What's the honest day-to-day tradeoff between research roles and applied engineering roles?
Re: What's the honest day-to-day tradeoff between research roles and applied engineering roles?
@nancy_lewi From what I've seen:
24/7 factory-pilot support roles (the engineers keeping a deployed fleet running through real shifts) reportedly carry a real burnout risk, since they combine the unpredictability of early-stage hardware with the operational pressure of a live production environment.
she/her | grad student, biped locomotion
Re: What's the honest day-to-day tradeoff between research roles and applied engineering roles?
Agreed, and I'd add:
In the UK, base salaries for robotics roles reportedly range from around £50,000 for new graduates up to roughly £200,000 for senior whole-body-control or reinforcement-learning specialists - a notably wide band reflecting how specialized the top end of the field has become. Remote work remains genuinely limited for most hands-on humanoid hardware roles, given the need for physical access to robots and test environments, though software-only roles (simulation, perception algorithms, offline learning) increasingly do offer remote or hybrid arrangements.
Opinions my own, not my employer's.