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.
I generally agree with your post, but this nerd snipes me a bit. I'm regularly impressed by juniors. By what they achieve in relation to their experience. Sometimes they do stuff I genuinely couldn't do, and that's normal - skill isn't linear. Or they think of stuff I didn't come up with. But in most cases, I'm impressed by the talent and promise I see for them to become strong seniors in a few years. Especially when it comes to hiring, I tend to look more at a person's trajectory, than what they can do right now. But your question - "Do those people impress you?" - is certainly a great one to ask.
The only times i was really happy at work was when I was working with giants, people way smarter than me.
And then I made a turn to easy corporate jobs where progress was effortles by comparison and colleagues very eager to lay praise. This led to years of unhappiness and intellectual stagnation. (And money, but that hardly compensates, and I think a smart engineer can make money without having to work a dull corporate job).
Also, high praise in corporate environment often means no career progression past certain points. They already have their management buddies, and they need efficient engineers in the lower ranks.
Besides, robotics its where its at. Just ask where nVidia is investing. Or look at the demographics. Or anti-immigration politics in western countries. It will be robots all over the place within a few years.
If your goal is to climb the corporate ladder, work where you feel you can rise the fastest.
The smartest people won't be your peers in higher management.
I’ve seen some pretty incompetent people just show up and play the game make it decently far. I prioritized learning first and got great offers right off the bat, but I definitely overdid it.
Different strategies for different people.
The biggest thing to me is to not blow the small handful of opportunities that randomly present themselves. In this context, there is a good chance those won't be in agents or robotics.
At 50, I am happy with my life but I have blown almost all my opportunities. I have grinded out a decent life but it is pretty minimized vs what could have been.
I was offered a nice career at 21 in the financial markets from my part time job while going to college for CS so turned it down. CS was delusion with my math skills and I dropped out. Ended up spending a decade grinding to get into the financial markets after college.
Before CS I thought I would get a PhD in psychology. A real Freudian fan boy professor made me abandon that. I thought Freud was so absurd on first encounter. At this point I have read almost all of Freud's work on my own. I should have stuck with the original plan in psychology.
On the other hand, maybe the path I have traveled is the optimal path because at 50 I am not done. I still have huge dreams to make this all be the right path. The bar is not that high.
It is all a relative valuation.
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.
Be a friendly person who’s fun to be around.
Be optimistic. Say yes more than no.
Learn a lot. Have interesting things to say. Listen more and ask more questions than you talk.
Get good at selling. Be curious about how people think and act.
Encourage others and make them feel appreciative when you offer them critical feedback.
Find something with high value that most people really dislike doing that you are willing to get really good at and actually do.
I don't know of any other advice to this end that would apply universally. It depends on specifics of the operating modes and types of relationships you'd develop in the companies that you would fit with.
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.
Building software is a fast development cycle. Find bug, fix bug, compile, release, improve. Things can be done in hours or days.
Building hardware is a slow development cycle. If I think of a new feature it might take a month just to get a prototype board designed, made, populated etc. The results are cool, but the feedback cycle is slow.
For my personality, I prefer software. I can have an idea, play with it, realize it's rubbish, and discard it - all before lunch.
But people are different. So someone else might prefer the hardware cycle.
Ultimately my advice to the original question is that "it likely doesn't matter" and "you cant predict the future". Both paths lead somewhere, but you can't really "know" up front.
So choose the one that gets you out of bed faster. The one that excites you more. And in a couple years you'll be better placed to make the next decision.
I think that's pretty much entirely because the compensation is good enough that a lot of people can retire by fourty even without having planned for it. Many people in other office jobs find them tedious or get fed up with office politics or whatever but can't reasonably just decide to start farming instead.
Could you please share any tips on how to not sign away right to have commercial side-projects?
Every employment contract I've seen recently seems to claim IP really broadly, e.g. "everything created in the course of employment belongs to you employer". The better the job otherwise, the harder this seems to fight. I have just recently quit a job just so I could work on a "side-project" but would be nice to have an income.
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.
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.
Could it be argued they're producing big picture tech demos of robotics ideas?
I'm fuzzy on how much their in-house robotics work to-date is actually in use.
Absolutely, their hardware and software are widely used across numerous robotics companies, but keep in mind the number of actually successful robotics businesses is still super small and a minority of those you hear about in the news. (and how much are those companies actually doing with "agents"?)
Consider RoboAgent[1] or LBMs at TRI[2]
[1] https://robopen.github.io/media/roboagent.pdf
[2] https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-research-institute-unvei...
I think from a technological perspective, building actual hardware has more relevant tangible real-world impact. But in the end, as many other posters have said, it really depends on the team, their experience and their capability to build product/drive business.
Shameless plug, I have been writing about this since 2023. [3] https://jdsemrau.substack.com/t/robotics
Robotics on the other hand is entrenched segment and will always be there and will probably gain popularity covertly as automation is de-facto goal of all businesses.
Lastly, keep the Agents as side project(org people getting impressed by agent workflow tells more about them than you) as when/if Agent hype collapses, you are sure to be gutted, but robotics is probably the core business and long term secure. Eventually we will need more robotics(production automation, natural disaster recovery, rising global conflicts, medical surgeries etc.) but we may get these agents replaced by some other ground breaking power efficient models in next few years.
Contrary to what the cynics here say, LLM agents are in fact a thing. They are already reducing hiring and will only further disrupt the labour market for white colar jobs.
I propose an middle ground. Forget _mechanical_ engineering. There’s no money in robots unless you’re building roombas or industrial scale assembly line machines.
Aim to be the person who gives a robot _agency_ something like https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/shaping-the-future-of-...
Both security and robotics will continue to progress quickly (I'm actually taking a break from writing some cybersecurity documentation rn) because they address real, pressing problems.
So do the one that sounds more interesting. They'll both likely be very lucrative.
Security is also a niche field, but at least it is a more common lucrative position.
"An expert knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing."
=3
Seriously though, i think working at a startup at an early stage in your career is a great opportunity to work on a lot of things with lots of dedicated people.
On a side note, robotics is an exciting field as i do think robots gonna be everywhere in the not so distant future, from advanced drones, to agricultural robots, to humanoid robots, etc...
Robotics is "hard".
Other things being equal - hard things tend to make much more impact on your professional growth and look more impressive in CV.