Ask HN: Work on robotics or agents?
79 points ·
_js4b
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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!
snowwrestler ·7 days ago
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.
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jppope ·7 days ago
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.
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somenameforme ·7 days ago
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.
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contingencies ·7 days ago
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.
benreesman ·7 days ago
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.
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