Comment by dljsjr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dljsjr | Hacker News Reader

We're gonna have some job listings up come February.

Might be a tough sell for a lot of the folks here. We're not in the valley; we're in a small Florida city called Pensacola. And we're not slinging web apps. And we don't use super-sexy languages, we use Java. We're working on software for humanoid robots.

I work at the IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition). We just came in 2nd place in the DARPA Robotics Challenge after SCHAFT, so we're moving forward with decent funding and we have a Boston Dynamics/Google Atlas robot that we used in the competition.

We don't suffer from a lot of the poor project management that is endemic to pure academics; we have a pretty healthy "Agile" culture, so much so that Atlassian is actually an official engineering partner on our team and occasionally sends engineers on-site to work with us both with their products and contributing code to the 'bot itself. Our team is very international (French, Dutch, Taiwanese, Spanish, American, Canadian, and if you count the Atlassian folks then we have an Aussie) and Pensacola is actually a pretty cool town. Plus it's on the beach. If you're interested, take a look at http://robots.ihmc.us/jobs come February.

EDIT

I foolishly posted this right as I'm about to go to bed, so I won't be checking in on comment replies. If anybody has questions, contact info is in my profile.

It's really, really interesting to hear someone doing from Pensacola working on robotics. I spent several years there in my youth. Wish you all the luck.

For anyone looking to move there though, there isn't much to offer. The schools aren't very good. The local university is UWF, University of West Florida. It's a very conservative Christian area. Just want to emphasize VERY. Not a place to raise kids if you want them to have any early advantages in life.

That being said, the city is very family oriented. I was in Boy Scouts for many years there (Troop 610 ftw). Despite the overbearing religious pressure everywhere, I found a livable situation.

The beaches are gorgeous. There's nothing bad to be said about that. Go, visit, just for that experience.

Maybe things have changed since I lived there. Investigate. But my experiences say no, look elsewhere.

Congratulations on the 2nd place finish! Robotics is an area that's growing quickly with a lot of hard software engineering problems to tackle. It's also home to some great open source projects (OpenCV, PCL, ROS, to name a few). I think we're going to see more robotics firms looking to industry rather than academia for hiring, technology, and process (as you mention) as the field matures. I know that's the case at Bot & Dolly, where I work; at the moment we're looking for engineers with significant C++ and 3D/UI experience more than robotics expertise (www.botndolly.com/jobs). I can't emphasize enough how far these jobs are from cranking out web application features -- we're really at the cusp of something big at the physical/digital divide, and there's a ton of room for talented developers to contribute. Please get in touch with any questions.

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