Google invests heavily into basic computer science reseach, and Google
researchers are well represented at respected conferences and in high
impact journals in their subfields. So yes, one can do 'actual "research"
projects' at Google. We have an entire research organization doing just
that, often in collaboration with academia: https://research.google/

However, not everyone working on experimental projects at Google is doing
what one might call "research". For some, such as myself, the line can be
blurry, but I'm firmly in a development camp, as are most people I know. To
put it succinctly for me, as for many others, the job isn't to publish
papers or present results, it's to write software of value to Google.
However, we have considerable latitude to investigate new and innovative
ways of writing that software.

Of course, that also entails taking lessons learned from systems outside of
the mainstream.

It's true that Barret still works on Akaros: it was his PhD thesis topic.
However, Google is no longer investing in it directly.

        - Dan C.

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:54 PM hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dan, does that mean you are allowed to have actual "research" projects
> at google? i just never thought something like this would be possible,
> and never realized akaros happened at google itself. i imagined the
> involvement of universities instead, but i clearly didn't check
> closely enough.
> I hear only bad news from google lately, but if they give enough
> freedom to also do basic research (or let's call it OS development
> cause IT research is an oxymoron) that's great news to me indeed :)
> And as you said all i know of google is their web site. or knew, cause
> many useful services like google code search are no more. at least
> google mail still works :P
>
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