Pros
First of all, I get to work on the latest and hottest technology in the field, e.g. Cassandra, Kafka, Kubernetes, and ROS. Language wise I get to write in Go, Python, JavaScript, and C++. Besides being useful to the company, these skills have added a lot of value to me in my terms of my career in software engineering.
The software I write has the capacity to manipulate the physical world, and to me that means a lot. Our software can direct a robot to move. As the robot moves, its sensor can reflect information about the physical world in forms of data back to us. Then we use the data to create powerful insight about the robot's environment. That is very exciting to me.
Cons
Here's a minor one, we don't get to use Mac in robotics, everything is exclusively linux. It's fine to me in most cases, except when I want to work on a laptop, I'd prefer a mac over thinkpad.
