to work on. My advise would be to do some more reading in the area and find research papers in your field. Soon you'll know how to extend or improve on prior work. At this point it's a good idea to identify schools and supervisors you want to work with, especially those whose papers you've read or reach you are interested in extending. You might even propose a research collaboration with them based on the papers you read. This is a good way to open channel of communication and get your foot in the door.
There's a great deal that can be said on how to get into a PhD programme. Let me know if you want to continue this discussion offline.
This may be something I do later in life, but I feel very wired for R&D + tooling, and a bit locked out of these types of jobs without a PhD.