Remote Robotics Consulting - Seven Years In

Intro

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might have seen my earlier blog posts summarizing my experience as a Remote Robotics Consultant. In case you’d like to start from the beginning, here is the ordered list of my posts:

• One Year of Working as a Robotics Consultant
• Thoughts on 2 Years as a Remote Robotics Consultant
• Remote Robotics Consulting - 3.5 Years In
• Remote Robotics Consulting - A Five-Year Retrospective

In hindsight, there are some choices that I made that turned out suboptimal, but if I turned back time, I’m not sure if I would be able to make better decisions. Let’s see if there are some lessons to be learned!

The section below describes my last long-term contract, if you’d like to jump into some meaty advice, see the next section, Lessons Learned.

Update on my Previous Blog Post

In my last consulting update, I ended my blog post with a bit of a teaser of what is next and in my increased involvement with DTE, an Icelandic company building laser-shooting robots for molten metal analysis. I considered the company’s product the pinnacle of tackling DDD (Dirty, Dull, Dangerous). The smelters themselves and metal processing in general are no joke, and people get injured in these places very often.

Here was my thinking over two years ago - if I was given a choice to join a company I believe in, should I drop my consulting operation, and go full in?

It turned out dropping consulting was not necessary. The alternative was going through an intermediate company. The math of becoming an employee of an umbrella company was quite interesting, I would double my hours, but because of all the taxes and fees involved, I would end up earning 100 USD more a month.

Given this, we decided I would remain a consultant, with all the perks that come with a job description (no fixed schedule, can take other clients) and on top of that, receiving stock options, and having a three-month notice period.

One discussion I will always cherish from my time at DTE was when I was chatting with my manager at the time, Lúðvík, and the conversation went along the lines of:

• “Sure, I can lead the robotics team, but it might be difficult since I’m not working full-time” (was at 80 hours per month back then)
• “What? Based on your output, I thought you were full-time”

I indeed felt like I’ve reached my peak productivity with that company.

As I’m publishing this blog post, I wrapped up my cooperation with DTE. It’s been an interesting and very intense period of my life, and as a result, I can tell people that I’ve worked on heavy metal robots that shot lasers.

Lessons Learned

Of course, there was going to be a lessons learned section. Today, I have for you a mix of business and technical advice:

• Retainers are amazing - it feels great to lock in the hours at the beginning of the month. If you go this direction, consider how to handle under/over time (charge for it at the beginning of the next month, shift hours around, take them on as holiday)
• If you are entering a long-term contract, having a notice period in the contract might be a good idea for both parties (in my case, it gave me three months of runway to have a think about what’s next)
• Think of your insurance - metal smelters are very dangerous, which meant that if I was to go to one on behalf of DTE, I would not be covered by their insurance (since I’m also external to DTE). Always consider these in any hazardous environment!
• Eliminate repetitive busy work as soon as possible - developers should develop, not perform mundane, repetitive tasks. If this is the case, automate the tasks or create tools to reduce the barrier for performing these tasks
• If you don’t have time to create content for your main service, then what are you even doing? - this one stings a bit. When I went all-in with the long-term contract, I didn’t have time or energy for side explorations, and this blog has been dormant. In hindsight, I should’ve taken fewer hours and played more

Upwork

In every single of my updates, I mentioned Upwork, so will do it here too. It feels that Upwork ended when they disabled their RSS feeds.

For the past three months, I’ve been browsing the jobs in ROS, robotics and drone categories, and the quality of jobs went downhill from the last time I was actively using the platform. Back in the day, you would see 1-3 quality projects a month, and in the past three months… nothing. They are also upping their fees again to a variable 0-15% (want to bet it will be closer to 15%?)

Upwork is heavily pushing their AI tools for proposal writing, and I think AI will be doing a big disservice to the platform. When I created a job un Upwork the other day, I had a couple of long-form proposals within a minute of posting it. Clearly, AI bots are hard at work on Upwork, and I don’t think this is helping them.

Weekly Robotics

In June last year, I took a sabbatical from my newsletter Weekly Robotics. At the time, I was focusing on reconstructing our apartment, and preparing to welcome my daughter into the world. I was also hoping to finish Baldur’s Gate 3 but didn’t have many chances to play since that time.

Today, the newsletter is back in strength. I started self-hosting the e-mail infrastructure and automated the shit out of issue creation. At one point, I was thinking if I should use AI to create feature description but decided against it since I’m quite a bit tired of all the AI slop on the Internet.

My goal for the newsletter for 2025? Grow it to 20,000 subscribers across e-mail and LinkedIn!

What’s next

I’m tempted to try out something new, and offer “Senior Robotics Internship package” that as foresee would work as follows:

• Fixed three month cooperation
• Working on a specific problem the company is facing
• Throwing in Weekly Robotics sponsorship as a bonus
• Can be paid in money or equity or a mix of thereof

I think it would make for an interesting experiment, If you’d like to try it out, feel free to get in touch!

Until then, we will keep playing, and exploring coverage path planners.