I loved robotics and participated in robots programs all through high school and college.

The answer is that jobs mostly don't exist for this kind of work.

The robotics jobs that do exist are basically large manufacturing robot development (think fixed place arms in car production), warehouse automation (amazon, etc), autonomous driving (originally agricultural, but now also things like waymo/tesla), and DoD style work.

And even then - the number of real positions is minuscule compared to other software roles.

So instead I build robots in my personal time as an expensive hobby (and man is it expensive...).

I'm somewhat jealous of the folks who've managed to monetize that expensive hobby by filming it and putting it on youtube, but I've also seen exactly how much time/effort/luck goes into being successful there - and I think it'd kill any joy I have for it.

Hardware can be quite expensive and time-consuming, instead of just writing code (free) and running a command to deploy (quick) you have to get hold of good motors (expensive) and design and manufacture parts (slow)

There's the mech/EE equivalent of crud, too.

Plus the demand is higher for software than it is for hardware most of the time. Pretty hard to find jobs in robotics compared to all the various kinds of software.

You could do non-CRUD software instead.

Same. I do have an excuse due to lack of space in my apartment, but once we move...

If you have any spare time…