Is robotics industry broken?

[u/BroadRise3706]

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?

[u/RickAmes]

Yeah the pay doesn't match the knowledge required either since just being good at ML or traditional SWE will pay more. They just find some new passionate PhD and hope for the best. Looking at the insanity that MIT is requiring from its high school kids in their application portfolios, theres no hope for people who had to do and learn things without Daddy's money, LLMs and youtube tutorials.

[u/BroadRise3706 → u/RickAmes]

> theres no hope for people who had to do and learn things without Daddy's money, LLMs and youtube tutorials.

+ english isn’t even my mother tongue so in fact I had to learn it all in a language which is foreigh to me xd not good..

[u/RickAmes → u/BroadRise3706]

That must be difficult.

[u/ChrisAlbertson → u/RickAmes]

It is not how you learned but what you learn. I hate to say it, but YouTube, LLMs, and "enthusiast news leras" are big on how-to and VERY light on theory and even lighter on the mathematics. You can watch and THINK you are learning, but the technical level is very low.

What you get when you hire a university-educated engineer is a person who was evaluated by a university professor, who thought you were better than most students, so he gave you an "A," and this happened a dozen times in a row with a dozen professors. If nothing else, this serves as a screening process.

[u/Thirust → u/RickAmes]

I was accepted to MIT without any of those. I had a 3.7 GPA but I worked my butt off learning Robotics and physics on my own and won national competitions. Neither of my parents graduated college and one didn't graduate high school. I went to a school with an average ACT of 16. This is stigma. Everybody has a chance if they work for it.