alt Hacker NewsEverything you're describing mirrors my experience with remote scientific deployments and lab equipment (wet labs in particular). I support a team which manages dozens of these, and while it's shocking how inefficient and unsafe their practices are, it's similarly shocking how poorly the industry has kept up with or even tried to establish better practices. We get brand new equipment that costs in the realm of $10k for a tiny logger, and the thing is barely capable of remotely managed deployment of version controlled firmware. There are no tools in place to allow proper testing of the firmware unless you have the cash to buy extras and build test harnesses from them. The firmware itself is often in languages that don't have proper testing frameworks, type systems, IDEs, etc.
It's HARD to do the right thing. Dragging and dropping files into proprietary hardware management programs is the de facto standard.
Then you layer on top the unfortunate reality that sometimes electricity does weird stuff, people design weird circuits or wire the wrong components in, and firmware tends to have to deal with non-deterministic inputs a lot more often than, say, an API on the web. It's rough.
The pay is also so much worse in my experience.
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Not only is the pay worse (like literally half of what you make doing webdev for a corp), but they mandate you be on site at a factory working first shift like you're on the production floor or something, clocking in and out when you're a salary worker. It's an awful culture.
>>> The pay is also so much worse in my experience.
The result is that anybody who can program well enough to develop software is doing so. Those with any programming skills who remain behind are smart-but-undisciplined programmers, people who have a reason to be in a particular geographic area, too old to think about changing careers, or just plain nuts.
This is what "lack of investment in manufacturing, research, and infrastructure" looks like. Sow what you reap.
Disclosure: I might be one of those people. I came out of grad school in physics research, and programmed an entire plant. Thankfully, that was before it was economical to put every controller on the Internet.