If you're a robotics engineer you might get to help maintain the infrastructure that produces most of our food and manufactured goods. I personally have found it to be a very satisfying career choice.

Over the last several years I stumbled into a killer app for robotics: testing. Almost every manufacturer of any thing has a secret testing lab of robots (and engineers to program them). Robotics are good for dealing with dangerous things (like welding or bomb disposal) and those bots get most of the attention. But robots are also great for "boring", tedious things, like tapping buttons for 12 hours straight. Yet those robots don't get as much attention because, well, watching button tapping is slightly boring, and more importantly, many companies want to keep their quality control (and manufacturing) robotic processes a trade secret. Thus, most people have no idea how prevalent robots really are beyond flashy Boston Dynamics videos.

yep, seems like robotics engineers should switch to autonomous car engineers for upside, I would assume a lot of knowledge transfers well between the jobs