LabView vs LabWindows/CVI

[M37Eddie]

Having only about 6 years of LabView experience under my belt I must admit that I dont' have much knowledge of LabWindows/CVI.  Occasionally I will browse the careerbuilder & monster.com web sites to see what career opportunities and job openings there are for LabView programmers.  However it just seems like I happen to notice more job openings posted for LabWindows/CVI programmers rather than LabView folks in the geographical areas that I might be interested in.  I've even had more than one headhunter call me and ask me if I had any LabWindows/CVI experience even though my resume' clearly indicates that I do not.  In fact the latest recruiter who contacted me told me over the phone, "Oh, I rarely have any call for LabView programmers. It's mostly LabWindows/CVI."     One hiring manager told me during a phone interview, "We'd NEVER consider changing from LabWindows/CVI to LabView."  I hope I'm not guilty of trying to compare apples to oranges here but does LW have capabilities far superior to LV? (again I'm NOT LW/CVI literate at all)

Strictly for my own edification, does anyone know what the industry usage of LabView vs LabWindows/CVI is?  Is one more prevalent than the other?  Is there more of a demand for LW/CVI folks than LabView people?   Sometimes I seem to wonder whether or not I made a poor career choice by choosing the LabView route rather than going down the LabWindows/CVI path.  Is there any good comparison of the two products out there? (I haven't found one yet.)
 
I must confess that I've never had more fun programming than what I've enjoyed working with LabView. 

[jr_2005]

I work for the largest European Defence company, and it has looked at VEE, played with LabView, but standardised on CVI for test applications. It is just so powerful and flexible. From a military perspective, documentation and code maintainability is so much more important than in the commercial world and again this favours a conventional text based language in preference to a visual one.

Besides, Labview is just for college students, isn't it? Real programmers use CVI!

JR

[Ray.R]

hoooooo.....  jr_2005...

That's bold!  😉

I've worked with LabView, LabWindows-CVI and TestStand..

Personally, I prefer Labview.  It does why I need to do and fast!.  But... let's concentrate on your question:  Was Labview a good career choice.

If you want to work in the world of defence (integrators or bopard-level suppliers), they much prefer CVI.  Why?  I don't know.  They just didn't want LV.  Even when I showed them how fast LV can provide a solution.  They want something that anyone can modify in the future and that is standardized..  for instance ANSI-C, LabWindows-CVI...

However, in other tech sectors, they are happy with anything that will cost them less in the long run.. thus LV.

As a matter of fact, 75% of my contracts involved LV versus 25% CVI.  Don't let recruiters and Monster board influence your career.. well...  we do need jobs, don't we?  I've never had a job through those paths anyway..  Always (or mostly) word of mouth from personal networks..

Nevertheless, there are advantages to knowing CVI..  Especially when dealing with embedded people. 😉

RayR

[jyce]

It's been a while since this topic has not been discuss and i have question about that.

I'm investigatin Test Stand + LabWindow/CVI or LabVIEW in order to modernize automatic test procedure in my companie. I've been through basic tutorial for those three products. I have an extensive C background so on first hand i'm more seduced by an approach Test Stand + Labwindow. But my knoledge on those IDE is not really extended and i'm basicly wondering

- What is the most use ? Maybe depending on what industrie it adress.

- Is there one that provide a better integration with NI hardware and PXI racks than the other.

- Is it easy to design your own driver for LabVIEW

- A basic list of pro and cons would help me to understand the philosophy of those two products.

Thank you

Jc

[tbob]

Having recently worked for a defense contractor, I can give the main reason why CVI is preferred over Labview, at least from that company's perspective.  Code comparison.  You can use any diff tool on a text based language.  It is easy for a government auditor who knows nothing about programming or testing to use a diff tool on a text based code.  They can see that there is a difference or there isn't a difference.  Then they ask an expert to explain if the difference is good or not, or has caused a problem, or has been the culprit of a major catastrophy.  With Labview, they would need to enlist the help of a Labview guy to run the VI Compare utility.  Government auditors don't like this.  This reason alone supercedes all arguments about Labview being faster, more suited to test, and any other reasons one may come up with.  I think it is truly sad that something as trivial as a compare utility dictates CVI usage.  But isn't that par for our governement?

PS:  I have been employed in the Labview environment for over 25 years.  I keep getting calls from recruiters looking for someone with Labview experience.  When I had to switch jobs, I've had my choice of 2 or more jobs to choose from, even lately in this weak economy.  The jobs always involved Labview.  Even the defense contractor used some Labview.  So there is a big demand for Labview and it is a viable career choice.

[jyce]

I'm not looking at that matter on a career approach, i'm working in a big Avionic company and in order to reduce cost i'm assessing new means of test. I have the same feeling about you about the fact that version controls, and more important, requirment tracability is better in ANSI C. But i also need to take in account time to market, learning curves, and overall engineering cost.

[tbob]

Considering time to market, learning curve, and overall engineering costs, Labview beats CVI hands down.  I can write test apps much quicker in Labview than in CVI.  I've done both,  I know this for a fact.

[LV_Pro]

There would be a shallower learning curve to go to CVI with an extensive C background. The documentation/comparison arguements are also valid. I did work in the defense industry, for one of the largest in the world, and it has and is still using LabVIEW extensively on a number of projects. I in fact was the one to introduce it to the fairly large facility I worked at back in 1992. Recently, contracting to another company that was sub-contracting to "The Big One", I wrote much of the signal generation and shaping code for a sonar project using LabVIEW Real-Time and FPGA, something that would have been VERY much harder using C, would have involved VHDL coding or Verilog, to accomplish. It was supposed to be a 3 person 6 month project, ended up being a 1 person 7 month one, but if I had to write a realtime replacement in C, etc., that had parts running on an FPGA it would have taken me longer (even when my VHDL/Verilog/C++ skills were sharp).

Not apples to oranges.

[jyce]

So besides, comparison/documentation according two you guys Labview is more efficient. So what was the point of National Instrument to come up with CVI ?

[tbob]

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@jyce wrote:

So besides, comparison/documentation according two you guys Labview is more efficient. So what was the point of National Instrument to come up with CVI ?

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To satisfy government contractors.