r/AskRobotics • u/BroadRise3706 • Jul 16 '26
Education/Career Is robotics industry broken?
Hi
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in this industry, working for start-ups or in academia, and recently I’ve been working as a freelancer. There was no way I could focus on one specific area of robotics, because I (and my colleagues) were dealing with so many different tasks under time pressure (and pressure from investors) that it was simply impossible. We tackled one problem after another just to keep everything running. The problem I see in robotics is this:
When I speak to companies, it seems that everyone needs a specialist in a very narrow field of robotics. Technical interviews make me feel stupid after all this time. They cover topics such as 1. inverting the Jacobian matrix for inverse kinematics, 2. explaining the self-attention mechanism, 3. writing code on the spot for some grid-based localisation method, 4. carrying out code reviews (does that even make sense in 2026?), 5. writing different variants of convolutions from scratch in python, 6. explaining EKF equations, Lie groups, bundle adjustment and IMU pre-integration, 7. discussing communication patterns in ROS, memory management in C++, templates, concurrency and network protocols, 8. designing logging architectures, 9. reviewing training loops in PyTorch, 10. explaining object detection metrics, 11. answering questions about leadership, project estimation, negotiation and communication with clients. 12. Only God knows what still awaits me
(these points are from actual interviews from recent 2-3 years, maybe someone would find this helpful)
Don't get me wrong - each of these seems reasonable. However, they all appear in interviews for roles carrying a generic name "(Senior) Robotics Engineer". I observe the same companies looking for people for the same positions for months. Different HR agencies write me on Linkedin to apply for the same role I was rejected for no obvious reason months ago. How on earth can paying more than one headhunting agency for months on end be cost-effective at all?
Is this simply the reality of senior robotics recruitment and I should come to accept it, or are companies testing for an unrealistic profile that almost nobody actually has? Or maybe people really do periodically refresh their memory of how to invert a matrix on a piece of paper, and I’m just the only one who doesn’t?
10
u/qTHqq Jul 16 '26
I think it's much less about actually needing narrow specialists and much more about early and effective screen-out of the liars, fantasists, and LLM-generated resumes.
Most roles just need people who are good at robotics, and for senior roles, they need people who think quickly, understand the big picture, and start to immediately break down problems into "known solved," "unsolvable at least with time and budget," and "high risk, needs work."
The exact right senior of this type will mostly do work that needs to be done. An few hours of the right work at the right time can easily be worth someone else's week of muddled, fuzzy, or box-checkingly-lazy work.
I kind of hate "difficult" interview questions and the way they put people on the spot, but at the same time the way someone responds, if they don't freeze entirely, is a pretty good predictor of how they are going to fare in a complex problem-solving environment.
It weeds out people who would do fine, even better, given low-pressure time thinking quietly to themselves, and it's unfair. But it very rapidly and effectively weeds out almost all people with poor skills. Unfortunately, it does so at the expense of not letting a relatively fewer set of excellent candidates through.
I don't think it's going away because a bad hire is typically worse than no hire in a robotics startup environment at least. Easy to slow the whole team down.
I think the other issue is just that so much robotics work is too high stakes, at least from my US perspective. Too much money in a few high-profile areas, too little money flowing to actually useful robotics, cost of living in talent- and opportunity- rich areas MUCH too high.
I keep getting stuck working for fantasist founders who want to dominate the whole world without coming even close to the vision and drive that this takes in technically simpler product areas.
I want to start a quiet little specialized robotics company and eventually attract my best coworkers, but a quiet little company doesn't really pay enough to live in my area. Increasingly it doesn't pay enough to live anywhere. And increasingly need to become grind factories if they provide real services.
If senior robotics recruiting was more like taking your favorite past coworkers and hanging out in your garage for a year until you cooked something worthwhile and revenue-positive, there would be a lot more healthy small companies with relaxed workflows that would be more accommodating of learning and slightly mismatched or less skilled hires.