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Re: How do you keep your mechanical skills sharp if your day job is mostly software?

Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2026 3:11 am
by shill
Not sure I fully agree here. How much ML background a controls role actually requires varies a lot by company and team - some whole-body control positions remain heavily classical-optimization-focused, while others increasingly expect familiarity with reinforcement learning or imitation learning even for what used to be a purely classical-controls job.

Re: How do you keep your mechanical skills sharp if your day job is mostly software?

Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2026 10:21 pm
by ethan_fisc
@shill Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting: 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.

Re: How do you keep your mechanical skills sharp if your day job is mostly software?

Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2026 6:15 pm
by lperez
@ethan_fisc Minor factual note: 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. 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.

Re: How do you keep your mechanical skills sharp if your day job is mostly software?

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2026 11:59 pm
by scott.novikova7
Yeah, this tracks with what I've read as well. 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.