This is interesting. I'm a mechanical engineer who's spent the best part of 10 years working on software. First with Matlab and Pascal, then Excel Visual Basic, then proper Visual Basic , then Labview and some C for DSP chips.
In that time I've made countless working applications that do what they're supposed to do, eradicated bugs and generally worked with other end users to make systems that are fast and easy to use. Most of the code has evolved or I've thought about how to do things on the drive to work or lying in bed at night. Some of it has been pretty involving, what with development work being quite unpredictable.
Over the last few years I've developed an automated production and test machine that involves motion control, hardware interafces, USB connections, serial ports, user interface, data processing, logic, a database, configuration options etc. It's pretty involving and there's still more ideas to implement.
I recently had some conversations with fully paid up "software engineers" who had been tasked with converting the system to Csharp and was quite amused by their narrow minded take on our situation. They seemed to have no interest in how one of our machines worked or a desire to take an overall look to see how complex it might be. They also used the following words which I have never used myself: core system architecture, class diagram, use case model.
Do you think that Labview users would tend to be more hardware/practical system solution orientated?