All of the stuff this guy says. My dad's been running a robotics engineering
company -
http://www.primeengineering.net - for nearly as long as I can remember
(well, he worked for a company that was bought out by Siemens prior to that).
I've been inundated with the knowledge of what it takes to produce doohickeys at
scale, whatever those doohickeys may be, since I was like 5. It's fascinating,
and I wish more people were cognizant of all that goes into our modern society's
niceties.
When he installs new equipment, there's a sub-day shutdown usually, to install
massive lines of equipment into a warehouse. He's always busy on, say,
Christmas, because a warehouse can typically just barely manage to afford to
shut down for 16 hours on that day (or other holidays) since the warehouse
employees want to be at home with their families. If there are problems with
the installation (and there always are, because tolerances on everything are so
tight) then they have to be resolved right there in a crazy short timeframe.
I wrote some PLC software for him back right out of high school, to manage a
heat element for a shrink wrapping portion of a particular line. We got a
certain input from the other components in the line (so the spec said) to
specify how long we needed to run before cutting, in milliseconds. Their specs
lied, and they weren't sending us anything remotely like a serial data stream
specifying the time before cutting, so while everyone was installing the
hardware I had to derive from the data stream we could see what the timing
needed to be and 'test' it (more 'run some plastic and cut it and measure it'
tests than unit tests, yes?). It was super stressful, but it was also insanely
fun. Once the install was done (16 hours on the dot, loaded the code as the
timer ran out) the machinery started and has run uninterrupted for on the order
of 12 years now. Most people aren't aware that this is the sort of thing that
goes into modern manufacturing :)