Preparing for an Engineering Career: A Conversation with Dr. Rob Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics

Today I share a conversation with Dr. Rob Playter, the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the highly successful engineering and robotics design company Boston Dynamics, whose most famous personality may be its robot Spot, most recently seen dancing in the 2022 Super Bowl ad Your Cousin From Boston (Dynamics). Dr. Playter has earned a BS degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from The Ohio State University and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

My conversation with Dr. Playter centers his own career path and ideas for preparing for a successful career in engineering. It’s my hope that the conversation will encourage aspiring engineers along the college application process and assure them that success is attainable no matter their path.

Can you tell me about your professional background?

Rob tells me, “I got an undergraduate degree at Ohio State in Aeronautical Engineering, went to MIT and got a masters degree, worked for a couple of years, and went back and got a Ph.D, at MIT. I helped start this company which was a spinoff of my lab at MIT and basically have been here ever since. I’ve actually been at the company since 1994, so it has been 28 years. I went from five people and being a practicing engineer, to being an engineering manager, to various roles. My career has changed a lot. From practicing engineer, to manager, to HR, to legal, to doing mergers and acquisitions, to finally, this leadership position as CEO. So, it has always changed. It has been very interesting in that way.”

Did you spend all four of your undergraduate years at Ohio State?

Rob: Actually, I am glad that you brought that up. In my first year, I was at a junior college.

You did not start your education at a highly-selective and highly-ranked technical institution, yet you found your way to MIT and have been wildly successful. I want my families to hear that this is possible! So many people think that it is critical to attend one of a short list of highly-selective, highly-ranked schools to build a successful life. And it will be devastating if a student isn’t get accepted to one of these schools. This is such misguided thinking. I believe that it is not where you go - the ranking or reputation of a school; it is what you do wherever you go.

Rob: Yes, I firmly believe that, too. I was also pursuing - you asked earlier - I think passion is important. And I was pursuing a passion. I was an athlete, and to be honest, I was not good enough of an athlete to make it at an Ohio State, coming right out of high school. So, I went to a junior college for one year, where I did fine in school. I mean, the school was not the most challenging, but it did its job, and in the meantime, I trained, and in my second year, I was actually able to compete at Ohio State as an athlete. I chose Ohio State because of the combination of athletics and engineering. And that was a really important step for me - going to the junior college. It didn’t hold me back. I think because a larger thing that we are looking for when you talk about what we look for in candidates is passion.  Passion is a big part of it. You know, when you have some interest, that gets you excited. That makes you get up in the morning. That makes you want to do more than the minimum. That is an important element. And that is something you can get anywhere. That doesn’t happen only at Ivy League institutions, you know (laughs.)

The head of MIT Lincoln Laboratory and several other top leaders there went to Ohio State, too. Ohio State has quite a legacy in the Boston area.

Rob: Yeah, Ohio State has a very solid engineering program.

What do you look for when you recruit and hire student interns and early career employees?

Rob: The passion is part of that. Teamwork is part of that. I find that you really need to be able to work with other people. A common theme is, was there project work done where you had to collaborate with someone else and manage the interpersonal dynamics? When you couldn’t do everything yourself, there was an opportunity to go a little bit deeper, and you had to deliver something at the end of the day. So, we like to look for that kind of project work. That is also a reflection, I think, of passion. It doesn’t have to be all school work, right. It can be a hobby. It could be an extracurricular club. Something, again, to show that you went above and beyond. That there is something that gets you excited. And that you are able to leverage that energy into doing something interesting. We used to have people come present. In the early days of the company, every single person would have to make a presentation at an interview. And, if they had a thesis, a masters degree, or Ph.D. thesis, it became obvious that they had presented about that thesis. But if you weren’t yet at that graduate student level, we’d still ask people to tell us what they did and show us something they are excited about. And that ended up well. I always thought it worked well. Not everybody adapts to a presentation format like that perfectly well, but it is a great way of letting somebody tell you about their life, and let’s see if they decide to talk about something outside of the norm or just their classes and the grades they got.

And a presentation shows communication skills in addition to the other technical skills that you seek. How do you determine these qualities, which you’ve already addressed. Is there anything else you’d like to add? 

Rob: That’s primarily it. Sometimes, depending on the expertise, in an interview, there will likely be technical questions about your coding skills or your mechanical design skills and things like that. That is par for the course. Ideally, you do that in a way in which you ask the candidate what they are professing to have expertise about as opposed to just having a standard question that you ask everybody, which can be hard to do. It takes a good interviewer to do that. But that is really how we would like to determine those things.

Tell me about how much you care or don’t care about or factor in the ranking of a student’s undergraduate school or engineering program. 

Rob: Candidates need to stand out for one reason or another. That might be a school or a program that you are a part of, or that could be this interesting project work that you did. So, it's not limited to that school or that program. We hire widely. We hire from everywhere. Yes, we hire from the MITs and Carnegie Mellons, but we also hire from Worcester Polytechnic Institution and local trade schools. We’ve hired people out of high school who we’ve now given the label of engineer because they’ve simply learned so much on the job. 

Wow!

Rob: Yes, they have the title of engineer now. I am not afraid to do that. It might take a little while to get there, but I can think of at least 2 or 3 people who, in fact, don’t have an engineering degree from an institution but are essentially doing engineering work here at the company. 

That is fantastic. And interesting. And I wonder if Boston Dynamics is unique in this way or if other places do this. I am not aware of anywhere else that does this.

Rob: We try to be open-minded. We really believe that there is a role for all skills here. When you are building these advanced robots, it takes technician skills and hands-on skills to really prepare them. To build them. To fix them. And someone who is good at that. So, we’ve hired people out of the bike-building business. We have about fifteen people out of the custom bike-building business because they are good fabricators. They know how to weld. They know how to work with their hands. And we’ve hired a lot of people out of automotive racing and repair. We’ve hired a lot of people out of that industry. We think we can get good people from everywhere.

Do you hire people from liberal arts colleges with math or science degrees who maybe distinguish themselves in engineering work somehow?

Rob: I used to run all of the hiring up until about three years ago. Frankly, we’ve probably hired 250 of our 500 people since I stepped away from it. But we’ve also really enlarged the pool of talent that we are trying to draw from, and that is because we need a whole new set of skills that include sales, IT, legal, business administration, etc.  So a great variety of skills. We have definitely branched beyond straight engineering disciplines because, frankly, we need more. In the past, we may well have hired somebody with a science degree but we would have needed to see, again, a significant project that demonstrated their ability to utilize those skills. 

How important is the student's major and coursework? Based on what you’ve said, it sounds like it is more what they’ve done with their major and coursework. A related question is, are specific coding languages and tools an asset to an applicant?

Rob: Again, it depends.  If you are a mechanical engineer, you will need to have some CAD skills and have worked with SOLIDWORKS which is sort of the common thing folks in school are using. We’ve shifted to some other tools like CATIA that are a little bit more elaborate. Same with the core disciplines, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. There are still some pretty specific skills that you need to operate at a pretty high level in our environment, so we do look for those skills. C++ and Python are the most common languages that we are programming in. We don’t use so much of - well, one of the problems in robotics curricula these days is oftentimes they’ll use a high-level language like ros, the robot operating system, or something like that. And we tend to want people who can operate at a lower level like C or C++ for our applications.

Oh, that is very interesting and valuable. I have just one last question. Do you have any specific advice that you would like to share with high school students starting technical careers?

Rob: The advice is to find something you love and pursue it with passion because that will show. That is the key thing. You spend a lot of your life working. You need to enjoy it. Don’t be afraid of pursuing something that interests you because it will come naturally if it is interesting to you. It will be an uphill battle if it is not. (laughter)

Yes, I agree! It should flow, as they say. What do you find yourself thinking about for fun? What do you read? What podcasts do you listen to? What do you talk with others about? What do you find yourself focusing on all the time? When you find your brain is hooked on something, and you can’t help but think about it, that tells you something. And you should listen to that.

Many thanks to Dr. Playter for his time and wisdom.