SemAntics0

It's an incredibly messy space and the particulars are going to vary wildly based on the company. A company in a more regulated space may have the finances to standardize on Siemens or something similarly fancy, but smaller manufacturers may not have any standard at all and you'll be looking at a mix of Rockwell, Allen-Bradley, Honeywell and even more niche brands and PLCs. Many vendors have "proprietary" languages, but they're all going to be very basic stuff that is essentially Visual Basic, C, or JavaScript-ish. It's not going to be a formal software development environment like you're used to. In less regulated environments, a lot of the time you'll find that the PLC/automation component is being handled by the MAINTENANCE or FACILITIES people.

So for an example of a problem I'm facing, we have some Vacuum Furnaces. Essentially before you can turn titanium into a useful implant, you have to bake titanium at a temperature above its ignition point so that the molecules can loosen up enough and release the stresses that accumulate in the forging process. As part of this process, there's eight thermocouples of different sensitivities and at least three pressure/vacuum sensors all physically wired into a "chart recorder". The thermocouple "data" is literally a voltage reading, and the chart recorder is interpreting that and converting it into an integer and storing that in RAM. These devices are about 20 years old, and it can only hold about 24 hours of data, so you have to network it with a server that can store those readings in case you ever need to prove to someone that this step of your process was done right. It's not technically complex, but these devices aren't easy to interact with and often require physically connecting to them to make changes.

There's all sorts of possibilities for really meaningful integrations with other manufacturing systems, ERP systems, data analysis and visualization, and basically a million "low hanging fruit" problems in the space that simply don't get done because don't have enough people with any technical skill at all. Most companies I've worked for literally don't care about what the solution is, so you get a ton of leeway on architecting the solution.

IMO, the best part is that it feels like you're accomplishing something. Making a real impact. You can walk the floor and see the code you wrote building things. Doing things. You know the engineer who came to you with a problem, and you delivered a solution that makes his life easier. Not to make some abstract number go up for a quarterly report, but to actually make things that are useful.

Years ago, they really drilled into the performance of the various products they compared and frequently the winner was a specialist product from a brand you had never heard of, but it really was the best on the market. Wirecutter articles did good testing with defined rationale that might not be up to laboratory standards, but it was enough to clearly identify which products were offering the best performance. When they labeled a product "The Best X", you could be fairly confident that it was going to outperform almost everything else on the market. They tested everything from the highest range products to the garbage chinesium specials and if you read the entire article, you could see where some products might outperform in certain areas, but under perform in others, letting you make an informed decision that wasn't simply picking the "Winner". Effort had clearly been put into discovering a full range of products instead of simply comparing the amazon options. Any product that was disqualified from comparison had a clear and reasonable rationale.

Starting around 2018 the quality of testing plummeted into clickbait territory. Many articles appeared to justify their choices entirely based on reading amazon reviews without actually putting hands on the product, a theory reinforced by waves of comments appearing that despite a wirecutter recommendation, the product was absolute junk. My personal "Wirecutter is a lost cause" moment was when I was looking for a new comforter and the writer had simply disqualified every single option that was polyester based because "I don't like how polyester feels." That's not good testing. That's opinion. If I wanted subjective opinions on products I wouldn't be at Wirecutter.

For an contemporary example, pull up their "The Best Drill" article. The reviews highlight things you could discover from holding the drill and looking at it. The testing is a single test performed by a single person with no edge cases or alternative uses considered. If ergonomics are such a critical consideration that it gets entries shot down, shouldn't you have multiple people testing to see how different models perform in different people's hands? Furthermore, the only products tested are mid-range household drills available from big box stores. Nothing from the professional brands like Festool or Hilti or some brand I've never heard of. No explanation why I shouldn't just buy a Harbor Freight special for half the price. No explanation why any other consumer-grade brands weren't included. The articles don't provide "The best drill", they're providing "The best consumer-grade drill for light duty work", and this attitude has spread to every corner of the site. You can't go to wirecutter and find a specialist tool that outperforms the commonly available options any more, because they're not even including it in testing.

The Great Lakes region has a surprising concentration of advanced manufacturing skillsets. With large manufacturing facilities with extremely stringent quality standards like a bleeding edge chip fab there's going to be a enormous need for people with traditional manufacturing-specific support skillsets that are simply not available in large quantities anywhere else in the US.

If the current administration's support of the transition to electric vehicles doesn't falter, that's going to drive an increasing need for microprocessors in vehicles. Intel locating themselves in central Ohio puts their production facilities on an interstate highway hub that puts them within a 6-12 hour drive of nearly every major auto manufacturing facility in the US, which is an enormous incentive for the auto manufacturers to source from them. Additionally, Columbus has the Rickenbacker International Airport which is a dedicated air freight airport that lets them get their product global faster.

This announcement of two facilities makes me think that Phoenix is going to be a smaller facility handling the more advanced, smaller run chip designs, but host the R&D and design offices (To take advantage of the city's concentration of tech talent) while Columbus is going to be the primary production facility.