Ask HN: Doing unpaid research while working in industry

Does anyone manage to do research (publishing papers and the like) while working? I'm just wondering if this is possible at all as it seems both research and working take a huge amount of time.

By this I don't mean people who are paid to do research and publish on behalf of their company but people who do research, manage to publish, and aren't paid by their employers for said research.

The reason I ask is everyone seems to talk about how difficult it is to find positions in academia and such, but nobody has really come up with any alternatives. Doing research in industry is possible but besides MSR and maybe IBM it seems that companies only fund research which have the potential to generate revenue.