Finding Experienced Labview Programmers

[falkpl]

We are an alliance member and we are growing the limitation has been more an issue of adding labview experienced programmers early in their career. 

Steve Briggs :

you mentioned Drexel which is just up the road, I would love to talk to professors at Drexel and see if they have any students using Labview and see about what experience they provide.  There is a natural symbiotic relationship with mentoring local talent then in return you would get possible future employees or contacts which will bring their labview skills to thein future employers and institute labview as a defacto standard for application development.  This would benifit everyone involved (At least I think).

Paul

[Steve.Briggs]

Hey Paul,

When I left my first message I was trying to find the contact information for the professor we had in this class.  His name was Robin Carr and I find publications and mentionings of him on the Drexel website, but contact information of any sort is lacking.  Keep in mind, this class was in the fall of 2005, he may be elsewhere.

I'll continue looking in to this for you and hopefully come up with some results.

[michenglaoxu]

Hi, Kenny,

I am a TA during 2001-2003 helping students for instrumentation lab (EECE 141 right?) when I studied at MU.  

Now, I am a software engineer focusing on instrumentation system design and development using LabVIEW. But, I do find it is really difficult to find a LV programmer job when facing job market.

Probably one reason, at least I belive it is partly NI's "fault".

When I first touch LV introduced by someone (local NI sales stuff) who claimed LV is easy to learn, just a few days you can build up a system which may take a few months using C/C++, blah, blah...  This is true to some extent.  But the negative impact is everyone believe anyone can be a LV expert in few days, unlike C/C++ expert may take a few years. This means LV programmers are cheaper than C/C++ programmer from the training and learning cost perspective.    

Another reason, is that currently the major automation market still controlled by several large companies (Simens, Rockwell, ...) which has their own GUI design and development tool. Whenever you had chance going to Rockwell automation show, NI is excluded. and vice versa.  I do ask this question to a NI engineer, his answer verifies my guess: they have benefit conflict, like PLC/PAC... . Those companies are unhappy to see the growth of NI which may take maket share from their terriority.

[Kenny_K]

Small world, I am sure we have met than, EE is a small group at MU.  EECE 141 is correct, with good old prof jacoby.

One thing I have noticed, is my reliannce on the forums to help me solve problems, since I am THE labview programmer at my company.  I don't have the benefit of some of the alliance members or larger consulting firms that have multiple programmers. 

 Maybe I could contact someone at another company and bounce an idea off them, but, according to the NI salesman (note possible salesman inflation), there is only 1, maybe 2 people in the area that are anywhere close to programming large applications to the scale I have (but pale in comparision to some of the applications I have seen here on the forum).  So I am on my own,  wishing there were more LabVIEW "experts" to talk shop with....

I know that the salesman are saying that they get about 5 calls a month asking if they know anyone who can program in LabVIEW.  So it does not seem to be isolated to falkpl's area, probably country wide....

[johnsold]

Kenny,

It sounds like you would benefit from a Users Group. Have you asked your NI rep (or checked the website) to see if there is one near you? Many areas do not have them, unfortunately, but they can be a great asset for the isolated LV programmer where they exist. We had one in my area for a while, but it faded away....

Lynn

[Kenny_K]

Yea, we are just trying to get it back up and running again.  apparently it has been dead for a couple of years.  I actually have the honor of being the first user presenter for the meetings.  Hopefully I can get some phone numbers/emails out of it, but since there have not been any meetings for years, there is not much interaction in the area at the moment. 

[Mark H]

I feel I must chip in here...

I work for a fairly sizeable (2000 employees worldwide) and successful U.K. engineering (R&D and manufacturing) company.

I've been using LabVIEW for around 8 years - LabVIEW is generally only used by a very small minority of engineers around the company.

Our company has a "Software Engineering" department that does not use or support LabVIEW in any way (I don't work there). When ever software engineers have been seconded to work with LabVIEW, they have generally been unhappy as they come to realise that this can effectively be something of a career "dead end" for someone who is interested in enhancing their wider "marketability" software engineering.

From the "business point of view" - LabVIEW is unusually expensive, and it would be considered wholly unwise to become dependent on a proprietary software development system that is only supplied by one provider i.e. N.I.

For the two reasons cited above, combined with the difficulty in recruiting suitable LV engineers, has brought the company close to "moving away from" further use of LabVIEW - although this seems unlikely to happen whilst there are still several engineers (like myself) who are profficient and have a significant legacy of code.

If LabVIEW were considerably cheaper, and were the "language" available from more than one company/vendor in a freely competitive market - then I'm sure it's usage would be considerably wider, in the test & measurement & engineering arena.

Even then, LabVIEW is clearly not best suited to (nor is it designed for) general purpose software engineering - there are many situations where text programming is far better suited. I like LabVIEW, but there are many situations where I find it much more efficient and transparent to program in a high level text language.

Mark H.

Message Edited by Mark H on 10-29-2007 09:24 PM

[tbob]

My turn:  Even though I love Labview, find it fun to use, and believe it is by far the best language for test and measurement, I must agree with Mark H about the overall usefullness of Labview.  If I were writing some application like a word processor or such, Labview would not be my choice.  It is expensive (how much does a text editor and C++ compiler cost vs Labview?).  It is supported by only NI.  But for the work I do (test engineering), it is vastly superior in many ways.  Being fun to use gives it a huge advantage because it stimulates the user's interest and causes higher productivity, in my opinion.  Everyone here that uses Labview loves it.  There are a couple of engineers here who want to learn Labview because they see how enthusiastic the Labview programmers are.

[Ray.R]

Well-said tbob!

🙂

[parthabe]

I wish to express something on the lines of Mark.

My company is an ATE manufacturer, mainly indigenously developed ATEs, without using NI's PXI stuff in the earlier days. The client wanted the SW in LabVIEW for the chip testers we supplied, so we did & keep doing the same. It is running for nearly 4 yrs without any trouble. The SW for the board testers were built using VC++, for years long & they re also kept as such.

In a small challenge inside my company with a .Net developer, I even developed a Digital Waveform Editor solely in LV, which took all by astoishment. Only I cant do the digital comparison for fail easily, I hink which can be done using LV 8.5.

A month back people from NI came to our office & briefed my Director & the entire team about TestStand also.

On the everge of everything falling into place for an year-long hectic work of migrating to LV-TS, now the management says that it may want to STOP further development even for the chip testers using LV in another 2-3 yrs, because of the problem of getting good skilled & experienced people for LV.

All other SW coding people earn more salary compared to LV people in India, so omly a very few are willing to migrate to LV or take LV as a future career option.

But a little good news here is NI is doing big in introducing LV in the Universities across India, that is what I heard from a senior NI man.