Extremely talented engineers. Worst management I’ve ever experienced in my entire career. - Software Engineer Boston Dynamics Employee Review

1.0
16 Apr 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

When they were 90 people it was fantastic. Free lunch. Very smart people. Hard problems. Go for a few years but don’t expect to change anything. You won’t be able to. You *will* be pigeon holed.

Cons

Past their prime. Horrible at managing projects. Elevating all the old guard into management positions (with equity, which no one else has) was a disaster. Truly incompetent at managing software projects. Absolutely horrible product quality. Lots of secret discussions. Much politics. Many many bad decisions. An HR dept modeled after Attila the Hun. Most of the old guard are far more interesting in paying for their expensive cars and farms than in producing a quality product. Good people are pushed out, often frustrated beyond belief.

Explore other reviews about Boston Dynamics

5.0
8 Dec 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Amazing company culture with people willing to answer all your questions

Cons

There were not enough projects for the interns

3.0
3 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

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.

Cons

- 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.

6
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