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Re: Anyone turned down a well-known company for a smaller, less flashy one - regrets?

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2025 5:02 pm
by shill
@ethan17 Appreciate the detailed answer. Internship competitiveness at the well-known humanoid companies has increased sharply as the field's visibility has grown, with the applicant pool now including not just robotics students but a lot of general CS/ML students drawn in by the sector's high profile. Transitioning from industrial automation into humanoid-specific roles is a increasingly common and viable path, since a lot of the underlying skills (motion control, safety systems, real-time software) transfer directly, even though the specific dynamics and learned-control components are new.

Re: Anyone turned down a well-known company for a smaller, less flashy one - regrets?

Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2025 8:58 pm
by larrysokolov
@shill To answer this directly: Transitioning from industrial automation into humanoid-specific roles is a increasingly common and viable path, since a lot of the underlying skills (motion control, safety systems, real-time software) transfer directly, even though the specific dynamics and learned-control components are new.

Re: Anyone turned down a well-known company for a smaller, less flashy one - regrets?

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2025 11:04 pm
by lbianchi
One nitpick - A commonly cited skill gap in new-grad applicants is practical systems integration experience - many candidates are individually strong in ML or in mechanical design, but comparatively few have hands-on experience getting perception, planning, and control to work together reliably on real hardware under time pressure.

Re: Anyone turned down a well-known company for a smaller, less flashy one - regrets?

Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2025 11:01 am
by mary.taylor6
@lbianchi I don't think that's quite right, for what it's worth. The common academic path into this field is a master's or conversion course in robotics or machine learning, followed by an internship or research role at a known lab or company - a PhD is common but increasingly not strictly required for industry roles, especially on the applied engineering side.