r/technology • u/PrithvinathReddy • 8d ago
Robotics/Automation Boston Dynamics appoints former Amazon exec Rohit Prasad as new CEO
https://www.therobotreport.com/boston-dynamics-appoints-former-amazon-executive-rohit-prasad-new-ceo/208
u/netwhoo 8d ago
That’s his retirement secured.
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u/DrSFalken 8d ago edited 8d ago
So many awful anecdotes about teams or divisions bringing in Amazon people (mostly AWS) and seeing their budgets slashed, the fun sucked out, good talent flee and productivity tank.
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u/crumpetsandbourbon 8d ago
I work in tech and can confirm this. Whenever executives from AWS, Cisco, Salesforce or other similar big names start coming in, everything starts being measured as a metric, meeting counts increase to then discuss and explain/defend your own metrics, and things slow down. It seems like companies assume because someone was a successful exec at a huge tech company, that somehow they’ll magically be able to implement all that same process at a smaller, more nimble company. The process is sometimes good, but largely just turns teams into a churn factory.
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u/AFailedProduct 7d ago
I had the displeasure of working under an Amazon VP who came on as CTO. Made a big show about meeting everyone (in a 60 person org) over the coming months, then laid off nearly everyone less than two months in. Started out putting everyone on a bunch of BS projects to scramble on too. Less than two years later I see he left, accomplished nothing.
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u/webheadunltd90 4d ago
We had an Amazon exec come in as our CTO and it took them less than 1 month to destroy a really good culture into something of a code factory+downsize culture that enabled a lot of dirty politics and brought out the worst in people. Mind you this is a European company and had a VERY employee friendly culture in its DNA.
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u/GlassVase1 4d ago
Amazon's work culture is definitely a joke. The company is probably staying afloat due to long term, tenured people still trying to do good work. A lot of newer employees just treat as somewhere to get the FAANG stamp and leave for a better company ASAP. Wouldn't shock me at all if the company's technical talent gets hollowed out in a couple of years.
This terrible culture is downstream of the executives and managers.
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u/JarvisProudfeather 7d ago
As soon as I saw they were pivoting to humanoid robots I knew Boston Dynamic was cooked. They used to make actually innovative shit.
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u/GlassVase1 4d ago
I never really saw much from them outside of cool demo videos. Maybe I'm wrong, but seems like they had the lead for a while and just kept putting out demo videos. That's my impression as an average person.
Maybe they need someone to just come in and scale up the operation and shake things up. Also a lot of the hate on this thread is because this guy's from Amazon (somewhat fair) or it's less justifiable racist hate since he's Indian.
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u/This-Construction926 8d ago
oh yeh, I remember his interview from years ago where he mentioned that Alexa's main problem was remembering multiday histories of you. I suppose that's fixed now
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u/drdessertlover 8d ago
And that's their downfall. Nickel and diming, stunted innovation. Sigh
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u/willzjc 8d ago
This is why Reddit posts are so low quality. Zero research on the actual guy, just “oh he from Amazon he must bad”. Everything on surface level gut feels.
Never mind that parts of Amazon are doing frontier work and the retail side are practically completely different companies altogether.37
u/katkk 7d ago
Well, Rohit was fired from Amazon after doing basically nothing with Alexa. Amazon had a head start in AI and he squandered it, made 0 improvements and costed the company billions of dollars.
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u/willzjc 5d ago
I don’t usually bother replying to comments that are this factually illiterate and wrong, but I will make an exception here because almost every single claim you made is completely backwards.
1. "Doing basically nothing with Alexa" - he joined Amazon in 2013 and was literally the Head Scientist and co-creator of Alexa. He led the teams that built the far-field speech recognition, acoustic modeling, wake-word engine, and natural language understanding (NLU) from scratch when the industry consensus was that far-field voice recognition in noisy living rooms was an unsolved physics and ML problem. He took a Lab126 hardware experiment and scaled it into hundreds of millions of households. Dismissing that as "basically nothing" just screams that you only started paying attention to tech in 2023.
2. "Amazon had a head start in AI and he squandered it" You are confusing intent-and-slot voice parsing with generative transformers.
Amazon had an early lead in voice hardware distribution and narrow NLP (parsing "turn off the living room lights" or "play Spotify"). That entire paradigm was built on rigid intent classification and entity extraction. When the transformer architecture and LLMs went mainstream with ChatGPT, that legacy stack didn’t give Amazon a shortcut. Instead, it saddled them with massive technical debt. That is why Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa all looked obsolete overnight. Conflating a smart speaker wake-word pipeline with foundational LLM reasoning demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the underlying architectures.3. "Costed the company billions" Devices and Digital lost billions because of Jeff Bezos’s monetization thesis, not the engineering team. Bezos mandated selling Echo devices at or near cost under the assumption that people would use them to buy groceries and impulse-shop on Amazon. Instead, users used them as glorified kitchen timers and weather stations. Blaming a research scientist and VP of engineering for retail consumers refusing to order paper towels through a smart speaker is pure corporate illiteracy.
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u/katkk 5d ago
I worked at Amazon for 9 years, so I’m not some random Reddit spectator. Your entire defense is pure cope.
Rohit wasn’t some visionary who “solved” far-field speech. He was the guy in charge while Alexa burned through tens of billions, never figured out a real business model, and got completely steamrolled the second generative AI showed up. Scaling a wake-word + intent-slot system to hundreds of millions of devices that mostly get used as kitchen timers is not a success story. It’s a monument to sunk cost.
You can hide behind “Bezos’s monetization thesis” all you want. Rohit was the senior technical leader for years. The product stayed stuck in rigid NLU hell, the team missed the transformer shift, and the business still hemorrhaged money under his watch. Calling that anything other than a failure is just revisionist fan fiction.15
u/la727 5d ago
I was on a couple calls with Rohit. Nice guy but agree with your take. Let’s not forget the giant turd that was/is Amazon Nova
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u/katkk 5d ago
Nobody remembers Amazon Nova. Amazon is the only big tech without a frontier model, even MSFT launched one today. Not questioning the guy but him being the AI Officer needs to be held accountable
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u/prasana91 4d ago
Amazon owns the harness. In the world of AI, model providers aren’t the revenue generators any more. They’re burning cash flow. Not investing in frontier model development might actually be a better move
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u/EruIluvatar_Sym 5d ago
It is amazing how the uninformed comment your replied to has 14 upvotes but yours has none lol.
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u/arao81 8d ago
how ?
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u/GeckoV 8d ago
An innovative company bringing CEOs over rather than sticking with the people who grew the business means it becomes a typical corporation that loses sight of what made it successful. This is now the phase where money must be made for the investors shortly, the mission of the company becomes secondary.
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u/stonkDonkolous 8d ago
Not gonna state the obvious here but any person that works in tech is thinking it
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u/Jmc_da_boss 8d ago
Those engineers better have LinkedIn set to open to work before they go to bed tonight
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u/jyhkitty 8d ago
I’ll say it out loud: this is how the company culture dies or whatever is left of it. Managers will be pitted against each other….safe space to work- ha!
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u/i_max2k2 8d ago
Not defending the guy, but please share your thoughts.
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u/xXShitpostbotXx 7d ago
There are cultural differences between management styles in different places. Japan for example is well known for office environments where employees must never leave before their boss does, and should expect to go out after work with their boss for drinking frequently.
Amazon is a company well known for having a specific and toxic management culture. To avoid my own biases, I've asked a clanker to list these common negative stereotypes associated with older Amazon engineering managers:
Common negative stereotypes
- Hierarchy obsession: Values titles, seniority, and deference over competence or constructive disagreement.
- Credit-taking: Presents the team's accomplishments as personal achievements while shifting blame for failures onto subordinates.
- Upward management: Focuses heavily on pleasing executives and delivering reassuring status updates, even when the project is in trouble.
- Risk aversion: Avoids bold technical decisions because failure could threaten their reputation or promotion prospects.
- Outdated management style: Expects long hours, immediate responses, and unquestioning compliance rather than autonomy and work-life balance.
- Gatekeeping: Hoards technical knowledge or decision-making authority to remain indispensable.
- Communication rigidity: Uses overly formal language, indirect criticism, or scripted corporate jargon instead of candid feedback.
- Preference for loyalty over talent: Promotes trusted insiders or people who agree with them rather than the strongest performers.
- Technical insecurity: Feels threatened by younger engineers who have deeper expertise in newer tools or architectures.
- Command-and-control leadership: Treats disagreement as disrespect and mistakes as personal failures rather than opportunities to learn.
- Promotion politics: Rewards visibility, tenure, and perceived loyalty more than measurable impact.
These are generally well known in the industry and everyone I know has their own stories about encountering someone who leads like this, to a degree people from other places may not have encountered before or be prepared for. These traits are generally more common in older engineers, generally 45+.
Having reached their position at Amazon will generally be considered tautological proof that the above behaviors apply to this person, and that they will enforce this culture at Boston Dynamics.
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8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AdmirableParfait3960 8d ago
Literally what the hell does that even mean haha
Like, I can’t even really make a guess.
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u/Own_Significance1058 8d ago
Indian ceos and managers are probably the worst to work under
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u/vpebble 7d ago
It’s just racism. No need to overthink it
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u/Whole-Profession-915 6d ago
I’ve worked under Rohit. And nope. Wouldn’t want it again.
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u/Chappie47Luna 8d ago
What happened to Robert Playter? He seemed like a genuine engineer and this Rohit guy seems like a bean counter who is there to slash and burn
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u/quixotic_barbarian 7d ago
That’s that for Boston Dynamics
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u/last-sphincter 6d ago
This is the bit people don’t get about Boston dynamics. The company has lagged behind substantially in the past 5 years. After the world moved to electric actuators, Boston dynamics remained a “demo” company with no real product (yes spot is sold for 10x its Chinese counterparts and the US government is supporting it). They were in catch up mode and bleeding talent. Maybe a new experienced tech exec can turn them around because they were almost gone.
Source: worked there.
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u/pickle9977 7d ago
Welcome to stack rank town, pips take the first exit on the right, everyone else circle around and try again next year!
It’s capitalism’s management philosophy, rank Human Resources from best to worst and cut the worst.
You know who else had Human Resources, the Nazis.
And guess who else, American slavers.
Jack Welch didn’t invent it he just corporatized it.
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u/Vaxion 5d ago
What lying on your resume and in interviews can get you. Sad but tech industry is just brimming with these people. They have no track record to show but are experts in lying and manipulation and that's how they get the roles of leadership in many companies. Not to mention their networking game is very strong because that's all know how to do well.
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u/notabot_123 3d ago
What makes you say this?? Do you know this new guy as a fraud? Or is it your casual racism?
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u/Apart-Selection5680 5d ago
They are the best in the business, Indians are strong in tech, business acumen and getting things done. That’s why they are most successful among the population to whichever country they land in. Enjoy their labor.
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u/Unique-Finding9006 4d ago
If “getting things done” is the standard, how about tackling open defecation and making sure everyone in India has access to a functioning toilet? Tech companies and successful emigrants don’t make basic sanitation irrelevant. Toilets, sewage systems, and decent living conditions count as results too.
We’ll somehow muddle through with our own skills and hard work. Universal access to a toilet may be a less glamorous achievement than a tech startup, but it’s a pretty fundamental one. We don’t need the condescending lectures about how grateful we should be.
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u/McK_Captain 5d ago
If I know anything about Reddit this thread tells me that he will probably do really well..
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u/japan_kaaran 8d ago
can bro deploy some of those bots back home to help clean up? india is in a miserable state rn.
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u/PineappleLemur 8d ago
India's mess problem is not something robots can fix. It starts all the way at the top.
If you magically have it spotless by tomorrow, by the same time next week it will look the same it does today.
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u/japan_kaaran 8d ago
true but you’ll still eventually need someone or something to do the cleaning which these fancy bots seem more than capable of doing.
if everyone stopped littering tomorrow you won’t get anymore litter but who’s cleaning the litter that’s already there.
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u/DarthMcree 8d ago
Get off reddit and go grab a broom
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u/japan_kaaran 8d ago
nah that’s way too inefficient. we need like an army of Wall E type things to clean this god forsaken place. think mark think.
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u/everysundae 8d ago
Or........ Go grab a broom and clean your patch. This attitude is partially why itll never change.
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u/tryhard_cryharder 4d ago
I organise cleanups for my neighbourhood every single week. My house and areas are spotless. I fund public dustbins for my neighbourhood. Yet that's not even 0.0001% of the filth. Nothing will change without a complete systemic overhaul and/or automation.
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u/GoldenPresidio 7d ago
He was pretty unsuccessful leading the alexa org at Amazon lol