Factory construction boom in the US

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.

I warn you that much of controls is very very boring. PLCs w/ ladder logic in most places. Embedded devs have better devex than controls engineers…

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.

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.

Mechanical Engineering BSME definitely wouldn’t hurt. Probably the most versatile of engineering paths.

What industry is that, if you can say? There's lots of mixed messages about the economy right now, both in Europe and the USA.

> no one bothered to investigate it

Are you sure?

$6B to $18B in the last few years cannot be explained by inflation.

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.

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.

And we have thousands of people arriving daily who want to work at those factories. Double win.

“Those jobs are never coming back.”

The plan was that by doing our factory jobs they would become like us.

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.

I'm pretty sure in this case it's movement of factories from Europe, due to energy costs there.

“Bribing the Chinese to stay on the NATO side in WWIII” is another victim of the end of the Cold War

Only took 40 years….

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.

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.