I’ve always thought the issue was a bit less “Find the interesting research problem” and more “Find the resources, network, or skills that get you into the position of being able to work on the interesting research problem.”

If you asked a bunch of researchers working on the “boring” stuff to predict what the hot papers of the year will be about, do we really think they’ll be that far off base? I’m not talking about groundbreaking or truly novel ideas that seem to come out of nowhere, but rather the high impact research that’s more typical of a field.

Even in big tech companies, it’s quite obvious what the interesting stuff to work on is. But there are limited spots and many more people who want those spots than are available.

Interesting. I don't quite agree. It's one thing to predict what general topics will be hot and popular this year. But that's not the same as what particular research problem will be important and have lasting influence.

There are a few kinds of important research. One is solving a well-defined, well-known problem everyone wants to solve but nobody knows how. Another is proposing a new problem, or a new formulation of it, that people didn't realize was important.

There is also highly-cited research that isn't necessarily important, such as being the next paper to slightly lower a benchmark through some tweaks (you get cited by all the subsequent papers that slightly lower the benchmark even further).

In the book The Cuckoo's egg, Cliff Stoll talks to I think Luiz Alvares. I don't have the book handy here, but Alvarez basically told him to nit get distracted by grants, bosses, ... Here is interesting science to do, so go for it. Just run faster than the rest of the world.

In a way, it was a sidetrack of the book, but for me the attitude speaking from that text was interesting and inspiring. When I could pull it off, it tended to work.