If someone with a non-related degree and profession was interested in a career change to mechatronics/industrial automation and controls, what would people recommend? An engineering degree? Would a one or two year certificate course be enough training to find a good position? Any particular schools that are worth looking at?
I received a degree in electrical and computer eng. In general, CS can get you in the door for industrial automation, particularly with the ability to write simple HTTP servers and a familiarity with networking for embedded products.
As far as "good enough training to find a good position" if you want an "engineer" job title, get a masters degree from an Accreditation Board of Engineering Technologies (ABET) program. You should be able to do this in two years part time study at a local state engineering school. All state engineering schools are approximately equal in this regard.
Controls programming always feels 20 years out of date. 10 years ago I was excited to move projects from ladder to structured text. This year I’m excited to finally use git to manage a PLC code base.
Beckhoff's TwinCAT platform lends itself to git pretty well, there are XML stuff on most files, but it's mostly readable as long as you use STL (Structured Text) which is their recommended language.
Siemens's TIA Portal you can export the source code to make it readable in git as long as you code in SCL (structured control language, which is really structured text), but it's not automatic and a lot of times the binary blob that is the source code and the exported readable code get out of sync cuz of lack of discipline by the programmer.
Rockwell's Studio 5000 can be readable if you use STL (structured text), may be this has changed though, I haven't used it in a long time.
Programming experiences in the industrial controls world is highly dependent on the brand/platform, the IEC 61131-3 describes the standards for industrial controls programming languages, but each brand implements them in a different way so there really is no standard. Writing structured text in one platform does not guarantee the same code will work in a different platform.
If you work at start ups that are in the a manufacturing, processing, or general heavy industry, think SpaceX, Relativity, Rivian, etc. they use structured text (STL) which is like Pascal and usually use Beckhoff's TwinCAT platform which is a modern platform relative to Siemens and Rockwell platforms, but due to their start up nature they usually have a mix of platforms.
I've been working in this field for quite awhile and the systems can be complex and challenging. The software you write controls equipment that can cause massive damage and even death. This leads to very conservative programming languages and frameworks.
The physical dynamics of the processes are the interesting parts for me. Ladder is good for representing Boolean logic but the paradigm has been stretched too far beyond its area of strength.
An engineering degree in electrical, mechanical, robotics, mechatronics, etc. will help get you in the door for the title "Controls Engineer", since you need to know the both hardware and software usually. Having good experience and a portfolio can replace the degree. There are plenty of courses online and in-person that get you into this field pretty quickly, it's relatively easy to learn, but difficult to master due to the diverse applications, platforms, and industries. There are a lot of industrial automation integrators that will take anyone, train them up, and contract them out in exchange for low wages, long work hours, but you get the skills and can then gtfo.
There are also industrial robot programmers who come straight out of high school, get some quick training and go to automotive integrators who contract them out to large automotive companies. This usually requires less engineering knowledge because the industrial robot platforms are relatively easy to learn and what you're doing most of the time is teaching the robot where to go to meet cycle times which is tedious, you use a "pendant" not a laptop usually, but that's changing with all the offline programming software, but reality never matches the simulation.
There reason most people don't like this field is you have to be in the "field", sometimes that's a loud ass, highly dangerous, manufacturing floor, outside in the searing heat or frigid cold, working with people that are.....uh...not the brightest, and work under constant pressure since "controls" is usually the last to get all the specs and the time you get to finish got shortened due to late deliverables from mechanical and electrical. It's not a job you can really do remotely. You can program remotely, but at some point your going to test you code on the machine and you're responsible for not breaking anything or killing anyone.
* no tech work in the U.S. is "easy to get into" at this time. Manufacturing especially is tiers higher than the knowledge taught for any specific degree. Have to go to the right schools that are integrated in that market, or know people.
If you already have any engineering or computer background, you could probably waltz into the lobby of the nearest semiconductor manufacturer and ask for your badge and desk right now.
Finding people who are willing to do proper root cause analysis and not make wild assumptions about everything is pretty much the only important concern for onboarding in most manufacturing*system roles.
You will learn on the job. Go in with an open mind and try to remain humble. Pay will suck at first, but these domains are pretty much limitless in your career potential. I knew of some working in the photolithography area that were virtually classified as a nation state asset. Make yourself that important. You won't get that from college or a certification program. You get that by working with real tools in a real factory and learning about all the strange emergent properties of these systems as they come together.
I worked at BEI Electronics and one key position there was the Industrial Automation role who defined how things got built. Another one to look at is Process Control.
I work for a factory in Europe that manufactures a specific type of heavy industrial machinery.
I work as an on site supervisor for the installation and commissioning, so basically I do the final assembly.
My manager told me and my colleagues a couple of months ago during our biweekly meeting,
that our customers are no longer asking what is the price for our product, but if they can have one. Our planned factory output is increasing from 300 units per year to 600. 2024 and 2025 is already fully booked.
Seems weird US factory PMI 13th consecutive month under 50, i.e. contraction after covid highs. Would have expected to retain some momentum rolling into capex build out. Hopefully arizona fabs deliver, otherwise that's 1/4 of the investment not delivering. Either way, have to start somewhere. Americans will find a way. Get those sad boys into trade.
This lines up with a potential shift away from manufacturing in Europe [1].
Fuel and natural gas prices have really made an impact since the sanctions against Russia started. The blowing up of Nord Stream pipelines couldn't have helped, though maybe the impact there wasn't as important as I'd guess seeing as no one bothered to investigate it when the attack happened.
If it was investigated, both the investigation and findings went completely unmentioned publicly.
News coverage at the time made it clear that there weren't active investigations and Sweden effectively blocked any investigation due to national security concerns.
The Wikipedia page links to a bunch of pieces to the global investigation that happened, including the letter to the United Nations Security Council that three detonations were an act of sabotage.
Any chance you have a link you could share? I skimmed the Wikipedia pages for Nord 1 & 2 but don't have time to dig deeper at the moment
I know I had seen claims that it was a Ukrainian special forces colonel (or captian?) that called the attack, but those claims I've seen all leaned on released intelligence documents and sources without any mention of an actual investigation of the attack site.
Those claims sounded circumstantial to me as they were only based on intel reports before/after the attack and didn't get to my point that no investigation of the site occurred immediately after the pipes where hit.
Investigations take time but don't necessarily mean they've stalled. The last leaks were from Nov 11, 2023 so less than a month ago so it's hard to call that stall. Sure anybody can just point fingers like Russia did at the UK [2] but then you just look silly when you can't substantiate it.
Right, inflation reduction act and China decoupling in general. Tangentially, Mexico is now the US' top trading partner, with China in 3rd place. Industrial real estate in Laredo, TX is exploding as part of this economic reconfiguration.
Let's be realistic, this is directly related to the Tax Cut and Jobs act and the USMCA. The IRA will have minimal impact and even those effects are yet to be realized.
It wasn't rocket science, make it advantageous to produce your goods sold in America in America. Economies of scale will follow and make it true that producing goods for export makes sense too, even with the tax hit.
The USMCA only tinkered with NAFTA. The principal changes are in the automotive and dairy industries, and they are extremely minor. This is certainly not a major component of the manufacturing construction boom.
The TCJA could be having a larger impact, with immediate expensing of capital costs and depreciation provisions, but it was also passed 6 years ago.
Last time was the war of 1812. Funnily enough the only war that does not have a more catchy name. Guess if you lose a war you don’t want to remember it really.
yeah, I actually read a book about that, which there aren't many of. The multiple half-assed "invasions" of Canada were a disaster for the US, as was the loss of Detroit and Michilimackinac Island. On the latter, the Brits had no reason to give it back, but they did.
People like to remember the Battle of New Orleans, except the war was already over. Good thing the Brits were preoccupied with Napoleon.
I think the US suffered minor attacks on the mainland and invasion of Alaskan islands in WW2, in addition to the more well-known attacks at Pearl Harbor and Midway.
Not sure it was a loss for USA as a country. The real losers of that war were all the indigenous who were involved, and perhaps Spain who'd lose Florida a short time later.
For now. The Roman Empire wasn't suffering from invasions during its prime years. Only when it got too old and weak, it was picked apart by its neighbors. On the human scale, the US is maybe 50 years old: still strong, but there are obvious signs of decline.
The Roman Empire suffered from plenty of invasions and direct military defeats during its peak years.
The Roman Empire also showed plenty of what people would see as obvious signs of decline during what we now call its rise.
The idea that an Empire follows a 3 act trajectory of rise, plateau, and fall is incorrect or at least incomplete. The history of empires is one of multiple waves of expansion and contraction. The peak can only be seen in hindsight.
While you’re in it, you might be able to see the slope, but there’s no way to tell whether you’re headed towards local or global maxima or minima.
If you’d asked a Roman on the street in 53 BC, after a Roman army had been decisively beaten by the Parthians, he probably would have been worried about obvious signs of decline as well, but that was well over a century before what most people think of as the peak of the empire.
That’s not to say America can’t be sliding off of a global maximum, but there’s absolutely no way to tell until it’s over.
Yeah, I think it's impossible to say, but I also think you have to think in relative terms. How is a nation (or empire) faring in comparison to its peers or competitors? If it seems to be in decline in some way, but everyone else is also in decline the same way, then they may still be at the top. America is having some big problems lately, but it seems like most of its peers and adversaries are also having big problems too.
The Roman Empire was constantly invaded during its rise and then was constantly splintering and fighting civil wars along with the occasional war against foreign powers in its height. You’re completely wrong about that
A Lot of Energy intensive Companies in Germany and probably other European Countries, are leaving and going to the USA or China. Because of the high energy prices, we have now.
To be fair, the thinking at the time was that trade relationships would foster better relations overall. I honestly don't think the results could have been foreseen early on.
Also perhaps it didn't have to be this way. An awful lot of people have been willing to overlook issues over the decades because it put money in their pockets in the short term. Perhaps if the US had taken a tougher stance on these issues earlier rather than turning a blind eye while they pilled up and reached a breaking point things could have turned out differently.
To be fair, it has improved a lot of relationships. We hardly see entire large countries at war with each other and I’m sure the dependency chains have a lot to do with it.
True. And let's not forget that a lot of the rationale centered around bolstering China as an ally against the USSR. In hindsight we were too successful in that goal, and should have made adjustments to trade structures a long time ago.
Sure it was. The thinking at the time was a small group of people could make a shit ton of money and we can rationalize it to the suckers on the ground by saying it’ll actually make China more like us.
You act as if there wasn’t a consistent movement the entire time screaming that this was a horrible idea. Even Donald Trump was saying this in the early 90s
Ricardo's Comparative Advantage argument was specifically derived under the condition of closed capital accounts because Ricardo himself didn't only understand but actively warned about what would happen with open capital accounts. Every time he got trotted out to rationalize the policies that deindustrialized the United States he must have been spinning in his grave.
For more, read "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis. The thesis is in the title and the case is convincing.
A similar thing happens with immigration. The public discourse is about "jobs Americans won't accept", labor shortages, bringing in the best and brightest, etc. The closed door discussions are all about wage suppression of the middle class.
It worked very well with south Korea, Japan ,Germany, Taiwan, allowed which were either enemies or not a democracy 100 years ago. Vietnam seems to be working that direction as well.
It seemed to be working in China too until Xi took over.
Am noob. TIL: One motivation of Xi Jinping's strategic policy shifts is anti-corruption. I can't help but wonder if there were alternatives. Like legislation, enforcement, and strengthening the judiciary.
But I'm noob. If it was just that easy, it probably would have happened.
> It seemed to be working in China too until Xi took over.
Ya. This whole mess just makes me sad. I had really hoped China and USA would continue to grow towards each other.
We didn't make them nice by destroying them. We made them nice by rebuilding them afterward in our image. Which, as it turned out, was a lot better than what they were working with previously.
Do they though? Looking from the outside (I am neither in the US nor in China) it seems to me that the animosity is coming from the US and that it originates in the realisation that it cannot compete anymore.
China has always had hegemonic ambitions with "(Communist) chinese characteristics" using the "Hide your strength, bide your time" approach. Xi Jimping, showed its aggressive attitudes without having enough strenght behind, one of his many geopolitical blunders, forcing Western leaders to take much needed countermeasuers despite business leaders desires (business interests in chinese markets)
Yea but who cares? We want the outputs from them and if we aren't dependent on massive amounts of people working dangerous dirty jobs to get it then that should be a positive, not a negative. I hope we can find a way to spread around the wealth rather than essentially cull massive amounts of our population over the next century but that remains to be seen.
The choice to get rid of these policies was made by people who fully understood that doing so would pump assets and dump exports, and that the ability to benefit from the asset pump would be concentrated while the fallout from the dumping of exports would be widespread.
When you think about it, manufacturing has high productivity growth. While services and other stuff suffers from cost disease. So it was brain dead stupid to encourage manufacturers to move production overseas.
This doesn't make any sense. Cost disease occurs because workers can get higher pay in other industries. If manufacturing really is high productivity (as you imply), keeping it onshore would only make cost disease worse not better. Moreover, the fact that cost disease is happening despite the fact we offshored manufacturing suggests that productivity is increasing in other sectors. My guess is in tech, high end manufacturing, and finance.
Globalization commingles the economies of different countries. You can no longer talk about the US's labor force and the Chinese labor force as different things. Also rentier capitalism raised labor costs via rents.
Bonus: Services are not fundamentally productive like manufacturing.
It is becoming clear these days that bilateral trade interdependence reduces the probability of inter-state military conflict. They may hate your guts but trading with each other humanizes us. Also it is much more efficient.
US wanted to desperately win the Cold War and winning China over was seen as a key goal by Henry Kissinger. That objective was achieved and diminished the USSR to a puppet. US lost other things as a consequence. This is a complicated geopolitical 4D chess game played by powerful white men. The rest of us are pawns and slaves to them.
Edit: I mean every country is playing this game, thinking everybody but whites doesn't protect their interest is delusional. Japan had an empire in the past, China is aggressive towards its neighbors now, africa too, and wants Taiwan.
I assure you, the average American hates China's guts far more than the average Chinese person 'hates America'. I'd be surprised they think much about it at all.
They are focused on their own development, not dealing with a declining hegemony's tantrums over a transition to a multi-polar world.
I'd believe you if your were talking about Russia, but not so much China. Unlike what we see in the tabloids, it's not lurching from one self-inflicted disaster to another, is not seeing an active decline, and does not need to blame a shadowy cabal of external enemies for its domestic fortunes and ambitions. (Which are, all things considered, faring pretty well.)
What this does feel like, is a projection of western insecurities at the principal cause of them. We fear and hate them, and the only rational justification for our behaviour is convincing ourselves that they hate and fear us even more.
If you're going to judge Chinese opinions, and try to understand it's culture based on what their foreign ministry is doing, should the world stereotype and generalize about Americans based on the behaviour of the Department of State?
That would not be a particularly flattering portrayal.
Corpo can’t sacrifice short term gain to protect itself from some nebulous future conflict, basically that would eat the profit margin and result in the sacking of the senior leadership.
Furthermore, Apple is doing this to access the Indian market. When the Chinese middle class grew they wanted iDevices, if Apple is banking on this repeating in India, it needs to have leverage.
The funny thing is, India always wanted to be an equal partner/ally of the US, since its independence, but was continuously rebuffed. Every move of India was an effort to get close with the West. India owes a bit to FDR and Truman for applying pressure on the UK to decolonize, and the American public for being staunch supporters of Indian independence. The Green Revolution in India, crucial for creating Indian food security, was spearheaded by a US govt programme and Norman Borlaugh. The IITs were created through largely Western funding and collaboration (with the exception of IIT Bombay, which was created with Soviet funding). India (under Nehru) helped convince most of the West Indies and Africa to join the UK Commonwealth, in spite of their own torrid histories of being colonized.
But then USA decides to do stuff like supporting a belligerent China (which had the infamy of invading every one of its neighbors), supporting Pakistan openly (which was an easier puppet because of the military rule, unlike India), assassinating people in the Indian nuclear programme (allegedly), silently supporting the Bangladeshi genocide. And in spite of all this, India didn't choose to go to the Soviet sphere of influence, but tried to create one based on mutual partnership, a sphere that remains the largest today (the Non-Aligned Movement).
All in all, the USA and India share a lot of common goals and objectives, but the US must realize that India wants to be a strongly independent partner, like say France, and not a puppet partner like the UK or Germany.
> India wants to be a strongly independent partner, like say France, and not a puppet partner like the UK or Germany.
Allies that are reliable and dependable are not “puppet partners”. Having a different opinion just for the sakes of it doesnt make one “strongly independent”. It only shows frustration from being weak. Equal partners stick together and work on common goals when times are rough. Outside such times Germany, France and UK have all shown different opinions but never to the point of treason (Germany almost did it but quickly got back in line). India on the other hand burned a lot of bridges - particularity in the minds of those like me who until then considered India a close ally. A bit disappointing.
Perhaps. Or perhaps the US realizes that India's goals align closely enough with our own that we do not need to court them and can use that energy to court other countries in the region in order to build up more of a power base.
Not saying that I would agree that this is a good strategy.
After seeing brexit, tarrifs, trade wars etc all over the news in the past few years, I find it hard to believe that people in EU, UK, USA think they don't have protectionist policies.
Honest question, almost everywhere in countries like India you see tons of US, UK, EU brands established and benefiting from exports and the huge domestic market. When companies from EU, US, UK outsource manufacturing/servics they benefit from lower costs obviously, why is it that the people seem to have sense that they are doing a favor and not a business deal as implied by the OPs post?
The US does have.that for a lot of things. One (small) reason passenger trains and buses are behind here is they must be made in the US. (There are other factors, and some EU companies have set up us manufacturing so things are improving)
Way too many countries have a make in (country name) policy. The policy is mostly an encouragement to set up local manufacturing with capital, knowledge or technology support, rather than a full-on push to only use goods produced locally. In India's case, from what I've seen, it's mostly a push back against Chinese imports for low value goods like plastic products, metalware, etc.
AGY produces all of Apple's glass. It's in SC and I have done much work there. So I can attest that it is different kinds of manufacturing outsourced because US-workers do a lot of great quality products.
