Ask HN: Work on robotics or agents? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Work on robotics or agents?

79 points_js4b64 comments

I'm a recent Mechanical Engineering / CS graduate working in the Sales Engineering space for a cybersecurity company.

I have an opportunity to join an early-stage robotics company in SF and work with some amazing robotics engineers. However, I've also been building security-related agents/workflows in my free time that have gotten the attention of some senior people at my org.

This isn't necessarily a "which one should I pick?" but rather where you all see both of these industries going in the next decade or so. No one can predict the future, but would love to hear thoughts from people way more experienced than me in either field.

Thanks!

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Pick the immediate direction that will put you in a position to work with the smartest people. That’s probably more important than picking a technology.

Your side projects with agents have impressed people in your org. Do those people impress you? My gut reaction is that if they are impressed by the side projects of a recent college grad, they may not be at the top of that field.

At an early stage of your career, the best work environment is one that makes you feel like “damn I’m really going to have to perform to keep up here.” It’s not great to be very early in your career and feel like “damn, I’m the smartest guy in this room.” It can create bad habits and a sense of entitlement.

And the tricky thing is, if you are a high performer, most situations will make you feel like the latter.

this!

Agree 100%

Contrary (and cynical) take.

If your goal is to climb the corporate ladder, work where you feel you can rise the fastest.

The smartest people won't be your peers in higher management.

Yeah this. Also leverage yourself a position where you are well known and indispensable.

Indispensable is unpromotable. Train your replacement on your own terms before they make you.

I don't want to be promoted!

At some point you get to the state where you can't perform a work function. We lost more people above me than along side me.

I mean, this could be phase 2 of career growth. Focus on personal growth first by surrounding by experts.

Maybe.

I’ve seen some pretty incompetent people just show up and play the game make it decently far. I prioritized learning first and got great offers right off the bat, but I definitely overdid it.

Different strategies for different people.

It just all seems so random and personal to me to make any blanket statement in this area.

The biggest thing to me is to not blow the small handful of opportunities that randomly present themselves. In this context, there is a good chance those won't be in agents or robotics.

At 50, I am happy with my life but I have blown almost all my opportunities. I have grinded out a decent life but it is pretty minimized vs what could have been.

I was offered a nice career at 21 in the financial markets from my part time job while going to college for CS so turned it down. CS was delusion with my math skills and I dropped out. Ended up spending a decade grinding to get into the financial markets after college.

Before CS I thought I would get a PhD in psychology. A real Freudian fan boy professor made me abandon that. I thought Freud was so absurd on first encounter. At this point I have read almost all of Freud's work on my own. I should have stuck with the original plan in psychology.

On the other hand, maybe the path I have traveled is the optimal path because at 50 I am not done. I still have huge dreams to make this all be the right path. The bar is not that high.

It is all a relative valuation.

Yeah, but then you get laid off from your cushy VP or Director role at 45 and realize you weren’t as smart as you thought you were when you’re searching for your next role that will pay you your previous salary. You’ll probably think back to this crossroad and regret it. Especially since robotics hasn’t had its ChatGPT moment just yet, but looks soon.

As director or VP one should be able to retire at 45 in USA. Then you don’t care anymore about next job.

Most people making it to VP or Director by age 45 haven't been in that position long enough to retire. Not to mention that getting there by that early point generally requires a certain amount of drive that's difficult to just shut off and retire.

^ I am in 100% agreement with /u/snowwrestler here. It is very important to be around people more smarter than you early(and even late) in ones career. Not only will you learn and grow faster, you’ll have lower risk to burn out and also enjoy your work.

This.

The only times i was really happy at work was when I was working with giants, people way smarter than me.

And then I made a turn to easy corporate jobs where progress was effortles by comparison and colleagues very eager to lay praise. This led to years of unhappiness and intellectual stagnation. (And money, but that hardly compensates, and I think a smart engineer can make money without having to work a dull corporate job).

Also, high praise in corporate environment often means no career progression past certain points. They already have their management buddies, and they need efficient engineers in the lower ranks.

Besides, robotics its where its at. Just ask where nVidia is investing. Or look at the demographics. Or anti-immigration politics in western countries. It will be robots all over the place within a few years.

> Your side projects with agents have impressed people in your org. Do those people impress you? My gut reaction is that if they are impressed by the side projects of a recent college grad, they may not be at the top of that field.

I generally agree with your post, but this nerd snipes me a bit. I'm regularly impressed by juniors. By what they achieve in relation to their experience. Sometimes they do stuff I genuinely couldn't do, and that's normal - skill isn't linear. Or they think of stuff I didn't come up with. But in most cases, I'm impressed by the talent and promise I see for them to become strong seniors in a few years. Especially when it comes to hiring, I tend to look more at a person's trajectory, than what they can do right now. But your question - "Do those people impress you?" - is certainly a great one to ask.

Man this is precisely my dilemma right now. I’m an 1st year analyst with a ms in data science doing ai engineer requests for in an insurance company where heads of analytics division think transformers are from movies. Knock on wood I pull off a pay package that’s being discussed, which would keep me for sure, but I can’t find(/failing to recognize) anyone in the company who I’d aspire to. Instead, out of boredom essentially, I’ve been doing Ai full stack development projects for companies, but again no inspiring people just repeating customized (though admittedly some rather interesting) problems with bit extra income. Am I just not looking for the right perspective?

Any tips or advice are welcome lol

Different take here -

In my career it hasn't mattered if I'm cleaning bathrooms or building Software used by millions of people IF I'm doing it with people I enjoy being around. The people you work with will make or break your career, and (this will be shocking) if you're smart and like working on hard problems you'll end up wanting to be around people who are like that... so choose your direction based on the people.

How do you meet these people, and more importantly sell yourself to them so they are willing to take you on?

Work on hard and interesting problems by yourself and then talk to them about your experience doing so. Meet them through meetups and online communities and job applications

Follow the golden rule, be the person that you would want to work with. Be valuable enough so that you have some choice in which team you join.

I don't know of any other advice to this end that would apply universally. It depends on specifics of the operating modes and types of relationships you'd develop in the companies that you would fit with.

> more importantly sell yourself to them so they are willing to take you on?

Be a friendly person who’s fun to be around.

Be optimistic. Say yes more than no.

Learn a lot. Have interesting things to say. Listen more and ask more questions than you talk.

Get good at selling. Be curious about how people think and act.

Encourage others and make them feel appreciative when you offer them critical feedback.

Find something with high value that most people really dislike doing that you are willing to get really good at and actually do.

If space lives up to even a fraction of its potential over the next ~10-20 years then robotics is going to grow astronomically as a field. More generally I have not found software to be a longterm satisfying career - the compensation, freedom, and potential are all excellent. You are well compensated, can work from anywhere*, and a single successful side project (don't sign away your rights to code you write outside of work) always has the possibility to blow up into something worth billions - this is really unlike any other "normal" career. But I think there's a reason that there's a growing sect of people leaving to do everything from farming, woodwork, and even welding. Building even simple things in the real world is somehow so much more satisfying.

If I had it to do over again I'd pick a field where software complements something done in the real world - robotics, astronomy, aerospace, etc.

Having done work in hardware and software, I'm somewhat in agreement, but I'll also counterpoint.

Building software is a fast development cycle. Find bug, fix bug, compile, release, improve. Things can be done in hours or days.

Building hardware is a slow development cycle. If I think of a new feature it might take a month just to get a prototype board designed, made, populated etc. The results are cool, but the feedback cycle is slow.

For my personality, I prefer software. I can have an idea, play with it, realize it's rubbish, and discard it - all before lunch.

But people are different. So someone else might prefer the hardware cycle.

Ultimately my advice to the original question is that "it likely doesn't matter" and "you cant predict the future". Both paths lead somewhere, but you can't really "know" up front.

So choose the one that gets you out of bed faster. The one that excites you more. And in a couple years you'll be better placed to make the next decision.

I can back this up. I work as an FPGA engineer, which is very much an amalgam of software, "firmware" (RTL), and hardware. If I find a software bug or want to spin up something quickly on the HPS (on chip CPU) it might take me a few days - the reward cycle is really quick. Hardware issues on the other hand might take months if not a year+ to fix depending on complexity, meaning the design cycle is long. It might involve multiple board respins because something has been incorrectly connected, whole redesigns because there was a baked in bug on the chip that we need to workaround, or there's some really ethereal signal integrity issue that can come up when working with high speed interfaces that nobody can work out why its failling 1/4000 times. It's fulfilling, but really is a slog at times for a smaller reward financially for something that cost so much more (12 hour day crunch times I've found are way more common in hardware).

Great take on the potential of software career!

Could you please share any tips on how to not sign away right to have commercial side-projects?

Every employment contract I've seen recently seems to claim IP really broadly, e.g. "everything created in the course of employment belongs to you employer". The better the job otherwise, the harder this seems to fight. I have just recently quit a job just so I could work on a "side-project" but would be nice to have an income.

Definitely check with a lawyer because the exact meanings are not intuitive. For instance that phrasing you gave (within the scope/course of employment) is typical, and would generally not apply to unrelated projects you did outside of work, but it's obviously not something to just assume - one way, or the other.

Thank you!

>But I think there's a reason that there's a growing sect of people leaving to do everything from farming, woodwork, and even welding

I think that's pretty much entirely because the compensation is good enough that a lot of people can retire by fourty even without having planned for it. Many people in other office jobs find them tedious or get fed up with office politics or whatever but can't reasonably just decide to start farming instead.

This is not true for the vast majority of software engineers. It probably only applies to 2% of the total SE workforce that got lucky to be at FAANG or FAANG adjacent companies during a certain time period.

That's for sure. I've had a lucky career where I feel like I've made above average compensation the entire time, but my upside is that I can maybe retire in my mid-50s rather than mid-60s. Which is about when (I fear) ageism would kick me out anyway.

Way more than 2% of software engineers in the us are earning at least two or three times the local median income and, barring lifestyle choices that prevent it, that's enough for very early retirement.

Successful software career turned robotics (2015) here. After a crypto exit (unicorn) I committed 100% to robotics, driven by sheer boredom with software, nail-in-coffin typified by the perception of the crypto world's journey from utopian vision to sad elucidation of status quo slash enshrined large capital slash regulator interest. Also opportunity: had already learned Chinese, knew the domestic business environment, had a global outlook and felt this was a unique starting position.

The switch has been a very different run to most software people heading to robotics, because I did this without external capital in China where it is cheap and small amounts of money (relatively) are unreasonably effective due to higher iteration speeds and lower supply chain latencies and costs. Having thus learned a heap running industrial facility, including equipment selection, maintenance and integration plus managing cross-disciplinary teams across all aspects of mechanical, electronic, electrical and production/process engineering, we are about to raise for US-based go to market, with a target of outright purchase of a permanent R&D slash autonomous manufacturing facility in San Diego so we can punch holes in walls and get core process really humming.

If you are interested in multi-disciplinary design work spanning software, hardware and operations research (think "real life Factorio") please reach out. We have some interesting problems and seek to buid a US-based core of talented generalists with what we would hope is a PARC-style pragmatic engineering culture (whole problem in view) rather than corporate-style "fill in the blank" grind. Positive environmental outcomes such as avoidance of single use plastics are part of our values. Prospective early 2Q start. Email in profile.

Robotics hands down. Robots exist today with demonstrated value and are on every bit the hyper-growth curve in reality that LLM wrappers claim. Robots build everything from printed circuit boards to automobiles to other robots.

The term “agent” isn’t really even defined out of some effort to fundraise by establishing some price target anchor to NVIDIA.

The really honest and serious people in a space that could be called agents are people like Nick and Adrian at Cohere, and historically they’ve been both specific and honest about what they’re doing, they’ve often called it “tool use”, which is a real thing. If you want to work on agent type stuff I’d go talk to Cohere.

Nadella saying on camera that “AGENT” will replace all business software near term is all you need to know: Nadella is smart as hell and wildly well-informed. If he says outlandish shit like that?

He’s lying.

For anyone who wants a refreshing candor from an unimpeachable legend I really recommend Nick Frosst:

https://youtu.be/4JF1V2hzGKE

I thought he looked familiar and realized he's the lead singer of Good Kid, which is a great band. What a talent

Pick the team that most impresses you with their expertise. That sounds like the robotics company.

Are you in it for the glory, for the money, for the experience, for the team and colleagues, for the resume, for the challenge, or for something else? Answer that question and you have your answer.

Why not both. Isnt that where it is headed anyway? Agents are hitting the S-curve in terms of raw text so the next big step is robotic agents. Nvidia is clearly pointing the way here.

> Nvidia is clearly pointing the way here.

Could it be argued they're producing big picture tech demos of robotics ideas?

I'm fuzzy on how much their in-house robotics work to-date is actually in use.

Absolutely, their hardware and software are widely used across numerous robotics companies, but keep in mind the number of actually successful robotics businesses is still super small and a minority of those you hear about in the news. (and how much are those companies actually doing with "agents"?)

In my opinion these fields will merge at some point in time as nextgen LLMs can be used to reason trajectories.

Consider RoboAgent[1] or LBMs at TRI[2]

[1] https://robopen.github.io/media/roboagent.pdf

[2] https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-research-institute-unvei...

I think from a technological perspective, building actual hardware has more relevant tangible real-world impact. But in the end, as many other posters have said, it really depends on the team, their experience and their capability to build product/drive business.

Shameless plug, I have been writing about this since 2023. [3] https://jdsemrau.substack.com/t/robotics

Robotics has less people involved in and less hype at least in open source GitHub projects. The good part that there is still lot of low hanging fruit to harvest even without touching real hardware. Namely simulators, models (most don't need multimillion dollar rigs) and infrastructure / robotic os projects such as ros.

Agents, LLMs are real cool stuff these days but it is too early to say that this topic won’t fade in next few years if we can’t return to ZIRP.

Robotics on the other hand is entrenched segment and will always be there and will probably gain popularity covertly as automation is de-facto goal of all businesses.

Lastly, keep the Agents as side project(org people getting impressed by agent workflow tells more about them than you) as when/if Agent hype collapses, you are sure to be gutted, but robotics is probably the core business and long term secure. Eventually we will need more robotics(production automation, natural disaster recovery, rising global conflicts, medical surgeries etc.) but we may get these agents replaced by some other ground breaking power efficient models in next few years.

You’re a mech engineer so your passion is most likely robotics. You’re young and can take risks and possibly, financial risks.

Contrary to what the cynics here say, LLM agents are in fact a thing. They are already reducing hiring and will only further disrupt the labour market for white colar jobs.

I propose an middle ground. Forget _mechanical_ engineering. There’s no money in robots unless you’re building roombas or industrial scale assembly line machines.

Aim to be the person who gives a robot _agency_ something like https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/shaping-the-future-of-...

Without additional qualification, the word "robotics" is meaningless. I've worked in automation of physical processes for my entire career. Some people refer to stuff I've done as robotics, I don't.

Both security and robotics will continue to progress quickly (I'm actually taking a break from writing some cybersecurity documentation rn) because they address real, pressing problems.

So do the one that sounds more interesting. They'll both likely be very lucrative.

I’ve been in robotics 12+ years now and I feel that having something tangible that my software works on is incredibly important for keeping my job interesting.

Robotics is an unforgiving field, and is generally not a sustainable commercial business outside research. However, if you live in a physical factory focused economy that might differ, but generally in north America it is niche field.

Security is also a niche field, but at least it is a more common lucrative position.

"An expert knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing."

Whatever the one you want to do is, but you're not sure because of the other one...ignore the other one, do the one you want to do.

This is my take, as well. "Work with the smartest people" has been said a lot here. But from my experience, you can hardly go wrong if you follow what you are most passionate about. Build things you want to build, build things you want to exist. If the field you picked seems like a bit of a dead end, there's usually a way to pivot into something valuable. Maybe I just got lucky that this approach worked for me, but I think life is too short to not prioritise joy in what you spend most of your waking hours doing.

I used to work on robotics, then left to focus on AI - now without question robotics is the place to be.

I’d go for robotics. The whole agent thing while not entirely without merit seems quite heavy on hype without necessarily add that much more over the underlying LLM magic.

What is a "security-related agent"? A robot guard?

Pick the area that has more engineering complexity and complements your unique skills and personality. In this case that would be robotics

you should do robotic agents :-)

Seriously though, i think working at a startup at an early stage in your career is a great opportunity to work on a lot of things with lots of dedicated people.

On a side note, robotics is an exciting field as i do think robots gonna be everywhere in the not so distant future, from advanced drones, to agricultural robots, to humanoid robots, etc...

agents workflows etc. sounds like something very perishable, easily replaceable, shallow

Robotics is "hard".

Other things being equal - hard things tend to make much more impact on your professional growth and look more impressive in CV.

Work wherever you like and respect the people more.

If you end up going with robots in SF look me up!

Robotics, without a doubt. Those exist today and are an actually feasible technology. Agents will very likely die out in the not-too-distant future, once the hype dies down and some more lawsuits go around and companies realize that "99% accuracy in production" is just pathetically low for these kinds of applications. At scale that's literally thousands to millions of things going wrong per second.

Offshoring and AI …. Twin threats to all IT jobs including SWEs.

Where have I heard that before? Right, it was in the book "My Job Went To India", which was published more than 20 years ago.

Our jobs did go to India but... the insatiable demand for computer science / IT meant it didn't matter.

And “Who moved my cheese?”

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