Finding Experienced Labview Programmers

[falkpl]

I have used labview in almost every industry including industral agricultural pharma, aeorspace materials R&D .... so I know the scope of what can be done and have seen very positive response but still see the lack of a programmer base as a problem.  Yes we are hiring but growing the business is limited by the ability to get labview programmers not the ability to get contract work for companies who desire a labview solution.

[Ben]

Excellent discusion all!

I love to hear talk about LabVIEW being in demand.

Paul,

There is another "out of the box" solution you may want to concider.

If you were to partner with an existing organization (hint, hint) with an HR and financial group already in place, you could forget about all of the recruiting stuff and let someone else do it.

Ben

bar@dsautomation.com

[Ray.R]

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@Ben wrote:

I love to hear talk about LabVIEW being in demand.

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I wish that was more the case in Canada...  😞

What I've observed is that even when LV jobs are offered in Canada, they tend to hire the inexperienced people over the experienced ones.  For some reason, they get the idea that LV is so easy that there is no difference in skill based on experience..  Very strange..  (we need a "YIKES" icon).. 

[falkpl]

Yes PR and recruting firms can help although most of them never have heard of labview, and labview and NI are a unique situation we are a small close community compared to almost any other programming community.  I was supprised to see that even the compitition among different members is friendly.  One thing that NI could do to improve on the education front is to get alliance members NI and select universities to cooperate.  Maybe get a labview department\lab at universities associated with members and use it as a way to grow the programmer base and feed these select companies with talent strait out of college.

Paul

[Steve.Briggs]

In my freshman year at Drexel University in Philadelphia we spent an entire semester learning Labview and Maple in our Engineering Class.  This was through the tDEC program which is no longer in existance and was replaced with ENGR program (I believe) that all freshman and sophomore engineering majors go through.

We never went through anything too in depth, but getting your feet wet is the first step to learning anything and provided some basic knowledge to the work I currently do at my internship using Labview.

[jrpe]

Getting students exposure to labview in university is definately something that NI needs to develop more. I am a student at University of Waterloo (in Canada) in the mechatronics engineering program, which is a program that fits very very well with labview, but I had not even heard of labview until I was on my first co-op work placement, where my employer asked me if I had ever used labview. All of my programming training had been in visual basic, C, and C++, but I initially thought that labview was just going to be a lot like visual basic. One the major misconceptions I had about labview was that since the UI of the language is so high level, the programming would be very high level, and it wouldnt let me do any low level manipulation, effectively crippling the language for any serious applications. I was also concerned about execution speed as compared to C. 

I have now used labview in all of my co-op workterms, automating measurement processes and test stations, and I quite enjoy it, but I still have not had any formal training in labview at school, the extent that I have seen labview at my university is I heard about a one weekend course that was being offered as an intro to labview. I think it would be a real benefit to NI if they could make more inroads into programs such as mine just to teach students that labview does exist as an alternative. In first year I had to write a program to control a mindstorms robot, and the language we had to write it in was NQC (Not Quite C), which is like C without any of the functionality. That would have been an ideal project to introduce labview (although there certainly would have been a lot of posts on the forums about lego robots ). I think that NI should try to show universities that there is a real benefit to labview: that it isnt just a top level pre-fabricated language. If more students have experience with it, it will become more widely excepted in industry, since I think one of the major constraints on it right now is that people in industry dont know it, and when they try to learn it, they are frustrated by the necessary shift in thinking to go from text-based languages to dataflow.

Anyway, thats just my $0.02 canadian...which is currently a little bit more than $0.02 american (Im going to gloat for the brief period of time this is true)

[Kenny_K]

I went to Marquette University and all electrical engineers (electrical and electronics, bioelectrical, electrical and computer and computer engineering) had to take an Intrumentation Lab class, and almost the whole semester was on doing automated experiments in LabVIEW.

I know that I never thought it was useful at the time , but our professors said that it was widely used in many companies and we needed to learn some of it.  And then the first day on the job, I was handed the developers suite and told I was the new expert in LabVIEW.  I now spend almost all my time writing software for various parts of our company.  We (Marquette) also have a brand new lab that has numerous labview based programs in them, and all types of engineers use them.  So at least at Marquette, they are trying to expose everyone to LabVIEW, but sadly I have not heard of any other of the engineers I graduated with using labview in their jobs.

I agree with some of the other posters that a lot of the computer engineers went to jobs that used the more "glamorous" languages, and bigger paychecks....a shame.

[smercurio_fc]

Steve Briggs said

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In my freshman year at Drexel University in Philadelphia

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Cool. A fellow from my alma mater. Glad to hear that Drexel stuck with trying to teach alternative programming languages. At the time I went LabVIEW was barely present there. The fundamental problem they had at the time was lack of hardware resources, as LabVIEW is best used in that kind of environment. I suspect that's probably why many schools don't teach LabVIEW. It is expensive, after all, especially when you consider the required hardware. Traditional programming languages, on the other hand, are cheap in comparison - you can get the Express versions for the C#, VB.NET, and C++ languages for free from Microsoft. Hard to compete against free. Heck, I used the Visual C# Express edition here at work writing the application I mentioned in my original response.

[NoahR]

Hi falkpl,

I know that there have been a large amount of replies to your original question, but I do have a suggestion for you with respect to your original question about finding experienced LabVIEW programmers.  If you are looking for someone that can help you out with a specific project, you may want to look at our Alliance Partners.  If you go to www.ni.com/solutions, you can search for Alliance Partners in your area and hopefully they can help you out with your question.  Check this out and let me know what you think.  Thanks!

[Ben]

Forgive me Noah, I just can't help myself.

Noah wrote;

  If you are looking for someone that can help you out with a specific project, you may want to look at our Alliance Partners.  If you go to www.ni.com/solutions, you can search for Alliance Partners in your area and hopefully they can help you out with your question. 

That reminds me of one of my wife's favorite error message "Please contact your systems administrator." To which she screams at the screen;

I am the systems administrator, what do I do now?"

Ben