Pros
- Lots of smart people to work with.
- Lots of interesting robotic hardware to work with.
- Interesting projects if you end up on the right team.
- Decent pay.
- Boston Dynamics makes some of the best robotic hardware in the world.
Kontras
- The company culture used to be research focused and now it is product focused. This means you'll be writing code judged at a production standard on top of decades of research-grade code that the higher-ups wrote unless you're working on a green field project. There are mountains of technical debt that management has no incentive to clean up laying around like a mine field.
- Because so many smart people want to work on the world's best robots, it's almost impossible to get noticed in a positive way unless you end up with favorable projects, a force you will have no control over.
- Strong emphasis is placed on using proprietary logging tools with a very poor developer experience - get ready to spend weeks debugging issues of greater complexity than you find almost anywhere else.
- Very much a sink or swim technical culture with little interest shown to supporting employees.
- Eroding work/life balance; they used to be properly hybrid but are now essentially full time in-office.
- Little to no meaningful testing of robot behavior is properly automated. The company has a huge reliance on manual testing and individual unit tests, with a major deficiency in end-to-end tests that test systems together effectively.
- Forward deployed engineers, or as BD calls them Field Application Engineers, are typically under-respected and underpaid.