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Everything you're describing mirrors my experience with remote scientific deployments and lab equipment (wet labs in particular). I support a team which manages

Everything you're describing mirrors my experience with remote scientific deployments and lab equipment (wet labs in particular). I support a team which manages dozens of these, and while it's shocking how inefficient and unsafe their practices are, it's similarly shocking how poorly the industry has kept up with or even tried to establish better practices. We get brand new equipment that costs in the realm of $10k for a tiny logger, and the thing is barely capable of remotely managed deployment of version controlled firmware. There are no tools in place to allow proper testing of the firmware unless you have the cash to buy extras and build test harnesses from them. The firmware itself is often in languages that don't have proper testing frameworks, type systems, IDEs, etc. It's HARD to do the right thing. Dragging and dropping files into proprietary hardware management programs is the de facto standard. Then you layer on top the unfortunate reality that sometimes electricity does weird stuff, people design weird circuits or wire the wrong components in, and firmware tends to have to deal with non-deterministic inputs a lot more often than, say, an API on the web. It's rough. The pay is also so much worse in my experience.

b40d-48b2-979e 1mo ago
Not only is the pay worse (like literally half of what you make doing webdev for a corp), but they mandate you be on site at a factory working first shift like you're on the production floor or something, clocking in and out when you're a salary worker. It's an awful culture.
analog31 1mo ago
>>> The pay is also so much worse in my experience. The result is that anybody who can program well enough to develop software is doing so. Those with any programming skills who remain behind are smart-but-undisciplined programmers, people who have a reason to be in a particular geographic area, too old to think about changing careers, or just plain nuts. This is what "lack of investment in manufacturing, research, and infrastructure" looks like. Sow what you reap. Disclosure: I might be one of those people. I came out of grad school in physics research, and programmed an entire plant. Thankfully, that was before it was economical to put every controller on the Internet.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1mo ago
  To me that speaks to a fundamentally incorrect economic structure. I bet PLC programmers could command much higher salaries - at much higher levels of risk - if they held more liability for things going wrong. That, in turn, would spur a lot of economic development around unfucking the field. On the other hand, markets are generally smarter than I am. Much like how US citizens living in the EU are basically barred from investing in index funds due to two fundamentally incompatible regulatory regimes, there are almost certainly factors here I'm not seeing and wouldn't see without a couple weeks of research and talking to people who have tried and failed as this. A guy can dream, though.
  - analog31 1mo ago
    Deming wrote, "quality control is a management problem." When you see a plant where workers are cutting corners on quality, they're probably under pressure to do so. Factories face liability already, either due to the cost of "line down" or getting sued. They could pass this liability on to their employees, who would probably cover it through insurance, like doctors.
    - hiAndrewQuinn 29d ago
      >They could pass this liability on to their employees, who would probably cover it through insurance, like doctors. That seems like the ideal situation to me, yeah. In general more professions should shoulder individual risk and more insurance firms should arise to hedge those risks. >When you see a plant where workers are cutting corners on quality, they're probably under pressure to do so. Correct, and pressures cancel each other out. A reverse pressure of holding individual liability is a good way to push back on pushing back on quality.

b40d-48b2-979e 1mo ago

Not only is the pay worse (like literally half of what you make doing webdev for a corp), but they mandate you be on site at a factory working first shift like you're on the production floor or something, clocking in and out when you're a salary worker. It's an awful culture.

analog31 1mo ago

>>> The pay is also so much worse in my experience. The result is that anybody who can program well enough to develop software is doing so. Those with any programming skills who remain behind are smart-but-undisciplined programmers, people who have a reason to be in a particular geographic area, too old to think about changing careers, or just plain nuts. This is what "lack of investment in manufacturing, research, and infrastructure" looks like. Sow what you reap. Disclosure: I might be one of those people. I came out of grad school in physics research, and programmed an entire plant. Thankfully, that was before it was economical to put every controller on the Internet.

hiAndrewQuinn 1mo ago
To me that speaks to a fundamentally incorrect economic structure. I bet PLC programmers could command much higher salaries - at much higher levels of risk - if they held more liability for things going wrong. That, in turn, would spur a lot of economic development around unfucking the field. On the other hand, markets are generally smarter than I am. Much like how US citizens living in the EU are basically barred from investing in index funds due to two fundamentally incompatible regulatory regimes, there are almost certainly factors here I'm not seeing and wouldn't see without a couple weeks of research and talking to people who have tried and failed as this. A guy can dream, though.
- analog31 1mo ago
  Deming wrote, "quality control is a management problem." When you see a plant where workers are cutting corners on quality, they're probably under pressure to do so. Factories face liability already, either due to the cost of "line down" or getting sued. They could pass this liability on to their employees, who would probably cover it through insurance, like doctors.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 29d ago
    >They could pass this liability on to their employees, who would probably cover it through insurance, like doctors. That seems like the ideal situation to me, yeah. In general more professions should shoulder individual risk and more insurance firms should arise to hedge those risks. >When you see a plant where workers are cutting corners on quality, they're probably under pressure to do so. Correct, and pressures cancel each other out. A reverse pressure of holding individual liability is a good way to push back on pushing back on quality.