Day: July 22, 2025

• Kevin Bond bought a Tesla Model 3 with money from his pension after he retired.
• 5 years later, he replaced it with a BYD Seal after becoming uncomfortable with Elon Musk’s actions.
• Bond said the Seal is quicker and better built than the Model 3, with a nicer interior.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kevin Bond, a retired director of mental health services from Devon, UK, about swapping his Tesla Model 3 for a BYD Seal. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve lived in Devon for three years. I’m retired now, but I was a director of mental health services and the chief executive of a not-for-profit health and social care company.

I bought the Tesla Model 3 in 2020 when I retired, with the lump sum you get with your occupational pension, for my wife.

We sold it around three months ago. It just felt really uncomfortable that a single penny of our money would go anywhere near Elon Musk.

I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with Musk, but as time went on, my wife and I became increasingly uneasy.

I think that there’s a point where it’s beyond just unpleasant, and you believe this guy is actively creating hate and division between people.

When the [Southport] riots happened, it felt like he was fanning the flames. I’m not at all comfortable with that, and I don’t want to be associated with it.

I think he stepped over a line. His support for far-right parties in Germany and his spreading of misinformation is just disgraceful.

Model 3 woes

If I’m honest, I never really liked the Model 3 that much.

There was no denying that when you first got in, it was exciting. You put your foot down, and it goes very fast. But for me, it was not very comfortable.

The seats weren’t well made, and the interior was cheap and nasty. Many of the important settings were adjusted via the display screen, so your eyes were off the road when they should have been on the road.

The doors weren’t fitted that well, so you got quite a bit of cabin noise, and after a couple of years, the suspension started squeaking heavily.

It just felt cheap. Personally, I didn’t think it was very well put together.

Initially, the service was OK, but after a few years, the response was awful. It’s probably the worst service I’ve ever had from any car dealer.

When we sold the Tesla, it had the worst depreciation of any car I’ve ever owned. We sold it for just over £10,000 [$13,500] after buying it for nearly £50,000.

[Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.]

Buying a BYD

When we started looking for a new car, I thought that we would have to compromise.

What we found was that there are quite a lot of cars that have caught up and overtaken Tesla, both in terms of quality, but also on range and price.

We got the BYD Seal around the same time we sold the Tesla. We bought an ex-demonstrator vehicle that was a year old.

It’s quicker than the Tesla — it accelerates from 0 to 100km/h in 3.8 seconds — and it has a longer range. You can also charge it to 100% without damaging the battery.

It’s just a beautifully built car, and very comfortable. If you shut the doors, they go thunk, as they should, and there’s no wind noise in the cabin.

It’s got ambient lighting, vented seats, and head-up displays, all the things that you might expect in a car that you pay a lot of money for.

It’s hard to find things to fault with it. The media system is a bit clunky and glitchy, and it’s a tiny bit slower to charge. However, we do most of our charging at home, and with the Seal having more range, the slower charge time isn’t really an issue.

It drives beautifully on the road. You would put it through a corner in a way that I wouldn’t drive in the Tesla. It feels safe and it feels solid.

If I could give scores, I’d give the BYD nine out of ten and probably one out of ten for the Tesla.

Have you swapped your Tesla for a BYD or bought a Chinese EV? Contact this reporter at tcarter@businessinsider.com.

• Hanut Singh, 30, has been a robotics application engineer for almost five years.
• He credits AI advancements in robotics for creating his role at Chef Robotics in Dallas.
• The demand for robotics application engineers will grow as companies need deployment and customer skills.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Hanut Singh, a 30-year-old lead robotics application engineer at Chef Robotics based in Dallas. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

Before the AI revolution, we had the classical robotics scene, like the robots that make cars in factories. After the machine learning and AI boom, advanced robots emerged. For example, Teslas can now autonomously drive on the street.

As a robotics application engineer at Chef Robotics, I act as the bridge between AI models and messy real-world environments. I’m about to start my fifth year doing this work.

People always talk about how AI or robotics will take jobs, but there’s a flip side to this — it created mine.

The pre- and post-AI eras needed two very different kinds of robotics engineers

In the pre-AI era, robots were hard-coded to perform the same movement over and over a thousand times a day. Any change would cause them to fail to adapt. Post-AI boom robots adapt to their environment.

Society needs engineers who understand robotics, AI, and customers. Unlike traditional robots, the new generation of robots needs constant internet access and communicates via the cloud.

If you have a warehouse with an open floor plan, the robots working there can get lost. A robotics application engineer’s job is to figure out where to include these smart features, like spatial awareness. We have to go to a customer site, look at their requirements, determine what they need, and develop our smart tech accordingly.

When I graduated from my master’s program, there weren’t a lot of robotics roles out there

When I graduated with my master’s in electrical engineering with a specialty in robotics in 2020, my first job out of school was very development-oriented. There weren’t many AI-driven, dynamic automation roles in the industry yet.

While in my first role, I applied for an application engineer role at Fetch Robotics. The job posting caught my attention because the company said it wanted a robotics engineer who understands AI robotics, but in a customer-facing role, doing deployments.

Mentorship and gradual experience helped me further my career in AI

I came in confident on the engineering side and a little less confident on the sales engineering side. Thanks to the mentorship of senior applications engineers, I quickly grew into the customer-facing and sales engineering aspects of the role.

I then became a senior application engineer and later got an offer from Chef Robotics. The company was at a point where it had a product, but it didn’t know how to deploy it yet. I came in as one of the company’s first application engineers in 2023, and now I’m a lead application engineer.

The salary ranges for this type of job from company to company. For an application engineer, the salary can be anywhere from $120,000 to $200,000. If you become a lead or a manager, it increases even more.

My company typically hires new graduates for our robotics application engineering roles

There was no role like mine a decade ago. You need an engineer in robotics who is well-versed in AI, with the confidence of a salesperson to talk to customers. Not many candidates have both these skillsets. Another reason it gets tough is that it’s a new role, so it’s difficult to find someone who’s experienced.

Looking back at when I got my first role as a robotics application engineer, I didn’t yet have the full skill set, but the company took a chance on me. Since I’ve started hiring for the role, it’s become clear just how difficult it is to find someone with direct experience for this type of job.

We typically end up hiring someone who has done traditional automation but not dynamic automation. Now that I’ve been with multiple companies, I know that what usually happens is we make a team with a few working engineers and then take recent graduates who we train into the role.

My team uses LinkedIn to scout for candidates

A lot of folks see sales and robotics in the job description and apply without understanding the role. Salesmen will apply, and hardcore roboticists will apply, so we end up scouting.

On LinkedIn, we mainly look for experienced engineers at Bay Area robotics startups. If we want recent graduates, we recruit from places like Carnegie Mellon University or Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The best thing to do if you want to become a robotic application engineer is to study robotics, but try to get some customer-facing experience. It might not be a robotics role — you might just get into it as an automation engineer at a warehouse.

In my experience, the best way to prepare for a role like this is to get real-world experience by working as an automation engineer in a warehouse and, at the same time, gain knowledge of robotics and AI by taking courses in them.

I think this is one of the safest jobs in tech right now

At this point, everybody’s heard of vibe coding, which is using AI tools to do the heavy lifting of coding software. These software teams are becoming smaller. When it comes to deploying the technology, AI cannot deploy the robots. This is a human-in-the-loop job in AI.

Robots are smart, but only when guided by someone who understands their limits and strengths. As this technology advances and new features emerge, a robotics application engineer will have more work to do.

I see the demand increase every day as new robotics companies pop up and they realize that they need someone to actually do the sales deployment and engineering to deploy these robots on-site.

If you have a career journey or AI story that you would like to share, please email this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.

• Startups are scrapping with Big Tech over AI talent.
• Salaries and equity are peaking, as startups emphasize ownership and impact, recruiters said.
• The AI boom is fueling a newfound intensity in startup work culture.

Tech giants aren’t the only ones fighting over top AI talent.

From multibillion-dollar acquihires to poaching packages reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars, the talent wars are having a “bit of a waterfall-like effect on comp” across early-stage startups, said Cristina Cordova, a former VC and the COO of issue tracking company Linear.

Salary and equity packages are climbing, and startups are touting the unique impact and ownership of working somewhere smaller, recruiters told Business Insider.

A head of AI at a Series A company — with an applied background and time spent in a top research lab — can command between $300,000 and $400,000 in base pay, said Shawn Thorne, managing director at executive search firm True Search.

That’s without any previous management experience. Before the AI boom, the salary for a vice president of engineering may have been closer to $200,000 to $250,000, he said.

“There are two sets of rules,” Thorne said. “The price that you need to pay for all talent, and then there’s the price you need to pay for AI talent.”

It’s not just base pay that’s exploding. Equity is “the big factor” because startups compete with the “opportunity cost” of a top researcher or applied engineer launching a startup of their own, he said.

Equity packages have climbed to between 2% to 5% for top engineers, Thorne said — compared to what would’ve been a fraction of a percent for an early-stage, non-managerial employee in the past.

Other bargaining chips include letting AI researchers or engineers come in with a cofounder title, compute access, and time for research outside work, Thorne said.

“We’ve seen top candidates win with remote flexibility, front-loaded equity, big sign-on bonuses, tighter cycles on compensation refreshes, and friends on the team,” said Natan Fisher, an investor and the cofounder of recruiting service SingleSprout. “It’s not just the offer. It’s how fast and personally the process goes.”

The fight for AI talent has become unprecedented. In June, Meta spent $14.3 billion on a Scale AI investment and what was seen as an acquihire of Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, while Google snapped up Windsurf’s top talent this month for $2.4 billion.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously said Meta had attempted to poach talent with $100 million signing bonuses, which Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said OpenAI had countered.

Startups can offer ownership and impact

Frenetic job-hopping has become the new normal in AI, Cordova said, contributing to “a mercenary mindset” and a higher bar for employee retention.

Startups have an edge. They can offer the opportunity to be part of something transformative and the potential financial windfall that comes with that. They can also offer a sense of freedom, as opposed to being a cog in a machine with a limited scope. (Big Tech CEOs like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are well aware of these dynamics, similarly offering fewer reports and more AI compute power to woo top candidates.)

While Fisher said he doesn’t know any early-stage startups that can compete with $10 million compensation packages, “they can win by pitching sharper problems, faster cycles, and giving top AI engineers the ability to own product, with strong upside.”

The larger talent wars aren’t affecting all startups, including those building off existing AI models. Shie Gabbai, the COO of AI travel planning company Layla, said that while nearly all of the company’s funding has gone to hiring engineers, salaries have not been affected.

Gold star AI candidates

AI startups face a widening gap between gold star researchers — the kind selling their startups for billions — and rank-and-file employees who might not have the same pedigree.

The latter may fetch salaries more in line with what’s typical in Silicon Valley, said Mark Bai, a managing director at True Search.

As AI increasingly replaces early engineering jobs, tech companies disperse salaries among a smaller number of people.

Gold star candidates are usually PhDs from a well-known computer science program focused on machine learning, such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Waterloo, or Carnegie Mellon, and who, five years later, have landed on a top AI research team at a major company, said Thorne and Bai.

“Pretty much every client that Mark and I talk to would like to poach someone out of OpenAI or FAIR at Meta,” Thorne said, referring to Meta’s Fundamental AI Research group.

Fisher added that xAI is often flagged. Many top researchers also know one another, a major boon when assembling a team.

“More than specific skills, companies want people who live and breathe AI,” Fisher said.

He said that this includes people who ship side projects, stay close to model updates, write code, speak at conferences, have a good social media presence, and write academic papers.

The AI wars fuel a newfound work intensity

The talent wars are a key symptom of “a level of urgency in tech that’s been missing for years,” Cordova said.

With every new AI model launched, a new wave of companies is born and dies, Bai said. The intensity is manifesting in more rigid return-to-office expectations and “founder mode” taking hold.

“They’re bringing in some of this 996 culture,” Bai said, referring to a widespread tech work culture in China of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.

Bai added that some companies work seven days a week. “There are literally offices with bunk beds.”

While a high-pressure atmosphere is synonymous with startup culture, Thorne said the pendulum has swung back in a major way after the COVID pandemic, and founders have become more forward about their demands.

“This is by far the most intensity that I’ve ever experienced from clients over the last decade,” Bai said.