Is the EE market overflooded with PLC jobs?

[hans]

I'm looking for a new employer in my local area, and I stumble across many PLC, SCADA and Eplan jobs. During my study half a dozen years ago I pretty much straight away chose the analog electronics, PCB design and microcontroller route. Because that's what I'm familiar with before I started my Bachelor study, that's what I do in hobby, and having worked with PLCs in 1 course my experience was pretty much: "big can of worms".

However, I'm not entirely sure what to make of this market situation. Like I said; all job titles I search for are saturated with these vacancies, like design engineer, hardware engineer, electrical/electronics engineer (doesn't matter which job title I use), embedded software engineer, and even C/C++ software engineers boil down to "affinity with Siemens S7 and SCADA systems" or Eplan. Whenever I put my CV up at a vacancy board I get like 5-6 phone calls in a day from employers or "recruiters" that are looking to fill something along the lines of Siemens S7, building automation and SCADA systems.

"Electronics" vacancies are incredibly hard to find, and when the appear they are either 2x 1,5+ hour travel or require relocation. Unfortunately I can't relocate for months to come, so I'm pretty much stuck with this location.

Is the automation market really that big? (in particular northern part of The Netherlands) Are these jobs damn hard to fill because they really are a "big can of worms"? Or is this just a local exception? Please share your experiences.

[tszaboo]

I've also noticed that they are looking for a very large number of project engineer in the Benelux. Probably because manufecturing and now design is already gone. Governments do everything in their power to make sure it stays that way.
In the meantime I've just hear about a company in east europe, where they want to hire several hundred EEs, only this year.

[Galenbo]

... Whenever I put my CV up at a vacancy board I get like 5-6 phone calls in a day from employers or "recruiters" that are looking to fill something along the lines of Siemens S7, building automation and SCADA systems.

Electronics design is de-facto banned by the EU, they made a swarm of regulations to archieve this.

Most PLC job offers you get is to "program" conveyors, packet handling, packaging, and SCADA to show the CEO monthly reports.

[hamdi.tn]

... Whenever I put my CV up at a vacancy board I get like 5-6 phone calls in a day from employers or "recruiters" that are looking to fill something along the lines of Siemens S7, building automation and SCADA systems.

Electronics design is de-facto banned by the EU, they made a swarm of regulations to archieve this.

Most PLC job offers you get is to "program" conveyors, packet handling, packaging, and SCADA to show the CEO monthly reports.

+1

Cause the industry of electronic is shifting ... for the same reason you see more and more software engineers and software hobbyist (most of the time they think that they are electronic hobbyist) and less hardware designer. For most end product manufacturer designing their own hardware (for small to medium quantity) is neither cost effective nor time to market effective. So most of them choose to use ready to use platforms and develop the software or just play around with parameters to adapt the thing to their needs.

[hans]

I was afraid of hearing this.

My previous employer already had trouble keeping 0.5-1 FTE of electronics design, and I fitted in quite nicely because I am a jack of all trades that will also do firmware, cross domain debugging and desktop software.

It seems like most large companies seek to fulfill 1 very specific job as well as possible (which JOAT arguable is not best fit), while small companies seek a JOAT with enough energy & disposable hours a week to pull the cart (which is hard for me given some handicaps).

I noticed the shift to more software too, and I guess will continue to expand given you get microcontrollers with almost a MB FLASH for a few $, and embedded Linux for a few $ more. Possibly not a bad idea to train myself towards to this industry shift.

[nctnico]

Most PLC job offers you get is to "program" conveyors, packet handling, packaging, and SCADA to show the CEO monthly reports.

I wouldn't be too wary of doing PLC jobs. People who are actually good at programming PLCs are extremely rare and can make absurd amounts of money. Someone I know is a PLC specialist and he gets work from allover the world to fix PLCs programs others can't fix. His biggest problem is that he can't find people who can help him.

[Kjelt]

I don't know about PLC's, I do know that for the most new IP connected projects we have two to three hardware engineers that are busy for 4 to 6 months, and around 65 software engineers that are busy for at least the coming two years, so you do the math.
Unfortunately also in software engineering (at least here) there is a shift from embedded with hardware knowledge to embedded Linux OO sw engineers. The niche you are seeking are mostly the cheap electronics with for instance bluetooth radio onboard or what to think about automotive (CAN) also jobs around in the south.
There are still lots of companies that build stuff in the Netherlands but I would not be picky to stay in the north.  Rent an apt for the weekdays or whatever till you find a more permanent job, then move.

[hans]

@nctnico I fear my deterrence from PLCs could very well be a single (bad?) sample in college in which we used ladder to program our stuff, with crap OPC libraries written for Visual Basic, proprietary hardware & software, on very old equipment. I can believe there is much better software out there, but it sure did leave a sour taste behind.

Of course you can become an expert in a given field and do very well, but I think such thing will only come when you like what you're doing and are in the right setting. Otherwise work is a mentally declining process. For me personally I got into electronics because of the computing & PCB design aspect, not really the control engineering (ignoring my 100% grade on the course in college; that was because the test was more about algebra than control engineering )
Money is not a primary decider for me right now, I have never been too impressed by the hedonic treadmill.

@Kjelt Yup, for projects requiring processing grunt microcontrollers are out and microprocessors are in. You can get very decent CPU power within a couple of Watts and $, running Linux with sophisticated protocol stacks, libraries and all other Linux OSS goodness. More and more projects require emphasis or TTM on said software, so it makes sense the shift is going on.

My previous company was actually automotive too, but in the north we have agriculture companies in particular. I liked automotive in that sense, can't say the same about agriculture.

My pickiness for this area is likely not long term, but for this moment in time it is due to revalidation unfortunately. It doesn't make any sense to change clinic amid treatment, while desperately seeking for a job that will hire me now at <=50% part time. Yet more reason to use this time to make my mind up what to do
Another option I have been contemplating is a master degree towards software or embedded systems. That seems fit for additional reasons not expressed here, but are not primary in scheme of things.

[nctnico]

@nctnico I fear my deterrence from PLCs could very well be a single (bad?) sample in college in which we used ladder to program our stuff, with crap OPC libraries written for Visual Basic, proprietary hardware & software, on very old equipment. I can believe there is much better software out there, but it sure did leave a sour taste behind.

Same here. When I learned about PLCs over 25 years ago it didn't interest me at all. However ladder diagrams are definitely a thing of the past and modern PLCs offer a lot when it comes to integrating displays and touch screens into a system. From what I have seen from the Siemens S7 software you can program Siemens PLCs using various programming languages including sequential and parallel ones. IMHO the key is to tackle programming a PLC as a software problem and don't treat it like implementing logic. IOW let the PLC compiler deal with the underlying complexity and use the programming language to describe what you want it to do. In one of the projects I helped to build we even created an interface between the PLC and a website.

[rstofer]

I spent my early years working on machine automation in the aerospace industry.  PLCs were just starting to come around back in '70 or so.  And, yes, there were also logic module based systems (Square D and Allen-Bradley had them, among others) and even a system from Dow Corning that used fluidic logic. 

I have used the latest stuff from GE (as of 12 years ago) with touch screens and built in PLCs and I thought it programmed quite easily.  Of course, I also used their plain ordinary PLCs and the GeniusBus to distribute signals all over a 50 acre site.

I like ladder diagrams and I like programming ladder logic.  It's pretty intuitive and, usually, a single line of logic tells you all you need to know about an output.

It isn't the programming that difficult.  It's getting a handle on how a machine is supposed to work.  Move part, level part, clamp part, drill hole, dwell, retract drill, drop rivet, back up rivet, upset rivet, withdraw rivet tools, unclamp, repeat until blue in the face.  It was kind of fun!  I like machines...

SCADA is applied at several levels in a modern factory.  At one level it monitors and or controls the building systems.  At another level it monitors manufacturing processes.  The data can be pulled into a large computer to provide QA information.  It's worth the time to know about these systems.

[Galenbo]

... In one of the projects I helped to build we even created an interface between the PLC and a website.

sounds like a school assignment.

People who are actually good at programming PLCs are extremely rare and can make absurd amounts of money. Someone I know is a PLC specialist and he gets work from allover the world to fix PLCs programs others can't fix. His biggest problem is that he can't find people who can help him.

Please express "absurd amounts of money" in euro/hr, give some examples about what he fixes, and the reason why qualified people don't want to work for him.
Too much travel, too demanding customers ?

[Rerouter]

My tafe (Trade training in Australia) teacher used to be a PLC hopper, paid something around 40K per month to hop out to other countries and set up all the automation, and paid even more to hop out and fix anothers mistakes.

He was qualified in instrumentation, so he was doing other things like calibrating weight systems and such, but i imagine the ballpark still rings true.

[nctnico]

... In one of the projects I helped to build we even created an interface between the PLC and a website.

sounds like a school assignment.

I tend to make things sound easier than they are. There is a lot more to it ofcourse.

People who are actually good at programming PLCs are extremely rare and can make absurd amounts of money. Someone I know is a PLC specialist and he gets work from allover the world to fix PLCs programs others can't fix. His biggest problem is that he can't find people who can help him.

Please express "absurd amounts of money" in euro/hr, give some examples about what he fixes, and the reason why qualified people don't want to work for him.

It is just a lack of qualified people with a good pair of brains. Did you notice the title of the topic?  Producing a steaming pile of shitty code is easy, working smart and doing a lot with just a few lines of code is hard and takes creative thinking. A lot of PLC programmers got stuck in the ladder diagram era where modern PLC applications are often very large and may even consist of various programs working seperately. This requires an approach which uses proper software engineering techniques otherwise a project is going nowhere and the result cannot be maintained.

[hamdi.tn]

... In one of the projects I helped to build we even created an interface between the PLC and a website.

sounds like a school assignment.

yeah everything sound like school assignment until you have to do it. Sorry but you have no detail about what he's saying to give such statement.

People who are actually good at programming PLCs are extremely rare and can make absurd amounts of money. Someone I know is a PLC specialist and he gets work from allover the world to fix PLCs programs others can't fix. His biggest problem is that he can't find people who can help him.

Please express "absurd amounts of money" in euro/hr, give some examples about what he fixes, and the reason why qualified people don't want to work for him.
Too much travel, too demanding customers ?
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here we have only a couple of serious company that works on PLCs and yap they get some serious amounts of money, cause few people do what they do and yeah it involve too much traveling and staying away for long periods so they give some nice salary to keep their engineers interested. Most of the time projects i saw are huge and involve so many intervenant, i don't think many people can handle the weight. 

[hans]

I rather hope that said nctnico project was not a school assignment In fact at the university of applied sciences they teach a very similar project in the major "industrial control" (year 4 of bachelor). However, for my PLC course/project in college in 1st/2nd year I was the odd man joining a project group, and in order to balance to work (i.e. add work for me) I had to "control" the PLC via a desktop program and a website.
In this case the project was a simple conveyor controller that follows a list of positions/speeds with acceleration/deceleration values. The rest of the group did the ladder diagram, however initially I was quite involved in setting it up. This is where my experience with OPC libraries and PLC ladder came from, and it wasn't the nicest to be fair. However the complete project was pretty willy-nilly, most students are happy when program "seems to work" and is conformal to the assignment. They want to move straight through demo preparation and finish the report so they can get their EC points. Looking back I should be happy I was working on a pretty delimited piece of the project.


Anyway, I think we're getting closer to source of my abomination. I like programming software, it was actually the passion I practiced a lot before going into EE college. And I still hold that passion, arguably more than EE actually.
 
When I hear about "understanding what previous engineer had programmed into a PLC for a given project" - it makes me think; wait, isn't that the purpose of documentation? Code comments? Code abstraction/structure? Or do these projects have huge technical debts?
It sounds like I don't want to be involved much in that.

However, I probably shouldn't hold expections for microcontroller projects up either. Some company cultures or fellow (EE) programmers don't hold high standards of refactoring, testing methodologies or creative thinking, and maintain a pretty high amount of technical debt in their code base unfortunately.

[Kjelt]

IME it gets worse every decade, TTM makes software teams do lots of overtime and finishing the code becomes 98% of the project instead of 75% and the rest for documentation and quality (rework).
The issue is not so much that the engineers don't want to as in the past but they get no time to do it. So indeed it becomes self documenting code (think doxygen) and wiki's on a teamwebpage where no-one can find anything anymore after a year since there is no wiki master role asigned that inventarizes the contents and keeps an eye out what is missing. There are more projectmanagers and the sorts inventing sometimes ludicrous features then engineers to work them out 

[Galenbo]

It is just a lack of qualified people with a good pair of brains.

The "manager" of our local mcdonalds complains with the same words.

...Producing a steaming pile of shitty code is easy, working smart and doing a lot with just a few lines of code is hard and takes creative thinking. A lot of PLC programmers got stuck in the ladder diagram era where modern PLC applications are often very large and may even consist of various programs working seperately. This requires an approach which uses proper software engineering techniques otherwise a project is going nowhere and the result cannot be maintained.

Ok, that was a flashback to 1987 where I was told that the first time.

Please express "absurd amounts of money" in euro/hr, give some examples about what he fixes, and the reason why qualified people don't want to work for him.

Is it travel? because that's the reason I don't have a (full) PLC job anymore.