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Comment by elevation | Hacker News Reader

A colleague of mine transitioned from a senior IC role to manager of a PLC group in the same company. Their methods were just as unsophisticated as you describe, and now he is attempting to evangelize/impose the finer parts of software engineering discipline, such as source control and integration tests (which can be trickier when it requires a hardware test bed.) Bringing some new tools to bear can be a fun job, as long as the team trusts you.

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Yes, the fortune 50 company I spoke of was running some of the most advanced data centers in the world. There was literally a team of world class IT specialists walking the same corridors as the industrial automation team but they might as well have spoken different languages.

I remember a time where I was beating the drums on security and ended up in a meeting with a senior red team member in the company. This person was absolutely convinced we were not running Windows Server 2008 anywhere in the company (the year was 2019 at the time of that meeting). Needless to say, he was very concerned when I showed him the 50+ servers running it globally, all covering critical infrastructure.

I think eventually Ragnarok will happen and things will improve. I just hope it's not as detrimental as it seems setup to be.

    integration tests (which can be trickier when it requires a hardware test bed.)

I use this as a fizzbuzz-type test when I'm interviewing at hardware companies: do they have development hardware in a rack with programmable power supplies and mini-PCs (or similar)? It's a low, low bar for testing, and rules surprisingly many companies.

They'll often just have The Guy running manual tests instead.

Wow. I’d kill for even a guy running my hardware tests. Most of my jobs barely seem to leave time to write the code, before it needs to be scraped off my monitor and poured into the customer’s systems. The ones like you describe with actual hardware labs are a dream when contrasted to those nightmares.

Does management sell unrealistic deadlines to the vendors that buy your solutions? Are you bound by impossible support contracts? Did the firm just let go of a lot of people and expect everyone to finish work quickly? Curious how the economic/management pressures here work as I abandoned hardware very early in my career (from an internship) for similar reasons.

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