I've gotten a fair amount of grant money from different Canadian research grants, some retrospective, some prospective. I've also written grants as a side thing

I've gotten a fair amount of grant money from different Canadian research grants, some retrospective, some prospective. I've also written grants as a side thing. Probably all summed together I've helped pull in around $1m–$2m. I don't know about the academic side, but for corporate grants this part: > sprinkle a bit of fad-ish topics into your research if even if it's a stretch to do so. Does work, but only if the core thing you're tackling isn't as meritorious as what the reviewer is used to seeing. So, for example, one grant I wrote for a hardcore AI startup that had huge data engineering issues on a shoestring budget. Former Stanford, Google, etc folks. I didn't need to pull in anything. I just straight wrote the claim (retrospective grant applications are called claims) and we got a big cheque. Most of the work was meticulously going through their pull requests and estimating hours that were research vs traditional software development. As an aside, I make around $5k per day with this type of work because I get pulled into the most technical claims and I'm very good at it, but I don't enjoy it as much as software development so I only take stuff that I think needs my help.