I love conferences. No, really. I don’t like the packing and unpacking and new routines and trying to squeeze in a workout. But I really get energy from conversations with the many smart people in the industry.
Anyone who has read me for long knows that I see immense benefit from interoperability standards. Perhaps some vendors pay lip service to a standard while trying to close their systems (ISA95 has often been abused by suppliers this way), but overall as engineers adopt these standards and put them in their specs, the more manufacturing will benefit. That means we all benefit.
This week at the Packaging Automation Forum, Bryan Griffen of Nestle described in detail how adopting PackML–itself an outgrowth from ISA88–is beginning to save his company time and money. After all, our focus must be on making manufacturing a contributor to our companies’ growth and profits–otherwise, why exist?
But another conversation involved “the younger generation.” One generation of engineers has devoted a chunk of their lives for the greater good of the profession by working on all these standards. But the work is not over. We don’t see many young engineers stepping up to take up the cause.
One person thought this might be because of the environment in which these people have been raised. That is–the emphasis on self, on how much money can I make, on “what’s in it for me.”
But they said that about my generation–the Boomers. And the current generation of standards developers all come from that generation. You don’t want to let marketing definitions color your view of people. We had greedy people and idealistic people. So does the younger generation.
I wonder if the problem is boomer management. While some decry coming retirements of boomers, others like me notice that management has been forceably retiring that generation for several years now. As engineering departments are cut, there is little time for other work. Add travel restrictions and management’s lack of vision, and you get other reasons for lack of involvement.
So, what do you think? What have you seen? More important, what can we do about it?
I just spent two weeks in Australia working with a client who was an environmental scientist in her late 20's. We started talking about SCADA and her eyes lit up as she talked about how fascinated she was with automation and how she had wished she'd known about it and would love to be more involved with it. She thought that it was a perfect fit for her skill set and scratched a creative itch that is her career isn't currently scratching.
I bring this up because it's a single data point that is outside of the cultural influence of the US and the boomers, though I don't discount that angle at all. Like many things, I think there are lots of reasons and a big one is simply competition. If I had been born just two or three years later, I'm sure I would have gone for computer science instead of engineering.
But the story also exemplifies another factor that looms large; serendipity. Engineering (and automation in particular) is not a glamor career and most of the people I meet who are automation professionals never deliberately pursued that path, but were instead pulled into it somehow (myself included).
Finally, being an engineer is just plain hard work. I think the U.S. culture and educational system has become all about shortcuts and gimmicks. I look at the techniques and exercises my kids are given in school and, to me, they reek of laziness. I think that this attitude has evolved out of good intentions; the boomer generation wants their kids to have an easier life than they did and who can blame any parent for wanting that?
I don't think there are any fewer kids today who want to do something for the greater good… they just prefer to press the "save the world" button instead of designing or building the ladder logic behind the button. And if they can't find the button, then they're being conditioned to simply demand it from their parents or their company or their government.
Good point, Jon. I had few choices in engineering when I started school. And those choices were not what I really wanted to study. So I wound up mostly studying on my own. Had computer science been more well know (heck, if computers had been invented then–OK, I'm not that old) I might have gone that way myself.
Do you think ladder will eventually fade away as more kids are knowledgeable about programming–and as more "guts" of the system become "black boxes" with open interfaces? Just a thought.
Boomers not only wanted their kids to have an easy life, but far too many hated the word "discipline" themselves, so that they themselves became undisciplined and passed it on to their kids. Fortunately, generalizations are not 100 percent accurate. There are plenty of hard workers. I'm blessed with two of them (plus their spouses) in my family 😉
I suppose it could go either way, Gary. If I use my own childhood as an example, I would say that the "black box" effect will make kids less likely to go into engineering. When I was growing up, I lived upstairs from my grandfather, who repaired radios and TVs (back when they could be repaired). I remember seeing vacuum tubes and rheostats everywhere and half-assembled electronics everywhere. My dad was also an electrician who occasionally took me on jobs and I remember vividly walking around half-built houses and examining its bones and guts.
Seeing all of the "innards" for these things made me curious and fascinated with how stuff was built and made me want to do it myself. Now that electronics, appliances and even cars can't really be torn apart anymore it may stifle that curiosity.
Grandfather??!! I had vacuum tubes and rheostats (and resistors and capacitors and coils) all over the place. But I was just 14. I knew the purpose of every grid in a vacuum tube. Boy do I feel old, now.
Actually, I was thinking that the engineers develop the "black box" so that operators or maintenance techs didn't have to muddle through the programming. Now that everything has gone to asics, programming is the world into the innards, I guess.
Maybe we have lost something.
(My dad was an accountant. Didn't know the difference between flat blade and Phillips screwdrivers. We had 5 tools in the house when I was small. My grandfather was a machinist and production superintendent in a GM plant. My great grandfather built and flew an airplane around 1918. I just reverted back to the earlier generations, I guess.)
As usual, it's a mixed bag. There is definitely a lot of DIY'ing around nowadays, otherwise Make magazine would be broke. But it's probably more at a software/system level; it's pretty hard to hand solder a high density QFP board, and impossible to hand solder BGA's.
But dev boards, such as the BeagleBoard, are pretty affordable. The Arduino hardware / software is pretty popular, and the BASIC stamp is still around. FPGA dev kits and free software are readily available, but the learning curve is pretty high. There are affordable, hobby-level I/O modules for USB and Ethernet. So there's still significant hobbyist interest in controlling the world.
Desktop CNC is pretty popular; one of my friends is on his third,and CNCZone seems pretty active. Affordable CNC machine control is here (e.g. Mach3, EMC2), but affordable, easy to use 3D MCAD and CAM basically doesn't exist.
I hope ladder logic dies. OK, there's a place for it, but it does not scale well, is 1970's level software technology at best, and is very awkward at doing many things (like motion control, communications, and text handling). OTOH, there's really not a widely-accepted better replacement, and many of the current alternatives aren't any better.
eBay is great; if you're patient, you can get a lot of used industrial equipment (PLCs, motion controllers, servo motors, etc) at affordable prices,which was impossible even 10 years ago (the downside is there are very few retail surplus stores left).. I've build up quite a collection; it's been more challenging finding time to play with it all. But my children will have ample opportunities when they're old enough…
I'd say I'm more of an automation geek now than I was when I started 15 years ago.
Yeah, Tony, you do a lot of tinkering. And there are some great tools. Might make a good article someday.