[DoctorDabadedoo]

Working on robotics software is still exciting to me, unfortunately that is but a small part of working in the field: supporting operations/customer support is something that can take a lot of your time due to a multitude of factors (lack of specialized knowledge, bad designs, bad components/suppliers that are hard to move away from, environmental issues that can take some investigation to uncover, etc.), handling the expectations from (usually not technical) management can be challenging as well.

Projects are usually complex in part due to having a lot of moving parts (hw, sw, mechanical), iterating (bad) designs/components is not practical due to support reasons, so you may be stuck with a known bad stack.

And copying a previous comment from me on another thread: Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG (which is a small pool). Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious.

Overall I would say that if you are optmizing for money / career mobility robotics is not great and you can do better some place else.