I've run into people with great private-sector positions, but they seem to almost all be ex-academics who first established themselves in academia, and then jumped to something high-level and researchy, like a position at Microsoft Research, or a senior position at Google with considerable freedom [1].

For a junior person, academia does have a lot of downsides, not least because of the massive move towards rationalization, metrics-counting, and a focus on how much grant money you bring in. But the junior people I know in the private sector have even less freedom regarding what they spend their day doing, and much less freedom when it comes to formal working conditions, such as choosing to work from home or a coffee shop a few days a week.

Is there a way to find positions with research freedom in the private sector without first becoming established in academia?

[1] Matt Welsh is a good example of someone who did the senior-academic-to-industry transition. He went into academia, got tenure, got promoted up the ranks through to Full Professor at Harvard, and then left for a senior position at Google with considerable freedom: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/

"Is there a way to find positions with research freedom in the private sector without first becoming established in academia?"

Define "established"?

Most relevant to the hypotheticals here, one question is whether you can get a position with research freedom in the private sector without going into academia at all. If you choose industry rather than academia, is it possible? Or do you need to first get that "professor" line on your resume to be able to land those kinds of industry positions?

I work for IBM Research. While I do not have complete freedom, I feel that my research and development mandate is quite broad within my project. I came straight from grad school. Most people that are hired into IBM Research were not professors, but are coming from grad school or post-docs.

Anyone with a Masters degree (working as a researcher)?

Kinda. There are so e people who have Masters degrees who work in Research, but they don't typically have what I think of as a "research mandate". They have more development responsibilities. But, there are some people with PhDs who are the same.

Most people, though, have PhDs.

Didn't they just shutdown Hawthorne, move everyone in software to Yorktown, and lose a lot of people to Google New York in the process? What's left?

We moved, yes, but I'm not aware of anyone who left because of the move. I'm actually happier up in Yorktown - it's a better building than Hawthorne.

I strongly believe the "professor" title is not a point of strength on one's resume vs solid industry experience. In general, if one is taking the time and effort required to become a tenured professor, he/she should stick with it. Sure, there are anecdotal cases (Harvard profs going to Goog...), but those are anecdotes and not the mean.

Could you elaborate? I mean I agree about academia being stifling, but I have trouble imagining it easy to find a research/reading sort of job in CS today.