3 ms·

but then you're switching to less paid career path, don't ya?

• TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  This probably depends a lot on where you are in your software career path, but in Silicon Valley robotics skills are in high demand. Most software engineers have trouble crossing the gap in to any kind of hardware interaction, so you ought to be able to charge a premium for this skill set. I personally am more concerned with doing work I care about, so I've never been too focused on getting paid the maximum, so I don't have the most expertise here. But I worked at Google X Robotics as a hardware test engineer. I was a contractor so I don't really know what the pay packages were like, but I would say that even the people who were primarily software engineers on that team pretty much all had hardware skills too. When you're working in robotics, you tend to at least play with all the stuff I mentioned above, and I would expect this experience to factor in to hiring decisions. And the people working at Google writing software for robotics seemed like they were all highly paid engineers, though I never asked anyone specifics. But if someone feels like software is a dead end job for them, moving in to robotics is a great way to make things more interesting. At one of my jobs I wrote C++ to help a researcher implement some of his ideas around locating specific individuals in a room, and I basically got to play hide and go seek with a Toyota HSR robot all day long. Working with robots is way more fun and interesting than writing web forms all day.