As a completely biased view of someone who's no longer in either academia or industry, industrial research, at least in HCI, is a funny place. Sometimes, I get

As a completely biased view of someone who's no longer in either academia or industry, industrial research, at least in HCI, is a funny place. Sometimes, I get the feeling that the major academic research labs try too hard to be universities to their own detriment. There's a pretty steady flow between universities and research labs, moreso than between product groups and research labs. I feel like the industry researchers I meet seem more concerned about impressing their academic peers than their bosses. It seems like research in other fields of computer science are tied more closely to practical applications: Systems, Compilers, Distributed Computation etc. but it's rare to find that kind of work in HCI.