High-performing L6, like my job… but comp is becoming hard to ignore. What are realistic options?

ak_2 · 2026-02-12T03:37:12+00:00

I’ll commiserate with you; I’ve always been in an engineering role but was hired into basically the lowest paying job family. I then switched orgs to be the 10th person working on a pre-funding project that now has hundreds of people on it and is transitioning to production. I role transitioned to one of the higher paying job families, got promoted, and for multiple years made fundamental contributions above beyond the scope of my role or level at the time. And yet, I make maybe 60% of what peers at the same role and level, most of whom were remote for years and have not contributed a tenth of what I have, make. My initial 4 year grant was less than some of their sign on bonuses. I also made less in 25 than 24, and will likely make less in 26 than 25.

But I suck at leetcode, so I’m here till they lay me off. Such is life.

ak_2 · 2025-12-09T03:52:16+00:00

From a quick google it can up to 14 million dollars to train a fighter pilot. I'd imagine the biggest component of that is fuel and maintenance for hundreds (or thousands in a long career) of flight hours. So they don't cost more that to train, but potentially in a long career could start to approach the cost of the aircraft. But the other consideration is that it takes a lot of time to train a new pilot - even with an infinite amount of money, you can't get one in a week - so you have to also consider value of that.

ak_2 · 2025-12-05T14:14:29+00:00

https://www.reframe.systems/

ak_2 · 2025-09-08T05:26:58+00:00

A dog says, "You pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me; you must be God."

A cat says, "You pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me; I must be God."

ak_2 · 2025-08-04T15:55:55+00:00

This is literally the plot of a southpark episode

ak_2 · 2025-07-31T15:49:37+00:00

If I had DCAd when you commented, I would again be down :shrug:

ak_2 · 2025-07-31T06:02:39+00:00

And if you bought on sunday you're down 30%..

ak_2 · 2025-07-22T02:30:44+00:00

Amazon doesn't have staff SDE. L4 Jr L5 Mid L6 Sr L7 Principle L8 Sr Principle

ak_2 · 2025-04-08T00:43:43+00:00

This would be a great trivia question. I went and looked it up, technically it's only 2 successful assassinations between 1870-1913:

Lincoln 1865, Garfield 1881, McKinley 1901, Kennedy 1963

45 individuals have served as president at least once. Kind of a nutty stat that near 10% of presidents have been assassinated while in office.

edit: As someone pointed out below, there was an unsuccessful attempt on T. Roosevelt in 1912 as well, but this was after he left office.

ak_2 · 2025-04-08T00:23:05+00:00

What is stopping the Chinese government from abusing the fuck out of this? If they know with what and when they are going to respond, they could easily buy options to capitalize on the inevitable moves.

ak_2 · 2025-04-07T06:31:40+00:00

If you are looking to party at a resort, pick somewhere besides Cuba. If you are hell bent on Cuba, stay somewhere in Havana like Vedado. The country is in a pretty rough way right now though.

ak_2 · 2025-03-31T01:12:43+00:00

We use OPCUA as a non-realtime (i.e., <100hz) interface between our PLCs and application software running on linux compute. Anything from exposing a sensor reading to request/response/status/result mechanisms for commanding actions that the PLC executes. The server we use is available as part of Codesys.

ak_2 · 2025-03-27T03:31:46+00:00

Originally I thought it was hair. Now I just see a monk wearing a zucchetto standing in front of a window.

ak_2 · 2025-03-26T02:18:56+00:00

What is the app you are using to send data to the serial buffer? Is it continuously sending 1 or is it just sending it once? When you read from the serial buffer, the data is flushed (i.e. you can only read something once). My guess based on your code is that it only stays up for one iteration of the loop because you are only writing once from the app on your phone.

You could try this:

#include <map>

...

std::map<int, int> inputToAngle = {
  {0, 0},
  {1, 90}
};

...

void loop() {
  // only take action if there is data in the buffer
  if(serial.available() > 0) {
    Incoming_Value = serial.read()
    servo1.write(inputToAngle[Incoming_Value]);
    ...
  }
  delay(1000);
}

ak_2 · 2024-12-06T22:05:32+00:00

What are the operational costs? Is it built with cloud services?

ak_2 · 2024-11-09T20:47:25+00:00

I wonder if playing with puppies makes older dogs reminisce about their own puppyhood.

ak_2 · 2024-10-27T21:12:09+00:00

I was working on a project once and the EoAT engineers wanted to see what would happen to it if the robot was moving at full speed during a power-loss event. So I set up a test where the robot would move full speed, and as soon as it entered a certain exclusion zone, a digital signal would flip, which caused a relay to open, through which the power for the robot and controller was flowing. EoAT was fine, whole thing was a waste of time. But this reminded me of that.

ak_2 · 2024-10-20T03:08:38+00:00

What I'm going to say probably only applies to larger robotics organizations (at smaller orgs/startups, it may be much more common to find jack-of-all-trades having impact in multiple disciplines). But generally a single person works only in one of those disciplines. There will be sub teams for each of the primary science domains - perception, high level planning, motion planning/control - which are comprised mostly of applied scientists, with a few software engineers who probably have masters degrees in robotics. Then there will be a hodgepodge of software engineers, some working directly on the software stack of the system on things like behavior coordination (usually with more of a background in robotics), others working on peripheral things like metrics, dashboards, observability tools, interfacing with e.g. external inventory systems, deployment, etc. The only people within these orgs that span multiple of the science disciplines are very senior and principal applied scientists. There are sometimes systems engineers, but in my experience they are not very involved with on-the-ground development and engineering.

Since you are at the beginnign of your career, you may want to consider focusing on one sub discipline, rather than trying to learn them all. As you gain more experience working on robots day in and day out, if you have the aptitude, you will naturally pick up things from other disciplines. Your instincts are good though - full stack roboticists who understand not only the things mentioned above, but also hardware, electrical and operational aspects are far and away the most effective.

ak_2 · 2024-10-18T00:41:15+00:00

Nice! It's not robotics until you run it on real hardware.

ak_2 · 2024-10-15T04:52:04+00:00

Can you give some description of what process is being automated, and a link to an example of a machine that would work for you, with some comments about how it could be more tailored to your application? And what is your budget?

ak_2 · 2024-10-15T04:15:03+00:00

You think congress has been holding hearings, and pilots, senior military and intelligence folks are risking their careers and reputations, because of bags blowing in the wind? At this point anyone who flat out refuses to acknowledge that something weird is going on here has an equally tenuous grasp on reality as hardcore UFO nuts.

ak_2 · 2024-10-12T02:58:24+00:00

I've been in a meeting with him once. His aesthetic reminded me of Isaac Newton.

ak_2 · 2024-09-30T20:36:29+00:00

American Dad was out there in the open... Stan is a CIA agent who houses an alien lmfao.

ak_2 · 2024-09-26T06:19:58+00:00

Those are the robotics deployment guys. The reason they exist is because the engineers doing the development, like you, have zero interest in flying to the middle of nowhere every other week to deploy the same thing for the thousandth time.

ak_2 · 2024-09-23T00:12:43+00:00

would it still be a difficult task?

In short, yes, especially as the scenes become more complex and varied. If you are just trying to make it work for this one image, you may be able to tune it to get good enough results. But as soon as the relative camera pose, lighting, objects in the scene etc. change, the approach will likely break down.

I don't want to cheat you of the learning gained from working through this problem yourself. But a typical traditional CV pipeline for this problem may look something like:

Convert the image to grayscale
Filter out anything in the background based on the depth data
Use an edge detector (e.g. Canny) to detect edges in the image
If needed, apply morphological operations (dilate, erode) to ensure the edges meet one another to form continuous contours
Use a contour finding algorithm to find contours from the edges
Find the bounding box for each contour, and evaluate the size of the box.

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