I'm a PhD dropout, but I did do lots of (somewhat poor) research leading up to that. For me, I was always a practical type, which made me less good as a researc

I'm a PhD dropout, but I did do lots of (somewhat poor) research leading up to that. For me, I was always a practical type, which made me less good as a researcher and more focused on engineering. Throughout my time in school though, I'd worked on the side (first commercializing our raytracing work, then consulting for Sony Pictures Imageworks). I still stay involved in research, as I attend SIGGRAPH every year and often go to HPG. But, fundamentally, I'm sort of bad at imagining what will be a problem several years from now, and much better at solving something that's right in front of me. That led me to doing fairly systems-ey hardly research work, and then doing that as a full-time job :).