Rubin began as a robot engineer at lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss and had a brief stint at Apple as a manufacturing engineer before devoting his working hours to developing computers instead. However, robotics remained a hobby, with Rubin both building his own and amassing a collection of robots from Japan. The Android operating system’s name was no accident: Rubin’s coworkers at Apple started calling him “Android” because of his love of robots, and he adopted the name for his own purposes years later.
Now, Google has allowed him to build those robots all day long. “I have a history of making my hobbies into a career,” Rubin told the Times. “This is the world’s greatest job. Being an engineer and a tinkerer, you start thinking about what you would want to build for yourself.”