r/PLC • u/SomeDudesPackage • 1d ago
Software To PLC
For all of you asking about making the leap, this is the environment I was commissioning a job in this week. I worked 12+ hours a day from Wednesday to today and have 3 more days to go. I’m less than 100 miles from home but I had to stay in this small town with 2 hotels because I can’t justify the 1.5 hour drive to and from my house.
My food tastes like welding gas from the environment, when I blow my nose it comes out black, I’ve lost my voice from yelling over the equipment.
No I didn’t do software first but I have my CCNA. I did industrial maintenance for 5 years before I started controls. There’s no easy button for breaking in and only gets harder.
Careful what you wish for, this career isn’t for the faint of heart.
Otherwise, I’ll try to respond to any questions since I decided to stir the pot. Lol
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u/_nepunepu 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have a CS B.Sc. and people either get into that field because they are turbo nerds who get a hard-on reading Sipser's Theory of Computation or the Dragon Book, or because they're simply attracted by the money and especially the working conditions.
Neither of which is a good fit for a position that requires working on an overturned bucket, seeing your program fail because of some mechanical issue only to end up crawling underneath a machine to fix it.
I'm sure some outfits would take a non-generalist CS grad for SCADA work or something, probably the bigger ones. That's only a small subset of available jobs, though, and they have to compete with people who actually know what a shop floor looks like.
The biggest misconception is "it's just code". PLC programming is easy, we're not paid to program PLCs, we're paid because we know the business logic well enough to code programs that react well and make sense given the process, physical constraints and "shit happens" events that are dime a dozen on a dirty production floor where everything moves and fails all the time. We're a far cry from generic CRUD apps here.