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Really wish the author would have commented on salary. I personally think the reason more people don't end up on the hardware/robotics side is that the question
by mdorazio 3y ago
Really wish the author would have commented on salary. I personally think the reason more people don't end up on the hardware/robotics side is that the questionable-value fintech/adtech/socialtech pure software side of the world pays so much better and most developers follow the money.
- edge17 3y agoDefinitely agree here. I have been making this transition and currently work on life science lab automation robotics. It definitely takes intentionality because if you're good at software it's easy to get steered towards lucrative but higher level places in the stack.
- bouk 3y agoThere are certainly hardware companies that value software enough to pay well
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI am assuming anything mission critical.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoBut few companies do, usually American ones, and their open positions are usually less in number than software and they're only in certain regions. If you don't live there you're shit out of luck.
- DoctorDabadedoo 3y agoRobotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG. Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious. source: I work in robotics. AMA.
- badpun 3y agoThanks for the AMA! Do you see a lot of opportunities for people utilizing computer-vision based SLAM (aka Structure from Motion)? I quite like that technique, but it seems too niche to make a consistent career out of it.
- jpace121 3y agoComputer vision based SLAM definitely has use cases and you can definitely make money applying it at the right companies to the right set of problems. Building a whole career around a single technique, any technique, probably is probably not gonna work. You need to be broader than that.
- 0xfaded 3y agoI work for a self driving doing mapping. There are definitely roles out there, more broadly look into other areas of state estimation. It gets interesting when these systems need to be productionized and scaled. A strong software engineer who can speak the math is invaluable. My first year on the job was basically removing N^2 loops and making 3D visualizations.
- DoctorDabadedoo 3y agoSLAM and localization in general are early bottlenecks in mobile robotics solution, unless the core business of the product is localization itself (e.g. waymo, cruise, etc.) it's not uncommon for that to take a back seat during product development later on. In my experience lidar based solutions are more common out there due to their "simplicity" and safety for industrial applications (i.e. PL-rated) You certainly can work with visual slam in the industry, but the job pool for that is not very big, I would say.
- moffkalast 3y agoWhat kind of robotics? It's a pretty wide field.
- DoctorDabadedoo 3y agoMobile robotics, slam/localization and robotics backend.
- okr 3y agoWhat is questionable-value? People pay for questionable things, that brings value to them, though that value is questionable? Do not get it. Though i understand the personal resentment.
- mdorazio 3y agoValue to society, which is different than value to companies or individuals.