[geomark]

As the author says "... it’s tough to hack together a demo in a few weeks, get users, and bootstrap / apply to some accelerator like in many software projects". So the financial rewards don't seem to be there in robotics startups. And as a result it seems that engineers in the field aren't paid that well compared to software developers, despite it being highly technical and requiring a rather vast skillset. Will that ever change (the financial part)?

[jcims]

In 30-40 years when supply chain logistics, manufacturing and distribution are fully automatable it will likely be possible for a small team to quickly convert an idea to a prototype to a product in the hands of the consumer.

By then the software/service delivery process is going to be so encumbered by regulatory response to the likely hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths and hundreds of trillions in economic losses due to bugs and hacks that the playing field will be largely leveled (through convergence more than anything, but still).

(That or the first company to ship a reasonable facsimile of Ava from Ex Machina. Go the Tesla route and start off selling them for $5-10M each and work your way down. People will be mortgaging their homes to buy one.)

[timgilbert]

People will be mortgaging their homes to buy one

As long as they didn't watch the entire movie!

[unishark]

If you can hack something together easily that can earn a lot of money, others can too. So that value will drop. Once upon a time you could slap together websites with html and make six figures. Now you'd probably be lucky to make 5. Same with phone apps.

Also from the perspective of the same person over their career, engineering skills definitely hold their value better than software skills.