4 ms·

This is a very good answer. You also don't necessarily need a degree for it.

• airbreather 5y ago
  True, you don't need a degree, but you need to know enough to get 4 or 5 half degrees - networking/infrastucture/software/instrument engineer/electrical engineer/process engineer/chemial engineer/mechanical engineer and random other stuff. These days also Functional Safety and maybe equipment for explosive atmospheres also in play, plus any specific industry or project nuances, eg fired equipment. Look away for a few years and you are out of date and need to really put some effort in to catch up, eg networking and OPC, MQTT etc are really making inroads last few years, some PLC's come with built in OPC servers now. Reason to know such a wide range is many times it is the control system engineer who rolls up at the end, and all the bits and pieces forgotten or not thought of become his/her problems. Very common one on process plant is they designed it for steady state operation at full load, but never really thought about how you start it up, or how much turn down you have got to run at half or quarter rates. Often for industrial plant of decent size they haven't really made anything quite like it before, so it always has things to iron out. Been doing it 30+ years now, I live in heavily resources based city where this kind of engineering pays more than any straight software job every day of the week. Footnote: The difference from IT software to real time very reliable software might look like it's trivial, but it is a whole different game. The number of times I have seen real time systems projects assigned to the IT department and fail, is every time.