LabVIEW
Finding Experienced Labview Programmers
Based on what I've seen over the past 13 years, there seems to be a number of reasons for this:
- Market share. Let's face it: LabVIEW isn't as widely used as other, more traditional languages. There was an article I had seen a while ago that compared the market share of LabVIEW vs other programming languages. Let's just say that LabVIEW aficionados needed to turn away.
- Most placement firms simply don't know about the language, so they (a) don't know who's working with it, and (b) don't know about the job offerings, so they can't tie the possibilities to the ones looking for work. I can't tell you the number of times I've talked to recruiters who've called me and when I told them I used LabVIEW their response is "Lab-what?".
- Another is simply that LabVIEW programming requires a different mindset, so it's not readily taught in schools. Not taught = no graduates who know the language = no potential workers. Why isn't it taught in schools? Well, that can start a whole debate, and I'm not going there.
- Yet another reason, it seems to me, is that LabVIEW isn't as flexible in terms of the kinds of programs you can write. I say this not to disparage LabVIEW, or start a flame war, but simply as a realistic assessment based purely on my own experience. There's just some stuff that you cannot do in LabVIEW, but can easily do in C/VB/C#/Java/whatever. Heck, I recently coded up a large .NET app in C# that would have been impossible in LabVIEW.
- Money. And by this I mean how much people are paid. LabVIEW jobs tend to start as test engineer jobs, which are nowhere near as highly paid as a C or C/database programmer. There are exceptions, obviously.
Is it a lost cause? Hardly. Have you gotten no responses posting on the LabVIEW openings board here?
NI is involved quite a bit in universities. The local one here has something called the Integrated Teaching Lab and there are NI DAQ boards and LabVIEW on the work stations. The last time I was there was to see a competition they have every spring. In their second semester, freshman are paired with older students to create a project. Most of the teams did not use any software but there were a few running LabVIEW. My daughter's boyfriend was on one of those teams. Not only did his team win, the LabVIEW programmer got some big help from someone on the forum in order to get his program working. 
My son's high school has a pre-engineering program that is affiliated with the university but they don't (or didn't the last time I checked) do anything with programming/data acquisition/instrument control. I'm hoping that they can add some robotic stuff with the Lego Mindstorms but high schools usually have a big problem with budgets so it would take donations from a company like NI to get cool stuff like this to the kids.
Gemany's famous computer magazine c't had LabVIEW 6.1 on the DVD that came with the magazine in April (?) 2007. I don't know anyone who uses it.
As far as I know the schools in Germany continue ignoring LabVIEW as much as possible.
Some universities have a tight connection to NI, so their students have at least more than a basic LabVIEW knowledge when finishing their studies. Some of my colleagues come from these universities.
Conclusion: There is still a high demand in "LabVIEW days" until LabVIEW gets wide-spread.
According to that fact, skilled people are hard to find.
interesting...you need a programmer in Europe?
i guess it is our job to make it widespread. i make it my moto to rewrite every code written in C or fortran that i encounter, into LV. my audience being mainly graduate students, they are not too reluctant into learning how to use and change code. but from there to make of them "programmers" needs this extra bit of "love of LV".
Physisits have tendency to dislike LV, and give it a bad name, because "it is not difficult enough", or " one cannot control the inner workings of the program". both are wrong, and interpreted as such mainly because lack of knowledge.
all in all, it all comes down to this: teaching!
