I love it! I wish I could have some of those difficult projects. I've sadly been wearing down my curiosity and idealism in favor of pragmatism and economy for the last few years.
How do you find work where this quality of code is valued? I can produce an entire machine in a couple hundred hours of work that will make my client money for a decade until the product line is cancelled and the machine and the time and money I put into it is depreciated. In that couple hundred hours, there's some time for problem modeling and architecture considerations at the start, and usually at least one or two really hard problems where nothing off-the-shelf will work and you have to "make yourself one" that might take a few days each, but the vast majority of the time is just taking in business logic, translating it to code, and testing/documenting.
I treasure the times I get to solve an interesting problem or can develop a system that's beautiful and accurately models the system required. But the sad truth that I'm coming to understand is that in a non-software company you can get a lot done for not a lot of money by duct-taping together purchased components and copy-pasting a simple, versatile component a couple times. I believe there are businesses where this pragmatic approach won't work - there's not much done in the space yet, the project will live long enough and evolve so it needs to support rework, and you're somewhere between Google and a one-hit wonder. But industrial automation is not one of those businesses.
How do you find work where this quality of code is valued? I can produce an entire machine in a couple hundred hours of work that will make my client money for a decade until the product line is cancelled and the machine and the time and money I put into it is depreciated. In that couple hundred hours, there's some time for problem modeling and architecture considerations at the start, and usually at least one or two really hard problems where nothing off-the-shelf will work and you have to "make yourself one" that might take a few days each, but the vast majority of the time is just taking in business logic, translating it to code, and testing/documenting.
I treasure the times I get to solve an interesting problem or can develop a system that's beautiful and accurately models the system required. But the sad truth that I'm coming to understand is that in a non-software company you can get a lot done for not a lot of money by duct-taping together purchased components and copy-pasting a simple, versatile component a couple times. I believe there are businesses where this pragmatic approach won't work - there's not much done in the space yet, the project will live long enough and evolve so it needs to support rework, and you're somewhere between Google and a one-hit wonder. But industrial automation is not one of those businesses.