How do you evaluate company culture at a hardware startup before joining?

[gary.tanaka2]

@sven.smith4 Here's what I know on this: 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. A field-deployment or reliability engineer's day-to-day work leans much more toward diagnosing real-world failure patterns, managing spare-parts logistics, and working directly with the customer site than toward algorithm development - a genuinely different role than a lot of new grads expect going in.

[carol.robinson]

Slight correction, though the overall point stands: 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. Totally unrelated but has anyone else noticed how fast component costs are dropping this year.