>>> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.