[TheCapn]

You're not wrong. It shows in the state of PLC/HMI Development tools. Even simple things like Revision Control is decades behind in some cases.

I've basically found my niche in the industry as a Software Engineer though I can't say I see myself staying in the industry much longer. The amount of time's I've gotten my hands on code published by my EE coworkers only to rewrite it to work 10x faster at half the size with less bugs? Yikes. HMI/PLC work is almost like working in C++ at times, there's so many potential pitfalls for people that don't really understand the entire system, but the mentality by EE/ME types in the industry is to treat the software as a second class citizen.

Even the clients treat their IT/OT systems that way. A production mill has super strict service intervals with very defined procedures to make sure there is NO downtime to production. But get the very same management team to build a redundant SCADA server? Or even have them schedule regular reboots? God no.

[dmvdoug]

I have no clue, but I wonder how unique this attitude turns out to be among MEs/EEs versus, say, everyone dealing with electronics. Because the stories and complaints about mechanical and electrical engineers treating code (and programmers) as second-class, remind me very much of how front-end people complain about how they’re perceived by back-end people. And about how backend people complain about how they’re perceived by systems programming people. And so on up/down the line(s) of abstraction.

[weaksauce]

> It shows in the state of PLC/HMI Development tools.

i mean you are talking about upgrading things that are going to be in service for decades perhaps. the requirements for the programs is generally not complicated. turn on a pump for a time, weigh something and then alarm if some sensor doesn't see something.

Structured text was an improvement over ladder logic as you could fit more of the particular program in the screen real estate you had and could edit it easier since it was just text. though, that had its own set of issues that needed to be worked through and it wasn't a panacea.