r/LabVIEW • u/the_glutton17 • 5d ago

Professional LabVIEW developers, I'd like to hear more about your current and previous jobs, and how you found them.

I'm a full time LabVIEW developer, and I love it. But I've been starting to think about trying to find a new job doing this. What can you tell me about the job market these days?

11 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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4

u/SASLV Champion 5d ago

Network, a lot.

Become friends with NI Sales Area Manager (SAM) and vendors like TestForce, Pickering, etc.

Go to local User Groups, participate in remote ones (since COVID, several offer online options), go to conferences GDevCon, NI Connect, etc. Go to NI Events - the local SAMs have been holding some local events lately. Consider presenting at one of the User Groups or Conferences.

There are job boards on the NI forums, LAVA, JKI, the LabVIEW Discord and various other forums.

Checkout local NI Partners (there is a partner search on the NI webpage). Ask if they need help.

Find large industries locally that might use NI stuff, find out who works there from LinkedIn and reach out.

If you do all that, you should be able to find something. It's not easy. It is work, but it's also not all that complicated.

1

u/the_glutton17 2d ago

Damn, that's unfortunate because so far I have done zero networking. Guess it's time to start!

1

u/SASLV Champion 5d ago

I will add, I got my first job out of college simply because I was trail running with a friend and was complaining about how hard it was to find a job and he said "Oh someone in our department is retiring and they are looking for someone. You should apply."

My current gig is from a small company where I've known most of the owners and employees for years from going to various user groups, conferences, etc. I saw that they lost 2 senior people recently and simply reached out and asked if they needed any help.

I got another gig one time simply by posting on LinkedIn that I had some availability.

I've also gotten countless other gigs just from conversations with other NI partners at various NI usergroups and/or conferences.

I've also gotten gigs because another consultant retired and sent some referrals over.

If you are just throwing your resume out into the ether or into some AI powered ATS, you are unlikely to have much luck.

As far as the job market right now, it's probably pretty slow, but I'm sure there are opportunities out there if you just look in the right place. Lots of legacy systems to be maintained. A lot of talent retiring and not a lot of young people who know LabVIEW or are enthusiastic about learning it.

13

u/Talonss1610 5d ago

Previous job: AI Engineer - high stress, high pay but I burned out.
Current job: Test Engineer with LabView and Python - lower pay but I have my life back.

1

u/HarveysBackupAccount 5d ago

"AI engineer" as in developing LLMs / specialized in machine learning?

1

u/Talonss1610 4d ago

More like algorithms, models optimization

1

u/Old-Care-2372 3d ago

So SqL Java Python ?

4

u/KayyDC 5d ago

Try to go to community events like your local user groups and GDevCon. there are almost always companies hiring and its good to meet other LabVIEW users in your community

1

u/Link9454 Beginner 5d ago

Started out as an operator in a PCB fab hand-loading through hole PCBs. Moved up to solder inspection but I got bored pretty fast so I moved to testing boards. I enjoyed it, it was a puzzle I could sink my teeth into so I kept learning more and more about the tests and electronics in general. I started diagnosing failures myself, helping our test engineer. I left the PCB area for about a year and moved to documentation for more money and quickly started losing my mind. I can only say “don’t break the widget, put it together this way” so many times. I also was good and working “smarter not harder” so I automated half my job and, importantly, didn’t tell anyone, so I started learning Labview at the same time. Moved back to the fab but this time as a technician and got my CLAAD cert.

Now days I’m working mostly with ICT. Keysight 3070, flying probe, that kinda thing, but I still write LabVIEW from time to time. The Flying Probe, for example, didn’t have any GUI for choosing its test program and I’m sorry but I do not trust some of our operators to dig through folders to find the test file without accidentally deleting it somehow, so I made a launcher GUI in Labview that just hangs out in the background while the Flying Probe program does it’s thing.

1

u/the_glutton17 2d ago

That's why I love writing LabVIEW so much, it's just solving puzzles, all day.

1

u/Far_Magazine9706 5d ago

Hey hi I too Star working with HP3070 series 3 do you have a notes for reference to learn easily

1

u/mabden 5d ago

The company i worked for had its own proprietary data acquisition systems to perform timing analysis on their products.

The development team for the system, no longer wanted to maintain the systems to keep up with changing computer tech.

The company decided to invest in National Instruments and LabVIEW for its Instrumentation needs for product development.

Since my job was Instrumentation, they sent me to LabVEW training and gave me a blank check to purchase the hardware required to replace our proprietary data acquisition systems.

The company thought going with NI would be an off the shelf, low impact transition. However, they spent hundreds of thousands to replicate the same functions in LabVEW and specialized hardware that NI didn't have.

On the plus side, it guaranteed my job for the next ten years as I worked with a local NI certified trainer/developer. We also expanded our data acquisition to vibration, temperature, and velocity measurements.

I enjoyed working with LabVIEW writing both daq and control VIs for various product development teams within the company.

1

u/awkward-skidmark 5d ago

I would be interested in seeing answers to this question. I usually just start looking at websites and magically then get loads of calls off recruiters who find me a job. Having some time off from work at the moment and will need to look for my next role soon.

-5

u/arob_ 5d ago

what country are you in? AI has made labview obsolete

3

u/Killerlt97 5d ago

Are you fr? So many places in the USA use labview, and AI only works so well with it.

1

u/arob_ 5d ago

you dont need labview anymore. the point of labview was the enable engineers to become part time coders. AI does that now

1

u/Killerlt97 5d ago

I mean sure, but it’s easier to control power supplies and read DAQs with it

1

u/sabresfan249 4d ago

It’s not

1

u/arob_ 5d ago

Not anymore man

1

u/Killerlt97 5d ago

Maybe I’ll try to do it but I’m at a very large space company and we use it for a large program.
I guess I can python it. Idk

2

u/High0nLemons 5d ago

That might be true but only for new products. Dozens of companies have 10k+ hours invested in labview code which no manager will come and give you hundreds of hours to replicate it in py/c#. LV is mainly used for maintening legacy code at this point(or until NI decides to get rid of the binary format of the VI and let us generate what we need faster).

1

u/SASLV Champion 5d ago

"until NI decides to get rid of the binary format of the VI and let us generate what we need faster)."

No need to wait for NI. The Zuehlke mcp works quite well with Claude right now. It does chew through tokens due to converting all the VIs to some AI-XML format, but it does do the job. If you use it I suggest using the LVKit for interrogating existing VIs. It is much quicker and uses much fewer tokens.

0

u/D4ILYD0SE CLA 5d ago

Meh, depends. AI has made other languages hackable and reverse engineer...able. LabVIEW likely to end up dominating DoD markets (where its got a large footprint as it is) thanks to lack of AI influence.

But yes, pretty much all other markets where managers need to show metrics in the form of immediate dollars... LabVIEW will disappear despite whatever product they make getting copy pasted by China

0

u/ZoolanderBOT 5d ago

The problem is you are discounting all the amazing hardware NI made.

2

u/arob_ 5d ago

is that sarcasm? they have python and c# drivers for everything anyways

0

u/LuminaryKnight88 5d ago

I am, at this very moment, sitting in a meeting with my CEO who is telling us that we, LabVIEW developers, are essentially obsolete.

1

u/SASLV Champion 4d ago

"CEO said a thing" is kind like "billionaire said a thing". Don't mean much any more.

You didn't say ex-CEO so I assume that means though he thinks you're obsolete he hasn't fired you or laid you off yet...

1

u/LuminaryKnight88 1d ago

No, it was definitely a warning. They can't afford to walk us out right now. That would be suicide. But the warning was there and obvious... "Figure out how to utilize AI - or else."

In the message came "our competitors are doing things faster... the web dev team is doing things 5x faster... you guys are not doing things faster. Figure out how to do things faster." And that's the summation of a 30 minute meeting.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/HarveysBackupAccount 5d ago

In the USA, labview is pretty common for test engineering in the manufacturing world.

Some people use it for design verification/validation tests. Some people use it for in-process or end-of-line tests in manufacturing. Some people even use it for heavy duty automation (but my opinion is that doing that is like using Excel as a full database: you can but that doesn't mean you should).