For the last ~3 years I worked for companies. No proper publication. But some articles here and there [0]. My Master’s thesis [T]. A (trivial) game to learn Ruby [1]. There are a lot that are not published anywhere.
I have left my full time job this month, and now pursuing full time research independently hoping some papers + job exp. + GRE lands me a PhD in a good research uni.
When you are working, try to make sure that the job aligns with your long term goals. Then learn a lot from work. Learning at work is effortless.
[0]: https://www.kaggle.com/code/truthr/learn-jax-from-linear-reg...