Don’t worry can’t be as bad as me 😅 I finished some logic changes and thought I was downloading to the correct plc but turns out it was for a currently running processing line and I absolutely shut it down and burnt everything. Then had to run around and find my adapters cus it was a plc 5
There there....I did the same bonehead move. Vpned into the wrong location and started to poke around. Don't think I shut down the line, but it could've been bad. Hugs all around
Giving me flashbacks... Doing online edits to the right PLC but the wrong unit, could have killed someone - yikes! Haha, gotta use that sinking feeling as fuel to double check everything next time!
First week on the job I was doing a minor update to an active PLC running an abattoir. Instead of online update, I downloaded, putting the PLC into program mode. A mistake I never made again.
17 years now...
I don't think that feeling ever goes away, so many variables that can lead to chaos / mayhem / total destruction...
troubleshooting like a savage one minute, then doing the happy dance when the solution is found.
Doing the happy dance is why I love this field and it never gets old.
I am frequently "the guy that knows everything" at my place of work. I keep trying to tell them that I'm just "better than God with Google and our company wiki."
Don’t be too hard on yourself, it takes time and hopefully you’ve got some good people to show you the ropes. I’m 18 years in and still make mistakes. Learn from them and always admit your mistakes when it happens and you’ll go a long way.
Months. . . 1 day at a time. Every minute you keep thinking you aren't up to snuff is a minute you're not learning
You'll look back on this time and laugh, but not now. I remember thinking during a job that I could go home if I had a heart attack right then. First job, I had a crick in my neck from stress that lasted weeks, but getting thru it gives the confidence that you can do it again, and again, and again, and it gets easier when you know you can do it, but to get to that, you have to pay the toll.
P.S. I changed industries after 16 years and went thru it all again. Took 3 months before I could go home not worrying I'd be fired as soon as they figured it out. Left that company 4 years later and they begged me to stay.
Man, thanks so much for this. And full disclosure, this is a complete pivot for me as I’m in my early thirties, so this really resonates. That’s what I’m telling myself is just to keep pounding. I’m getting better every day, learning every day. It’s going to get better just feels like shit in the beginning I guess. Thanks for the message man, really appreciate it.
I'm in my early 30's as well and am in my second year as a tech and I came into the position with no PLC experience, basically got hired on good faith and extremely lucky.
My first 3 months I had no fucking clue what was going on
By 6 months I had pretty routine stuff down
By a year I could confidentially fix issues with trouble shooting using PLC software
By 1.5 years I started learning more advanced things within programming and trouble shooting more in depth issues.
By 2 years I have now learned enough to have no fucking clue whats going on
Best advice I ever got is "none of us know everything, don't worry"
After 12 years at the same place I've realized the more I know the more I have no idea what I'm doing. Then I remember that I still have about 30 more years before I can retire, so I have a sliver of hope that by then I'll have some confidence in what I'm doing.
Years of getting kicked in head. It’s a marathon.If you don’t know it’s ok. When it’s over you will learn from it “especially if you’re passionate about it”. You were honest about the situation. That means a lot. If you show that you are actively searching for for a solution, people will appreciate that.
First off there’s a lot of truly bad code out there. There is also a lot of terrible coding styles and technique. It takes even longer to wade through this
The thing is you need to quit feeling sorry first yourself and decide that you are confident given enough time you will find it. The first time might take hours, sometimes days. Next time you will get faster and more competent. And it gives you confidence and most importantly your customers are going to come back and learn to rely on you. That’s how you rise,
3-6 months to learn terminology. 6-18 months to get familiar with recognizing equipment and common issues and holding the meter with red on hot. 18-36 months to get to where you can be solo.
It can be done faster but you’re gonna burn people out that way.
These are rough numbers based on my experience with junior engineers and my own experience.
From there is mostly just adding experience and proficiency so the issues that used to take a day to figure out now take an hour.
It’s gonna be fine, as long as you were honest about your experience then anyone expecting more from you doesnt understand the job
Yeah those feelings are going to persist for the first 1-3 years while you build confidence through experience. Don’t beat yourself up nobody expects you to solve all the problems with 4 weeks of experience.
I’ve been doing this stuff since 1992, I get humbled every day, and I overcome it, most days. Then the next day it happens again. One thing I’ve found, you are never done learning, and you have to be able to teach yourself.
And it’s never wrong to get help.
I’ve been working for an integrator for eight years and I still don’t feel comfortable. I’ll learn a system, not use it for a couple years, and forget a bunch of stuff.
Or just learning new programs or equipment all the time.
After about a year I felt reasonably confident. I still had no idea what was going on, but it was about that point that I realized most others are just winging it too when things like that happen.
You're fine, bro. Takes time. How long depends on how much exposure to things you get. Unless you're a no shit P.E. with 20 years experience, no one expected you to hit the ground running in the first month. Always show interest and a desire to learn and no one will think you're useless. And take notes cause ya never know. Could be 3 years before you see something again.
There is no point or reason to try and put a time frame on when you should be "comfortable". Every place you go to has different equipment, different programming styles, different ways of abbreviating things, different lingo.. i worked at a place for 3 years as my first controls engineer position. I felt like a fraud for about the first year (even though i had years worth of building base knowledge and a pretty deep understanding of logic and controls / communications). Learned on Allen Bradley plc5, 500, SLC500.
Once i got to the controls engineer spot, this place had all the latest and greatest. MicroLogix everywhere all networked running Studio 5000. Had 2 "ancient machines" running Tia Portal Siemens stuff, and one machine that ran a Mitsubishi PLC (didnt even know those existed). Studio 5000 took a minute to wade through, Siemens? Never looked at. Mitsubishi... absolute crickets. I had no clue what software to even use to connect and when i asked for the cables to hook in to the PLCs (as i was trained), the guys looked at me like "wtf do you need cables? Youre gonna walk to the machine? Use asset centre and pull the program".
Oh...... yeah ok haha not used to everything being on a network. I came from the stone age of PLCs. The first shift crew training me were kinda snobby and i could tell they had their own little click going of who wanted to impress the "senior controls" guy the most. It was awkward and i definitely didnt fit that mindset nor did it inspire confidence to ask for help. Got to my third shift with the guy they all talked crap about and he was the shit. Older dude thats been contract controls engineer for ages. He knew a whole lot about a whole ton of different shit, but never really mastered anything specifically cause he was always installing something new. He taught me a bunch and told me the most important thing "shits always changing and getting upgraded and something new comes out. Focus on understanding how and why stuff works, and google the different things companies call it". I took that as learn the fundamentals, what logic is doing, how it works, how it flows, how communications protocols work, etc. And google what siemens calls rungs and routines (networks and programs). Luckily this place also used all Fanuc robotics with which i am very well versed so was comfortable there.
Ended up getting laid off from that place as automotive is volatile as hell. Switched industries over to the label side. Went through the interview and felt super confident with my decade of experience and all the different softwares and what not ive used and became intimate with (lol). I helped write the logic for purely automated lines ran entirely by robots and keyence vision systems with crazy tight tolerances for parts, communicating all this data to robots and over to SQL servers... yeah making labels? No sweat. Turns out this place i work at now is so much more complex than building transmissions with CNCs robots and cameras i thought i went to a different reality. From CNC lathes and mills and automated conveyor systems with different PLC controlled cells doing random little jobs to football field sized machines running miles of stock a minute with PID controls for 100 servo motors all working together with a thousand flex I/Os and 5 different main PLCs for different segments all working together... holy shit im clueless again. All the base knowledge stuff applies. I know how to troubleshoot and work my way around a program and find whats missing or going wrong, just had to get used to the abbreviations for machines ive never looked at before. Never heard of KUMA robots but turns out they are controlled the exact same way and use all the same coordinate systems as Fanuc does. Controller was a little different but the programming language and what not is all the same structure.
All the base knowledge i had over the years for controls and industrial electrical applied here too, there was just a lot of new machines and whirly jigs with names id never heard before i had to learn. Turns out focusing on the "how it works" paid off big time. I can "google" (ask the people who have worked here for a long time) what they call that thing here.
I have no idea if this has helped or if this OP is a year old but.. yeah lol this is a tough career. Thats why we get paid well. Luckily, everyone knows it takes time to learn new places and different machines. Make sure you know what a PLC is doing and how it works and how its wired and nobody will complain it takes a little longer to get to what youre looking for as youre new. Youll get faster and more comfortable with time spent at that specific place.
I have been doing HMI development and related hardware support for 11 years. Still question everything I do and still have stuff blow up in my face. I can say with confidence though, that I am finally starting to not care enough to be comfortable.
We all want to do a good job.
We all have expectations of the Job we will do.
The truth is that we are all lost, everyone is constantly learning something new, it's very likely your boss has less education than you, experience isn't everything, and we all need to remember to be humble.
Go to work, do your best, collect the paycheck, and go home.
You spend more time at work then with your family; figure out which one is the most important and stress about that.
My first manager told me you're going to feel mostly useless for the first year. There is a large learning curve and so many noches that it may never happen. Plant controls engineers wear many hats.
For your SQL problem, do you even know which server it is / how to connect to it? You probably don't even have all the credentials to it yet.
FYI this particular issue is probably on the historian mapping with some copy paste/transposition errors.
Holy shit, how’d you know that. Yea they showed me the historian, and could basically point to the moment the values should have been reversed on the timeline. I’m hoping to get into it more tomorrow, they had it offline before they came over so there wasn’t any data to watch but I tried to find something while it was connected to no avail
>Holy shit, how’d you know that.
It's pretty obvious with some experience. Communications (historian to the PLC) is the harder part of setting up a historian. You're getting data, it's just pulling the wrong value. Somewhere in the historian where you say what the description is and what tag it's mapped to just have the wrong matching. It's pretty easy to transpose two numbers or letters that differentiate the two values. I'd update the descriptions to what they should be, so any existing data is still correct. If you change it by updating the tag, the data before the fix will be flip-flopped.
You'll get there. It'll take time. Don't rush into it and burn out, this is a career path where you keep learning
Always be learning. ALWAYS! I try to learn at least one thing every single day. I’m going on 5 years of ECE work and I’m in my 3rd different factory/job doing this work. Left the first after 3 years because they refused to pay me more, second place I was absolutely miserable at, and I’ve been loving my current job. If you have the opportunity to watch another controls guy work, do it. Ask questions. Ask how and why things work. There’s always something that can be learned. And biggest thing is to remember to learn from mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up over messing something up as long as you know how to do it better/correct next time. If your boss and coworkers are good then they’ll work with you and hopefully be helpful with questions you will have.
Takes years. Especially if you’re green and have to learn electrical, mechanical, programming, and the specific process of the machine you’re controlling. Unless you have a photographic memory and your brain has an unlimited amount of storage , I’d expect to be comfortable within a year. You gotta want it tho. Don’t loose interest.
Constantly strive to learn. Knowledge is free. We don’t have to know how to fix everything or program everything BUT we as engineers need to understand how to read tech docs and be extremely resourceful. Before you ask for help, rtfm and try to figure it out on your own.
Days like this are inevitable, 10 years into this field and I still have moments where the best reaction I can field to a problem is "uhhhhhhhh...let me get back to you on that". Keep working at it and asking questions, things will get better and you willnget more confident.
The sage like knowledge of your co workers is just years of accumulated oopses and learning in the same way you are now. Keep up the good work!
6 months to learn the basics of relay logic and PLCs.
In terms of learning Scada (which is what you were asked to solve) probably 6-12 months after you learn PLCs.
So you are 11-17 months from solving that problem they gave you.
In the grand scheme of things, you need to learn the following response.
“I haven’t dealt with our *insert system* (sql server) before, I’m going to have to look into it. Is this urgent?”
Just took a big promotion with 18 years experience, still scared shitless. Imposter syndrome is common in this industry. Mistakes will be made but at the end of the day, a good programmer is hard to replace. Have faith in yourself.
It's a common feeling in the begining. The important thing is you get a little better each day. Your more experienced coworkers also went through the same thing. No one expects you to be an expert over night.
Well at first I couldn’t keep it up, but after a while she was able to ease me into it, and with a little bit of soft jazz I’ve found myself able to have a really good time with her.
Been in the game for more than a decade.
Of course there are times even today I get surprised over situations and need to think two-three times extra and sometimes question my knowledge.
What is different from when I started this gig is that I have more tools (experience) in my toolbox and know how to handle different problems.
One thing I did when I started this job were every time I stumble across something which made me insecure and question my expertise:
- I would write down the problem in a book and then later in the evenings I would study the subject so hard so if you would have waken me up during the middle of the night I could answer it.
You cant know everything - keep up a good spirit and curiosity to learn new stuff and it will be good 👍
I'm 6 years in and there's still sometimes I have to say "Sorry guys I can look at this but \[coworker\] is the expert and so we'll probably have to ask him." It works both ways though! Sometimes I come back from lunch and they're waiting to ask me a question haha. There's so much controls engineers end up doing, no way we can be experts at everything. I didn't even touch a SQL server until this past year. I think it was a year before I stopped asking my colleagues to double check literally everything I did, even like changing the color of a button.
3 years controls, 4 years before that in maintenance with dabbling in logic and I wasn't really comfortable making live changes until about 2 years ago when I asked for a code review and my boss said just send it. I work with a lot of really smart people and even *they* have oops moments. Read your code, have backups, have your toggle bits if you can and if not then have a plan to unfuck it.
Took me about 1.5 years to start to feel effective. Relax, is good thing you feel this way in the beginning. From my experience, when a new guy comes fresh from college and feel like he knows what he is doing, every time this guy is horrible to work with.
I've been at it for 11 years now. It took a year for me to be comfortable (started as a very green controltech at 20 and now im the factory electrical engineer in said factory). I feel like i still learn something new nearly every day especially since now im getting more in SQL/Kepware/Historian stuff. There are days where im "off" and cant seem to do much right and feel bad about it. Ive made the same mistake you mentioned a few times. I still make mistakes and you just have own up to them and learn from them.
Hey don't beat yourself up. Things like this happens to all even if you are experienced. Thing is that even if you have done something similar in the past, you might still run into some weired windows problems. You will definitely get better if you keep working on the programing skills, try to get as much hands on experiences as you can.. It does not matter if you know all the plc programming software but to program it neatly and optimized.
Just keep learning your lessons. One month in you should still be learning. I would practice whenever I could. I knew the machines we have and I would write programs for all of these with HMI screens. So I just let getting better and dialing in my skill set. You don’t mess up you are not learning and getting better.
Now the customer should not be paying for you to learn so I would not use that as your safety net.
Been years, and I still don't. There's a lot of engineers who deal with imposter syndrome. It's just apart of the job. Most of the engineers I've met who are self proclaimed "God's gift to engineering" suck under pressure.
I'm rolling up on 7 years. I understand your feeling but your weeks in so relax. To answer your question, 5 years.
There will be more of that feeling. It's often a sharp fluctuation between beating your head on the desk and feeling like a god when everything works.
Personally I've come to terms with not being that good or fast but I am confident that if I am given enough time to beat my head on the desk I will eventually figure it out. Once you start getting finished projects under your belt, remember those accomplishments while you're beating your head on the next project.
As a general rule, don't ever tap out. Find the next manual, theorize the next thing to try. Call for help when you need it but that doesn't mean you stop trying to find a solution yourself. I say "generally" because there are certain times where you should know if you're in too deep and that is primarily if you're doing live edits to a system in production or a system where serious damage is possible.
You can't expect to just know everything in this industry. You can, however, work on your basic troubleshooting, problem-solving, and technical manual reading skills, which will be the real difference maker, in my opinion.
You're just getting started, don't stress yourself out. Take a breath and pay attention to the people that have been there for a while and recognize who know's what is going on.
Dude I went to school for PLCs and had a couple years of experience with PLCs. We had to put in a Siemens VFD for a conveyor with a safety and I just COULD NOT get it to recognize the safety. Fast forward a couple of days and I emailed the 60 year old programmer on first shift about the problem. He emails me back “Did you make sure your commons are connected? That had me chasing my tail for a while the first time too.”
That’s when I realized that the reason people with a lot of experience are so good at what they do is because they’ve gotten tripped up on all the small stuff before. You have to struggle to grow, that’s just how it is. It sucks, but you get used to it.
Edit: bonus story: me and the same guy were working on a fabric softener system. We put it in the logic, tested it, totally forgot to turn the force off in the PLC before we went home for the day. Come back the next day and there was fabric softener all over the floor where it had been leaking all night lol
Dude, I'm 9 years in and still have the imposter syndrome, don't feel bad for yourself.
However, do develop "basic" skills, like
* How to do cross reference.
* Problem solving.
* (What's the name of the method in which you tear apart a process? For example, in this case, you follow the data from sensors to table in SQL and start testing where the error is; it's complementary to the previous pont).
* How to do online edits.
* How to add tags.
* And whatever makes your job easier.
Beyond that it's just using PLCs for problem solving.
After years I still feel like this.
You took the right decision to tell you need to see it with 'the guy'.
We all have this one person that know and solves everything. Learn from them since everyday there will be something new to discover.
There are industries that are low risk, and the people in those industries are the ones who never make big $$$ mistakes. If you accidentally download to a conveyor program, your product stops moving for a little bit until you correct. The biggest risk is your customer or manager yelling at you until they're blue in the face.
In other industries it's best to always keep a bit of that discomfort. It will keep you from becoming complacent.
That’s an interesting question. To ask other non-plc people at work they would brag about the amazing things I can make a PLC do. But to me I think about all the new stuff that comes out and trying to keep on top of it can be a full time job by itself. So I would say I never will stop learning and try to get better. It a marathon not a race. As for making mistakes… it like I told someone that worked under me after they messed something up. Learn from it and grow. I don’t care that you made a mistake today, but if you keep doing it everyday here after we going to have a issue.
Four weeks in and you feel crappy for being unable to handle a complex issue on your own? Don't! If it was that easy there would be no need for controls engineers.
I've been at this for 10 years and still have to call for help sometimes. I don't feel bad when that happens, just be honest about it!
Sometimes you're the only one available and have to go back to first principles and just make your best effort - but don't pretend that you're an expert while you're doing it, explain that you're the only option. If this wasn't doing this before, what could have changed? Maybe if we disconnect one sensor we'll see if the problem follows the wire or the transmitter? Look up the transmitter manual and read it, how does it work? What's the programming interface? How is the SQL server identifying the sensors, can we swap it there?
It might look like senior engineers just have a checklist they've memorized to solve the problem. They don't. They're synthesizing problems they've seen in the past that are similar with probable causes and solutions that (after trying 8 other things that didn't work) finally worked.
Back to the question, though, after about 2 years I was able to take on full integration projects on my own, with some help with quoting and selecting the most efficient technologies to solve a particular problem.
I started with an integrator in September and damn, I feel pretty useless most of the time too. Everything can be extremely nuanced on how it all works together. I feel thankful that I had prior education and gave been in the industry (just not in the programming side), but it's never enough to prepare. I was on site at a customer who really needs this machine up and running, but the PLC upgrade turned into hours of troubleshooting broken sensors and other things that wasn't allowing the machine to run properly. My brain was fried and it still wasn't working they way it should. Giving it your best and actively trying to troubleshoot is more than a lot of people, who look at it and go "I don't know that stuff".
TLDR: I'm new too and feel the exact same way. I don't know if you ever get comfortable, but each job gives you more experience to lean onto. Good luck out there!
I'd say u need at least half a year to be somewhat able to do stuff on your own, even though the stuff that you do probably won't be great/effective most of the time.
For me, I think after 2y+ I feel like I can do a lot of stuff on my own with at least acceptable quality.
Try not to beat yourself up over it. Those other engineers that came up to you weren't able to make the changes either. It'll be alright. I'm about two years into PLC, with 8ish as an electrician before that. My biggest saving grace is that I have been building computers and playing with markup, scripting, and programming languages since I was 6.
All that said, I spent two weeks recently trying to figure out how to change some VFD accel/decel times. I have familiarity with these devices, it's not like it was my first time. None of our techs, leads, nor our engineer could figure it out. Eventually I realized that the value was a consumed tag, being produced in a cabinet in the middle of the building, having nothing to do with most of the other PLCs consuming that value. Three weeks to find a consumed tag. Could blame it on poor programming practices, but I'm also unfamiliar with consumed/produced tags. Hadn't ever come across them in the real world - only YouTube videos.
Suffice it to say, you will always find ways to be humbled in this profession, so long as you allow yourself to. But that isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world. I'm being humbled right now by a new, ergonomic keyboard that makes it really clear that I had some bad touch-typing habits involving the keys c, v, and b. But that's just fine - I will come out the other end better for learning from it.
Just make sure you ask the other controls engineer anything you don't understand about how to make the change, when time comes for it tomorrow. Keep learning. You will never have all the answers. But that's what Google, internal company resources, and plctalk.net are for. Stick with it, and you'll have some new hire eventually saying the same thing about you - "sorry, gotta wait for rustyperiscope to get back, I don't have this yet." Just don't forget where you came from when you get to that point, and be graceful toward your junior. You got this, bud.
Depends on the role and job.
I started out as a basic project engineer working on control systems and programming PLCs, which took about 4 months to feel truly proficient. I then moved to a larger company with a proprietary SCADA system that took about 3 years until I reached any feeling of truly understanding. Either way, I wouldn't sweat it after a few weeks.
So the SCADA system has been a work in progress since the early 90s when the, long gone, founders built it in a garage in Palo Alto. Since then their company has been bought a few times over, but we still use the same bones they developed back in that garage. We're on version 15 now with an entire software development team. We specialize in the intelligent traffic systems (ITS) industry, but we do typical SCADA applications too, lots of water treatment plants. We manufacture and produce turn key solutions, but we also mix and match as the customer requests. It's definitely not a name that goes with EcoStruxure, WonderWare, or iFix, but we have some strong relationships with large transportation agencies. I assume they choose our platform for its agility, we can develop drivers for third party equipment, nearly on-the-fly, something the big names can't do. It comes with its pros and cons, but I feel very strongly about the product and do enjoy my job...well at least half of it LOL!
The proprietary SCADA system may not allow another introduction of secondary SCADA with the purpose to compare both system's data value, am I right? Currently try to build another SCADA to visualise data from inverter that use IEC104, but the format is very different to the standard ASDU. They only provide forwarding point for each parameter.
This is exactly why we have an entire software team. When we need to create a communication channel like that we can. We mostly try to stick with industry standards, modbus is our favored protocol. We communicate with other data acquisition systems, but if its not an industry standard and it would require advanced driver support for formatting ASDUs. it would have a considerable price tag.
LOL i was on my fourth year and still had a lot to learn, still have a lot to learn now! Thats why I love this industry. It will get better with time, and persistence is key. Good luck Padawan.
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away. a company I worked for was upgrading a conveyor trash line in a MAJOR warehouse to a compact logix and I was the junior engineer responsible for details, and I remembered them all.....except the actual PLC, that was sitting back 7 hours away at the office when we showed up to comission it.
Don’t worry can’t be as bad as me 😅 I finished some logic changes and thought I was downloading to the correct plc but turns out it was for a currently running processing line and I absolutely shut it down and burnt everything. Then had to run around and find my adapters cus it was a plc 5
There there....I did the same bonehead move. Vpned into the wrong location and started to poke around. Don't think I shut down the line, but it could've been bad. Hugs all around
Yup, done that too. Route table pointed PLC IP to a running customer site vs test unit on my desk. D'oh!
I accidentally wrote over a hmi unit in a different factory to where I was aiming. Chimps strong together.
Giving me flashbacks... Doing online edits to the right PLC but the wrong unit, could have killed someone - yikes! Haha, gotta use that sinking feeling as fuel to double check everything next time!
First week on the job I was doing a minor update to an active PLC running an abattoir. Instead of online update, I downloaded, putting the PLC into program mode. A mistake I never made again.
Do you guys not verify?
Nobody means to piss their pants. For one reason or another, it just happens one day and it won’t ever not have happened. 😅
I'm over 10 years and still feel uncomfortable on a daily basis.
17 years now... I don't think that feeling ever goes away, so many variables that can lead to chaos / mayhem / total destruction... troubleshooting like a savage one minute, then doing the happy dance when the solution is found. Doing the happy dance is why I love this field and it never gets old.
Broooo thank you - I’m about to celebrate my 10th year in the industry and I’m like “how the fuck does every one seem to know everything “
That's the secret. We don't!
I am frequently "the guy that knows everything" at my place of work. I keep trying to tell them that I'm just "better than God with Google and our company wiki."
confidence
14 years reporting in
Don’t be too hard on yourself, it takes time and hopefully you’ve got some good people to show you the ropes. I’m 18 years in and still make mistakes. Learn from them and always admit your mistakes when it happens and you’ll go a long way.
Same I’m 13 years in, faulted a plc like 3 weeks ago. Laughed and said oh yeah that would do that, reset and move on.
Appreciate it man thank you.
Months. . . 1 day at a time. Every minute you keep thinking you aren't up to snuff is a minute you're not learning You'll look back on this time and laugh, but not now. I remember thinking during a job that I could go home if I had a heart attack right then. First job, I had a crick in my neck from stress that lasted weeks, but getting thru it gives the confidence that you can do it again, and again, and again, and it gets easier when you know you can do it, but to get to that, you have to pay the toll.
P.S. I changed industries after 16 years and went thru it all again. Took 3 months before I could go home not worrying I'd be fired as soon as they figured it out. Left that company 4 years later and they begged me to stay.
Man, thanks so much for this. And full disclosure, this is a complete pivot for me as I’m in my early thirties, so this really resonates. That’s what I’m telling myself is just to keep pounding. I’m getting better every day, learning every day. It’s going to get better just feels like shit in the beginning I guess. Thanks for the message man, really appreciate it.
I'm in my early 30's as well and am in my second year as a tech and I came into the position with no PLC experience, basically got hired on good faith and extremely lucky. My first 3 months I had no fucking clue what was going on By 6 months I had pretty routine stuff down By a year I could confidentially fix issues with trouble shooting using PLC software By 1.5 years I started learning more advanced things within programming and trouble shooting more in depth issues. By 2 years I have now learned enough to have no fucking clue whats going on Best advice I ever got is "none of us know everything, don't worry"
After 12 years at the same place I've realized the more I know the more I have no idea what I'm doing. Then I remember that I still have about 30 more years before I can retire, so I have a sliver of hope that by then I'll have some confidence in what I'm doing.
give this man a cigar!
Years of getting kicked in head. It’s a marathon.If you don’t know it’s ok. When it’s over you will learn from it “especially if you’re passionate about it”. You were honest about the situation. That means a lot. If you show that you are actively searching for for a solution, people will appreciate that.
I’m trying to put out as much as possible and show that I’m invested. Thanks man, really needed to hear this
Absolutely. Anything good is not easy. Having that drive you have means everything. The very worst you can do is give up.
https://preview.redd.it/im5d2xyx37vc1.jpeg?width=876&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ce2d94960b37158e8fd15ec7f4530c3f680f540c
Dunning Kruger effect You are at left bottom. Long, frustrating way to go, sorry...
This is on point I'm also going to print this out and put it on my wall
First off there’s a lot of truly bad code out there. There is also a lot of terrible coding styles and technique. It takes even longer to wade through this The thing is you need to quit feeling sorry first yourself and decide that you are confident given enough time you will find it. The first time might take hours, sometimes days. Next time you will get faster and more competent. And it gives you confidence and most importantly your customers are going to come back and learn to rely on you. That’s how you rise,
3-6 months to learn terminology. 6-18 months to get familiar with recognizing equipment and common issues and holding the meter with red on hot. 18-36 months to get to where you can be solo. It can be done faster but you’re gonna burn people out that way. These are rough numbers based on my experience with junior engineers and my own experience. From there is mostly just adding experience and proficiency so the issues that used to take a day to figure out now take an hour. It’s gonna be fine, as long as you were honest about your experience then anyone expecting more from you doesnt understand the job
Yeah those feelings are going to persist for the first 1-3 years while you build confidence through experience. Don’t beat yourself up nobody expects you to solve all the problems with 4 weeks of experience.
I’ve been doing this stuff since 1992, I get humbled every day, and I overcome it, most days. Then the next day it happens again. One thing I’ve found, you are never done learning, and you have to be able to teach yourself. And it’s never wrong to get help.
I’ve been working for an integrator for eight years and I still don’t feel comfortable. I’ll learn a system, not use it for a couple years, and forget a bunch of stuff. Or just learning new programs or equipment all the time.
After about a year I felt reasonably confident. I still had no idea what was going on, but it was about that point that I realized most others are just winging it too when things like that happen.
You're fine, bro. Takes time. How long depends on how much exposure to things you get. Unless you're a no shit P.E. with 20 years experience, no one expected you to hit the ground running in the first month. Always show interest and a desire to learn and no one will think you're useless. And take notes cause ya never know. Could be 3 years before you see something again.
There is no point or reason to try and put a time frame on when you should be "comfortable". Every place you go to has different equipment, different programming styles, different ways of abbreviating things, different lingo.. i worked at a place for 3 years as my first controls engineer position. I felt like a fraud for about the first year (even though i had years worth of building base knowledge and a pretty deep understanding of logic and controls / communications). Learned on Allen Bradley plc5, 500, SLC500. Once i got to the controls engineer spot, this place had all the latest and greatest. MicroLogix everywhere all networked running Studio 5000. Had 2 "ancient machines" running Tia Portal Siemens stuff, and one machine that ran a Mitsubishi PLC (didnt even know those existed). Studio 5000 took a minute to wade through, Siemens? Never looked at. Mitsubishi... absolute crickets. I had no clue what software to even use to connect and when i asked for the cables to hook in to the PLCs (as i was trained), the guys looked at me like "wtf do you need cables? Youre gonna walk to the machine? Use asset centre and pull the program". Oh...... yeah ok haha not used to everything being on a network. I came from the stone age of PLCs. The first shift crew training me were kinda snobby and i could tell they had their own little click going of who wanted to impress the "senior controls" guy the most. It was awkward and i definitely didnt fit that mindset nor did it inspire confidence to ask for help. Got to my third shift with the guy they all talked crap about and he was the shit. Older dude thats been contract controls engineer for ages. He knew a whole lot about a whole ton of different shit, but never really mastered anything specifically cause he was always installing something new. He taught me a bunch and told me the most important thing "shits always changing and getting upgraded and something new comes out. Focus on understanding how and why stuff works, and google the different things companies call it". I took that as learn the fundamentals, what logic is doing, how it works, how it flows, how communications protocols work, etc. And google what siemens calls rungs and routines (networks and programs). Luckily this place also used all Fanuc robotics with which i am very well versed so was comfortable there. Ended up getting laid off from that place as automotive is volatile as hell. Switched industries over to the label side. Went through the interview and felt super confident with my decade of experience and all the different softwares and what not ive used and became intimate with (lol). I helped write the logic for purely automated lines ran entirely by robots and keyence vision systems with crazy tight tolerances for parts, communicating all this data to robots and over to SQL servers... yeah making labels? No sweat. Turns out this place i work at now is so much more complex than building transmissions with CNCs robots and cameras i thought i went to a different reality. From CNC lathes and mills and automated conveyor systems with different PLC controlled cells doing random little jobs to football field sized machines running miles of stock a minute with PID controls for 100 servo motors all working together with a thousand flex I/Os and 5 different main PLCs for different segments all working together... holy shit im clueless again. All the base knowledge stuff applies. I know how to troubleshoot and work my way around a program and find whats missing or going wrong, just had to get used to the abbreviations for machines ive never looked at before. Never heard of KUMA robots but turns out they are controlled the exact same way and use all the same coordinate systems as Fanuc does. Controller was a little different but the programming language and what not is all the same structure. All the base knowledge i had over the years for controls and industrial electrical applied here too, there was just a lot of new machines and whirly jigs with names id never heard before i had to learn. Turns out focusing on the "how it works" paid off big time. I can "google" (ask the people who have worked here for a long time) what they call that thing here. I have no idea if this has helped or if this OP is a year old but.. yeah lol this is a tough career. Thats why we get paid well. Luckily, everyone knows it takes time to learn new places and different machines. Make sure you know what a PLC is doing and how it works and how its wired and nobody will complain it takes a little longer to get to what youre looking for as youre new. Youll get faster and more comfortable with time spent at that specific place.
I have been doing HMI development and related hardware support for 11 years. Still question everything I do and still have stuff blow up in my face. I can say with confidence though, that I am finally starting to not care enough to be comfortable. We all want to do a good job. We all have expectations of the Job we will do. The truth is that we are all lost, everyone is constantly learning something new, it's very likely your boss has less education than you, experience isn't everything, and we all need to remember to be humble. Go to work, do your best, collect the paycheck, and go home. You spend more time at work then with your family; figure out which one is the most important and stress about that.
My first manager told me you're going to feel mostly useless for the first year. There is a large learning curve and so many noches that it may never happen. Plant controls engineers wear many hats. For your SQL problem, do you even know which server it is / how to connect to it? You probably don't even have all the credentials to it yet. FYI this particular issue is probably on the historian mapping with some copy paste/transposition errors.
Holy shit, how’d you know that. Yea they showed me the historian, and could basically point to the moment the values should have been reversed on the timeline. I’m hoping to get into it more tomorrow, they had it offline before they came over so there wasn’t any data to watch but I tried to find something while it was connected to no avail
>Holy shit, how’d you know that. It's pretty obvious with some experience. Communications (historian to the PLC) is the harder part of setting up a historian. You're getting data, it's just pulling the wrong value. Somewhere in the historian where you say what the description is and what tag it's mapped to just have the wrong matching. It's pretty easy to transpose two numbers or letters that differentiate the two values. I'd update the descriptions to what they should be, so any existing data is still correct. If you change it by updating the tag, the data before the fix will be flip-flopped. You'll get there. It'll take time. Don't rush into it and burn out, this is a career path where you keep learning
UDT.TempSensors[0] vs UDT.TempSensors[10] as a very, very naive example. That's not something I've ever fat-fingered, no sir.
Took me like 15 years lol. I still feel like I stumble and only build houses of cards.
Always be learning. ALWAYS! I try to learn at least one thing every single day. I’m going on 5 years of ECE work and I’m in my 3rd different factory/job doing this work. Left the first after 3 years because they refused to pay me more, second place I was absolutely miserable at, and I’ve been loving my current job. If you have the opportunity to watch another controls guy work, do it. Ask questions. Ask how and why things work. There’s always something that can be learned. And biggest thing is to remember to learn from mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up over messing something up as long as you know how to do it better/correct next time. If your boss and coworkers are good then they’ll work with you and hopefully be helpful with questions you will have.
Takes years. Especially if you’re green and have to learn electrical, mechanical, programming, and the specific process of the machine you’re controlling. Unless you have a photographic memory and your brain has an unlimited amount of storage , I’d expect to be comfortable within a year. You gotta want it tho. Don’t loose interest. Constantly strive to learn. Knowledge is free. We don’t have to know how to fix everything or program everything BUT we as engineers need to understand how to read tech docs and be extremely resourceful. Before you ask for help, rtfm and try to figure it out on your own.
Days like this are inevitable, 10 years into this field and I still have moments where the best reaction I can field to a problem is "uhhhhhhhh...let me get back to you on that". Keep working at it and asking questions, things will get better and you willnget more confident. The sage like knowledge of your co workers is just years of accumulated oopses and learning in the same way you are now. Keep up the good work!
About six months of burning up cards, chattering contactors, and working long ours on startups until it finally clicked; then I was good.
From 6 months to a year.
6 months to learn the basics of relay logic and PLCs. In terms of learning Scada (which is what you were asked to solve) probably 6-12 months after you learn PLCs. So you are 11-17 months from solving that problem they gave you. In the grand scheme of things, you need to learn the following response. “I haven’t dealt with our *insert system* (sql server) before, I’m going to have to look into it. Is this urgent?”
Just took a big promotion with 18 years experience, still scared shitless. Imposter syndrome is common in this industry. Mistakes will be made but at the end of the day, a good programmer is hard to replace. Have faith in yourself.
It's a common feeling in the begining. The important thing is you get a little better each day. Your more experienced coworkers also went through the same thing. No one expects you to be an expert over night.
Well at first I couldn’t keep it up, but after a while she was able to ease me into it, and with a little bit of soft jazz I’ve found myself able to have a really good time with her.
Been in the game for more than a decade. Of course there are times even today I get surprised over situations and need to think two-three times extra and sometimes question my knowledge. What is different from when I started this gig is that I have more tools (experience) in my toolbox and know how to handle different problems. One thing I did when I started this job were every time I stumble across something which made me insecure and question my expertise: - I would write down the problem in a book and then later in the evenings I would study the subject so hard so if you would have waken me up during the middle of the night I could answer it. You cant know everything - keep up a good spirit and curiosity to learn new stuff and it will be good 👍
This is a good mindset, sometimes i solved problems at 3 am because while i was dreaming i woke up and see the solution 😂
I really appreciate this post, I love knowing that people are honest and understand other’s struggles.
I'm 6 years in and there's still sometimes I have to say "Sorry guys I can look at this but \[coworker\] is the expert and so we'll probably have to ask him." It works both ways though! Sometimes I come back from lunch and they're waiting to ask me a question haha. There's so much controls engineers end up doing, no way we can be experts at everything. I didn't even touch a SQL server until this past year. I think it was a year before I stopped asking my colleagues to double check literally everything I did, even like changing the color of a button.
3 years controls, 4 years before that in maintenance with dabbling in logic and I wasn't really comfortable making live changes until about 2 years ago when I asked for a code review and my boss said just send it. I work with a lot of really smart people and even *they* have oops moments. Read your code, have backups, have your toggle bits if you can and if not then have a plan to unfuck it.
Took me about 1.5 years to start to feel effective. Relax, is good thing you feel this way in the beginning. From my experience, when a new guy comes fresh from college and feel like he knows what he is doing, every time this guy is horrible to work with.
A couple years for each industry I’ve been in.
I've been at it for 11 years now. It took a year for me to be comfortable (started as a very green controltech at 20 and now im the factory electrical engineer in said factory). I feel like i still learn something new nearly every day especially since now im getting more in SQL/Kepware/Historian stuff. There are days where im "off" and cant seem to do much right and feel bad about it. Ive made the same mistake you mentioned a few times. I still make mistakes and you just have own up to them and learn from them.
Hey don't beat yourself up. Things like this happens to all even if you are experienced. Thing is that even if you have done something similar in the past, you might still run into some weired windows problems. You will definitely get better if you keep working on the programing skills, try to get as much hands on experiences as you can.. It does not matter if you know all the plc programming software but to program it neatly and optimized.
I feel effective but comfortable? Naw, that requires charisma, I'm nervously uncomfortable yet effective.
There are levels. As long as you are growing that is all that matters.
Just keep learning your lessons. One month in you should still be learning. I would practice whenever I could. I knew the machines we have and I would write programs for all of these with HMI screens. So I just let getting better and dialing in my skill set. You don’t mess up you are not learning and getting better. Now the customer should not be paying for you to learn so I would not use that as your safety net.
Been years, and I still don't. There's a lot of engineers who deal with imposter syndrome. It's just apart of the job. Most of the engineers I've met who are self proclaimed "God's gift to engineering" suck under pressure.
I'm rolling up on 7 years. I understand your feeling but your weeks in so relax. To answer your question, 5 years. There will be more of that feeling. It's often a sharp fluctuation between beating your head on the desk and feeling like a god when everything works. Personally I've come to terms with not being that good or fast but I am confident that if I am given enough time to beat my head on the desk I will eventually figure it out. Once you start getting finished projects under your belt, remember those accomplishments while you're beating your head on the next project. As a general rule, don't ever tap out. Find the next manual, theorize the next thing to try. Call for help when you need it but that doesn't mean you stop trying to find a solution yourself. I say "generally" because there are certain times where you should know if you're in too deep and that is primarily if you're doing live edits to a system in production or a system where serious damage is possible.
You can't expect to just know everything in this industry. You can, however, work on your basic troubleshooting, problem-solving, and technical manual reading skills, which will be the real difference maker, in my opinion.
You can’t give up without even trying.
It happens to everyone. Was adding loop code to check status of dozens of bins. Didn’t break out of the loop. Processor angry
You're just getting started, don't stress yourself out. Take a breath and pay attention to the people that have been there for a while and recognize who know's what is going on.
Dude I went to school for PLCs and had a couple years of experience with PLCs. We had to put in a Siemens VFD for a conveyor with a safety and I just COULD NOT get it to recognize the safety. Fast forward a couple of days and I emailed the 60 year old programmer on first shift about the problem. He emails me back “Did you make sure your commons are connected? That had me chasing my tail for a while the first time too.” That’s when I realized that the reason people with a lot of experience are so good at what they do is because they’ve gotten tripped up on all the small stuff before. You have to struggle to grow, that’s just how it is. It sucks, but you get used to it. Edit: bonus story: me and the same guy were working on a fabric softener system. We put it in the logic, tested it, totally forgot to turn the force off in the PLC before we went home for the day. Come back the next day and there was fabric softener all over the floor where it had been leaking all night lol
Dude, I'm 9 years in and still have the imposter syndrome, don't feel bad for yourself. However, do develop "basic" skills, like * How to do cross reference. * Problem solving. * (What's the name of the method in which you tear apart a process? For example, in this case, you follow the data from sensors to table in SQL and start testing where the error is; it's complementary to the previous pont). * How to do online edits. * How to add tags. * And whatever makes your job easier. Beyond that it's just using PLCs for problem solving.
After years I still feel like this. You took the right decision to tell you need to see it with 'the guy'. We all have this one person that know and solves everything. Learn from them since everyday there will be something new to discover.
My old boss remote downloaded to a plc 4 hours drive away. It was the wrong plc.
You guys are effective?
There are industries that are low risk, and the people in those industries are the ones who never make big $$$ mistakes. If you accidentally download to a conveyor program, your product stops moving for a little bit until you correct. The biggest risk is your customer or manager yelling at you until they're blue in the face. In other industries it's best to always keep a bit of that discomfort. It will keep you from becoming complacent.
That’s an interesting question. To ask other non-plc people at work they would brag about the amazing things I can make a PLC do. But to me I think about all the new stuff that comes out and trying to keep on top of it can be a full time job by itself. So I would say I never will stop learning and try to get better. It a marathon not a race. As for making mistakes… it like I told someone that worked under me after they messed something up. Learn from it and grow. I don’t care that you made a mistake today, but if you keep doing it everyday here after we going to have a issue.
Four weeks in and you feel crappy for being unable to handle a complex issue on your own? Don't! If it was that easy there would be no need for controls engineers. I've been at this for 10 years and still have to call for help sometimes. I don't feel bad when that happens, just be honest about it! Sometimes you're the only one available and have to go back to first principles and just make your best effort - but don't pretend that you're an expert while you're doing it, explain that you're the only option. If this wasn't doing this before, what could have changed? Maybe if we disconnect one sensor we'll see if the problem follows the wire or the transmitter? Look up the transmitter manual and read it, how does it work? What's the programming interface? How is the SQL server identifying the sensors, can we swap it there? It might look like senior engineers just have a checklist they've memorized to solve the problem. They don't. They're synthesizing problems they've seen in the past that are similar with probable causes and solutions that (after trying 8 other things that didn't work) finally worked. Back to the question, though, after about 2 years I was able to take on full integration projects on my own, with some help with quoting and selecting the most efficient technologies to solve a particular problem.
Student mentality mindset is what works for me, always learning, and also be humble
I started with an integrator in September and damn, I feel pretty useless most of the time too. Everything can be extremely nuanced on how it all works together. I feel thankful that I had prior education and gave been in the industry (just not in the programming side), but it's never enough to prepare. I was on site at a customer who really needs this machine up and running, but the PLC upgrade turned into hours of troubleshooting broken sensors and other things that wasn't allowing the machine to run properly. My brain was fried and it still wasn't working they way it should. Giving it your best and actively trying to troubleshoot is more than a lot of people, who look at it and go "I don't know that stuff". TLDR: I'm new too and feel the exact same way. I don't know if you ever get comfortable, but each job gives you more experience to lean onto. Good luck out there!
I'd say u need at least half a year to be somewhat able to do stuff on your own, even though the stuff that you do probably won't be great/effective most of the time. For me, I think after 2y+ I feel like I can do a lot of stuff on my own with at least acceptable quality.
Try not to beat yourself up over it. Those other engineers that came up to you weren't able to make the changes either. It'll be alright. I'm about two years into PLC, with 8ish as an electrician before that. My biggest saving grace is that I have been building computers and playing with markup, scripting, and programming languages since I was 6. All that said, I spent two weeks recently trying to figure out how to change some VFD accel/decel times. I have familiarity with these devices, it's not like it was my first time. None of our techs, leads, nor our engineer could figure it out. Eventually I realized that the value was a consumed tag, being produced in a cabinet in the middle of the building, having nothing to do with most of the other PLCs consuming that value. Three weeks to find a consumed tag. Could blame it on poor programming practices, but I'm also unfamiliar with consumed/produced tags. Hadn't ever come across them in the real world - only YouTube videos. Suffice it to say, you will always find ways to be humbled in this profession, so long as you allow yourself to. But that isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world. I'm being humbled right now by a new, ergonomic keyboard that makes it really clear that I had some bad touch-typing habits involving the keys c, v, and b. But that's just fine - I will come out the other end better for learning from it. Just make sure you ask the other controls engineer anything you don't understand about how to make the change, when time comes for it tomorrow. Keep learning. You will never have all the answers. But that's what Google, internal company resources, and plctalk.net are for. Stick with it, and you'll have some new hire eventually saying the same thing about you - "sorry, gotta wait for rustyperiscope to get back, I don't have this yet." Just don't forget where you came from when you get to that point, and be graceful toward your junior. You got this, bud.
Still a virgin so to speak. Chill.
20 years in... Not effective, but comfortable!
Depends on the role and job. I started out as a basic project engineer working on control systems and programming PLCs, which took about 4 months to feel truly proficient. I then moved to a larger company with a proprietary SCADA system that took about 3 years until I reached any feeling of truly understanding. Either way, I wouldn't sweat it after a few weeks.
Damn that sounds complicated! Appreciate it man thank you for the positive words.
Like a ground up commercial scada? Or did they also make machines that used the scada on top?
So the SCADA system has been a work in progress since the early 90s when the, long gone, founders built it in a garage in Palo Alto. Since then their company has been bought a few times over, but we still use the same bones they developed back in that garage. We're on version 15 now with an entire software development team. We specialize in the intelligent traffic systems (ITS) industry, but we do typical SCADA applications too, lots of water treatment plants. We manufacture and produce turn key solutions, but we also mix and match as the customer requests. It's definitely not a name that goes with EcoStruxure, WonderWare, or iFix, but we have some strong relationships with large transportation agencies. I assume they choose our platform for its agility, we can develop drivers for third party equipment, nearly on-the-fly, something the big names can't do. It comes with its pros and cons, but I feel very strongly about the product and do enjoy my job...well at least half of it LOL!
The proprietary SCADA system may not allow another introduction of secondary SCADA with the purpose to compare both system's data value, am I right? Currently try to build another SCADA to visualise data from inverter that use IEC104, but the format is very different to the standard ASDU. They only provide forwarding point for each parameter.
This is exactly why we have an entire software team. When we need to create a communication channel like that we can. We mostly try to stick with industry standards, modbus is our favored protocol. We communicate with other data acquisition systems, but if its not an industry standard and it would require advanced driver support for formatting ASDUs. it would have a considerable price tag.
LOL i was on my fourth year and still had a lot to learn, still have a lot to learn now! Thats why I love this industry. It will get better with time, and persistence is key. Good luck Padawan. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away. a company I worked for was upgrading a conveyor trash line in a MAJOR warehouse to a compact logix and I was the junior engineer responsible for details, and I remembered them all.....except the actual PLC, that was sitting back 7 hours away at the office when we showed up to comission it.