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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

I really envy anyone working in Industrial Robotics. It's such a fascinating field. Automating physical things is so much more rewarding than automating digital things.

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My dad ran a robotics engineering company after being vp of engineering for a company Siemens bought that did factory automation (conveyors first, then of course robots). Playing doom in his office while he overworked into the night is when I learned about computer networking mostly...I follow in his footsteps in the overwork)

Anyway, in automotive manufacturing right now frequently the industrial automation firm is told they will be paid net 240. This is insanity. It leads to unnecessarily long projects as the firms have to figure out how to cash flow enormous expenses.

In the meantime, inexperienced competitors regularly fixed bid quote something that cannot be safely and timely built for the quoted budget, ignoring profit. They win the project and they're worn down to a nub and either go under or deliver to avoid being sued into oblivion, so it's a horrific race to the bottom.

The latter behaviour I witness regularly in the software consultancy industry and it's a bothersome thing.

Maybe not surprisingly, the real money in this field is in maintenance and ensuring uptime. The robots are cool to develop too but its really hard to get a job doing that directly unless you're a startup with funding from a VC or have an incredibly good resume, but there is a cottage industry of people (businesses or business units usually) that make lots of money maintaining deployed fleets and developing patches / augmentations for existing robotics.

I think its hard to break into in some respects, compared to other fields (you need some certifications iirc in addition to a degree) but my limited, anecdotal exposure suggests its quite interesting and lucrative.

That said, my sample size is small, and on the other end of the spectrum, I know a few folks who maintain complex CNC equipment and develop software for it (using a language I don't recongize, I think its proprietary) and while they make good money, its not better than you can make as a senior engineer at a reputable place as a web developer, for example.

Maybe it's different where you live, but here in California you don't need a degree to do industrial robotics. It certainly doesn't hurt, but unless you're in controls people aren't too picky.

You would make more in webdev or ML though.

Not all of industrial robotics, but what they do, which is maintain and develop software for robotics in critical settings and oversee maintenance related to, I believe did, or at the very least, they are highly incentivized to get them after getting hired.

The one outlier example I gave is specifically tailored for medical equipment.

Industrial controls engineering was a ton of fun, and indeed more rewarding.

But the pay was nowhere near that of a software dev job in SV.

It’s fun when you’re working for the robot manufacturers but traditional software engineering is a lot funner to me. Robots are either programmed with a proprietary language that abstracts anything interesting away or with a joystick. PLC programming is funner but the tooling is still garbage and most of the fun things are also abstracted away unless you are doing servo motion. Things like ROS are typically used in industry. Worked in factory automation for a few years until I realized that software paid better and had better tools.

Meh Pay is better in programming. Fun fields part peanuts

You can get into the field! It's growing fast. There is a ton of pure SW involved.

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