IMO most of the practical "research" I've seen comes in the form of best practices from Big Co. who a) hire very intelligent people and b) have extreme financia

IMO most of the practical "research" I've seen comes in the form of best practices from Big Co. who a) hire very intelligent people and b) have extreme financial incentives to write the best code & have the best processes possible. In a world where the dependent variable isn't something that can easily be measured in a lab, the next best we can do is either 1\ Ask experts or 2\ experiment in an environment where it's financially advisable to experiment & measure (AKA an environment where running an experiment with 100 engineers is <1% of your engineering headcount). I.e. I don't work for Google, but I do share things like [0, 1] with new engineers who join my team. [0] https://google.github.io/eng-practices/ https://google.github.io/eng-practices/ [1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1702/1702.01715.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1702/1702.01715.pdf