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I am considered almost godlike at my company of 20 years. I have done automation/process control for all sorts of large plants over a large amounts of PLC’s, from foxboro, to TI. To Siemens, to Allen Bradley, and a few randoms in between. There is no process issue, that I cannot think through and solve. However, by todays standards, I am unhirable in any other field, as I hate more than anything in the world, the current set of standard programming practices. When I look at any vendor program, that we are forced by whatever reason to purchase, all I see is pure crap. And the plants always want me to fix their pure crap. It costs less in my $126 an hour to junk and rewrite the whole thing, so that any changes they want in the future to take minutes, than it does for me (or the original vendor) to just fix that one problem they are complaining about. If I rewrite the whole thing away from the current “accepted” standards, the plant people themselves are suddenly able to make any edits they need.

I also write analytical software for both office and engineering needs. Used to do it in C, but came to like VB in my old age. Both have easy access to any major database, or even oracle. One funny story, was I at a plant last year talking to the operations manager, when my eyes kept going to some spreadsheets and graphs on his desk. They seemed familiar looking. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I picked up the papers. It turns out that they were generated from a program I wrote in 1992 in borland C for Windows 3.1 for a plant in remote Nevada, some 2500 miles away. I have no idea how they got it, had no idea anybody was still using it, but they loved it, and it was running on windows 7, and made perfectly beautiful color graphs on printers that did not in 1992. My question is why does that program (that did some pretty fancy number crunching, and did some pretty fancy compression for data storage (hard drives were very small back then) still work in 2011, when Microsofts own programs don’t work for more than 3 years?

Sorry, did not “exist” in 1992, can’t see what I’m typing on this stupid phone, lol

I also write analytical software for both office and engineering needs. Used to do it in C, but came to like VB in my old age. Both have easy access to any major database, or even oracle. One funny story, was I at a plant last year talking to the operations manager, when my eyes kept going to some spreadsheets and graphs on his desk. They seemed familiar looking. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I picked up the papers. It turns out that they were generated from a program I wrote in 1992 in borland C for Windows 3.1 for a plant in remote Nevada, some 2500 miles away. I have no idea how they got it, had no idea anybody was still using it, but they loved it, and it was running on windows 7, and made perfectly beautiful color graphs on printers that did not in 1992. My question is why does that program (that did some pretty fancy number crunching, and did some pretty fancy compression for data storage (hard drives were very small back then) still work in 2011, when Microsofts own programs don’t work for more than 3 years?

Good God man! I've seen the same type of piracy! The stories we could swap.

It turns out that they were generated from a program I wrote in 1992 in borland C for Windows 3.1 for a plant in remote Nevada, some 2500 miles away. I have no idea how they got it, had no idea anybody was still using it, but they loved it, and it was running on windows 7

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IT “Hall of Fame” nominee.