Ask HN: Work on robotics or agents?

79 points · _js4b · 7 days ago

I'm a recent Mechanical Engineering / CS graduate working in the Sales Engineering space for a cybersecurity company.

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!

64 comments

snowwrestler · 7 days ago

Pick the immediate direction that will put you in a position to work with the smartest people. That’s probably more important than picking a technology.

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

Different take here -

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 space lives up to even a fraction of its potential over the next ~10-20 years then robotics is going to grow astronomically as a field. More generally I have not found software to be a longterm satisfying career - the compensation, freedom, and potential are all excellent. You are well compensated, can work from anywhere*, and a single successful side project (don't sign away your rights to code you write outside of work) always has the possibility to blow up into something worth billions - this is really unlike any other "normal" career. But I think there's a reason that there's a growing sect of people leaving to do everything from farming, woodwork, and even welding. Building even simple things in the real world is somehow so much more satisfying.

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

Successful software career turned robotics (2015) here. After a crypto exit (unicorn) I committed 100% to robotics, driven by sheer boredom with software, nail-in-coffin typified by the perception of the crypto world's journey from utopian vision to sad elucidation of status quo slash enshrined large capital slash regulator interest. Also opportunity: had already learned Chinese, knew the domestic business environment, had a global outlook and felt this was a unique starting position.

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

Robotics hands down. Robots exist today with demonstrated value and are on every bit the hyper-growth curve in reality that LLM wrappers claim. Robots build everything from printed circuit boards to automobiles to other robots.

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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