Your profession ?

[Ripper]

I just had my 30 Year Anniversary at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory / California Institute of Technology. Rather mindblowing.

JPL has been a dream employer all these years, even if the jobs and compensation were sometimes mediocre. The people are what really makes it outstanding for me, although there are always selfish self-important ladder-climbers no matter where you work.

Definitely maximum points for JPL/Caltech.

 

[wolfgrimdark]

I can't recall if I ever said. I am a General Information Technologist at a public university for the graduate school college. Basically a jack of all trades master of nothing job. Been here 25 years now as I don't really have an ambitious bone in my body. As long as I make enough to eat, have shelter, get a nice computer, and take care of my dogs I am happy. That being said I started low on the pay scale and do nice now.

Hard to describe my job but I provide IT service to everyone in the graduate school office which is the Deans and Admissions area - that covers recruitment/marketing to graduation. Purchase and provide maintenance on all hardware and software for the office; admin, designer, and manager of our webserver and website; provide training and support on university software to office staff and help with some training to over 50 graduate departments; work a lot with SQL (various flavors of it), business intelligence, PHP, Tableau, and other tools to provide reports and data for internal and external offices and organizations; create and write programs in PHP and a little visual basic for various applications used by our office, applicants, and students relating to graduate school; project leader between our office and central IT resources; responsible for finding ways to automate or otherwise improve efficiency for office work; data steward for all graduate data at the university and member of the security team ... and probably a lot more I am forgetting.

Also last summer I was "promoted" (i.e. no change in salary or title although I did get a small merit one time bonus which was nice) to being the Supervisor of the admissions office and its staff. On top of the other stuff of course.

I have noticed a trend that comes with age and experience. I started off as primarily a programmer and report/data manager along with data entry in regards to admissions and students. Over-time started doing bigger projects, created and managed a website, and went to more meetings. Now I do mainly project guidance, tons and tons of meetings, much more administrative and supervisory work, and much less programming and actual IT work.

 

[Deleted User]

I definitely envy (that aspect of) people who've managed to find a job they're passionate about and feel is important work

I used to envy people who could stick to one thing forever. I don't now though. I've accepted that I'm just built differently. I like to dabble in different things. Usually it means not reaching the highest highs (according to others, of course) of one profession but it's all good.

 

[Zloth]

Computer programmer here - mostly Visual Basic which I've been doing since the VB3 days. Quite a bit of SQL work, too, and database designing. Also web pages but I really never liked those. Lately, I've been doing a lot of work with WPF and Bing Maps.

So Myrthos is a PM and we've got a bunch of programmers in here?? ROFL!

 

[Thrasher]

And one system engineer. Perfect.

 

[CelticFrost]

Cutting tool Specialist.

The long and short of is, I worked in a machine shop for 10 years estimating machining times of jobs.

Now travel to machine shops and recommend carbide tooling to go on their CNC machines to improve on machining time for the parts they are making. Being doing it now for 16 years and most likely will for another 20.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Software Developer here. Mostly back-end in .NET/C# and I dabble in C++ in my free time. I'm mostly working in my passion field, so I also enjoy doing it in my free time, that is when it doesn't conflict with just procrastinating on the internet or gaming.

 

[Caddy]

I originally went to school focusing my studies on becoming a lottery recipient. Then I learned the value of compound interest in an index fund. Now I just pretend to fix people's computers by day, and look for lost people on weekends.

 

[crpgnut]

Corporate BS as in not doing the job, but rather doing the meta meta meta (regulatory/process improvement/etc) stuff? I am thinking there is some growing overhead in this. Let's say 5 people do a job and it does not work well. What happens today is you one by one remove people from the doing side and in the end 4 people are process enhancers and do appointment related business including powerpoint problems, and one does the job. Maybe some slight exaggeration here
It's safe to say, compared with small companies, big companies are a weird and distorted paralell universe.

You've nailed it! In a 5-man project, 4 will attend meetings and presentations and the other person will work their ass off getting the job done, albeit late. The 4 people will get promoted and climb the corporate ladder, the poor slob who did all the real work will get the blame for the project being late but won't be fired because he'll be the worker bee on the next project too.

 

[Maylander]

Looks nice

Thank you! It's still behind the apps on both iOS and Android in terms of features, but that's because it was only started about a year ago. We'll get there.

Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks, and I do, for several reasons:
- I'm passionate about football
- I've spent the last 10 years or so going to all the meetings discussed in the posts above. Banks and insurance companies have all the corporate stuff you and others have mentioned, and there's none of that here. I answer directly to the CEO and only spend about 30-60 min per week on meetings.
- It still pays the same as banking/financing.

 

[purpleblob]

You've nailed it! In a 5-man project, 4 will attend meetings and presentations and the other person will work their ass off getting the job done, albeit late. The 4 people will get promoted and climb the corporate ladder, the poor slob who did all the real work will get the blame for the project being late but won't be fired because he'll be the worker bee on the next project too.

Definitely nailed it there. I'm that one poor sod doing all the work, while others get promoted for talking themselves up.

I. HATE. POLITICS. AND. MANIPULATION.

That's not my strength. My strengths are attention to detail and diligence but I never get a credit for it because I am bad at talking myself up/bragging about my work/make it sound like I am a wonder girl/Jesus/cure for cancer/whatever.

 

[Maylander]

Definitely nailed it there. I'm that one poor sod doing all the work, while others get promoted for talking themselves up.

I. HATE. POLITICS. AND. MANIPULATION.

That's not my strength. My strengths are attention to detail and diligence but I never get a credit for it because I am bad at talking myself up/bragging about my work/make it sound like I am a wonder girl/Jesus/cure for cancer/whatever.

It may work like that at big corporations, but at smaller companies it's much easier to see who does what and thus get the credit for whatever work you do. Going to some smaller company in growth might be the way to go if you want to build a career without having to use pointy elbows to get ahead.

 

[NewDArt]

I probably wrote something about my job and my attitude towards it already, but here's some detail if anyone cares:

I work for the biggest municipality in Denmark - and I know many around here seem to think our work is important. It is, in a way - because it's part of a huge system that's put in place to make life livable in Copenhagen.

Problem for me, though, is that I have a very low opinion of how people have chosen to structure society - and even if Denmark is established as the "happiest" place in the world, I still think it's a bad joke in terms of the potential. We might be very fortunate in terms of equality when contrasted with places like America - but, believe me, there's no shortage of corruption, sexism, racism or incompetent leaders around here.

Now, I'm not personally suffering in any way - but a lot of people are, and most people are quite affected by how we (consciously or not) divide people into classes or levels of value. I have the utmost lack of respect for that mindset - so I could never, ever, feel comfortable supporting a system that destructive.

Meaning, there's really no formal job I could hold that would make me satisfied or happy on the whole.

Like all systems governed and monitored by man - it's subject to the failings of man - and they are many and wide.

For my own part, I'm lucky in that I've been given an unusual amount of freedom and trust to do what I do, because I work in a relatively exclusive area (print management) - and of all the areas that are kept dry under the umbrella known as IT, printers and print management are largely unknown entities in terms of people having any kind of formal education in the field.

There's really no established course you can take that will teach you about printers - so the vast majority of people who deal with IT really have no understanding or - more importantly - interest in printers or how to manage them on a large scale.

This means my group (we call ourselves the print-server group) - is pretty much left to its own devices - because no one else around here can really tell what the hell we're doing anyway.

That suits me very well indeed, because I don't really work well with people telling me what to do - unless they really, really know what they're talking about - and that's very rare in my experience.

My salary is modest - but not terrible. I would earn at least twice what I earn if I was working in the private sector - if not three times as much.

But I despise the private sector and I could never function where money is king.

So, I make do with my privileges and freedom and I'm reasonably happy where I am, when the circumstances I mentioned above are kept in mind.

 

[purpleblob]

It may work like that at big corporations, but at smaller companies it's much easier to see who does what and thus get the credit for whatever work you do. Going to some smaller company in growth might be the way to go if you want to build a career without having to use pointy elbows to get ahead.

Yeah.. see I found that out hard way. I used to work at smaller corporation where I used to whine about not being paid high enough. I went through tough tests and interview to work at where I am now. Turns out I miss that smaller corporation. But I find it difficult to let go of my current job. For one, I only worked here for 6 months and considering I worked damn hard to get this position in first place, feels like its a waste to let of it so early

 

[Pladio]

I can't recall if I ever said. I am a General Information Technologist at a public university for the graduate school college. Basically a jack of all trades master of nothing job. Been here 25 years now as I don't really have an ambitious bone in my body. As long as I make enough to eat, have shelter, get a nice computer, and take care of my dogs I am happy. That being said I started low on the pay scale and do nice now.

Hard to describe my job but I provide IT service to everyone in the graduate school office which is the Deans and Admissions area - that covers recruitment/marketing to graduation. Purchase and provide maintenance on all hardware and software for the office; admin, designer, and manager of our webserver and website; provide training and support on university software to office staff and help with some training to over 50 graduate departments; work a lot with SQL (various flavors of it), business intelligence, PHP, Tableau, and other tools to provide reports and data for internal and external offices and organizations; create and write programs in PHP and a little visual basic for various applications used by our office, applicants, and students relating to graduate school; project leader between our office and central IT resources; responsible for finding ways to automate or otherwise improve efficiency for office work; data steward for all graduate data at the university and member of the security team … and probably a lot more I am forgetting.

Also last summer I was "promoted" (i.e. no change in salary or title although I did get a small merit one time bonus which was nice) to being the Supervisor of the admissions office and its staff. On top of the other stuff of course.

I have noticed a trend that comes with age and experience. I started off as primarily a programmer and report/data manager along with data entry in regards to admissions and students. Over-time started doing bigger projects, created and managed a website, and went to more meetings. Now I do mainly project guidance, tons and tons of meetings, much more administrative and supervisory work, and much less programming and actual IT work.

Interesting wolf. I think I understand your view about more meetings and less work.
It's happened relatively quickly for me in some ways, not because I am senior but because I moved to a bank with tons of processes unfortunately

 

[Maylander]

Yeah.. see I found that out hard way. I used to work at smaller corporation where I used to whine about not being paid high enough. I went through tough tests and interview to work at where I am now. Turns out I miss that smaller corporation. But I find it difficult to let go of my current job. For one, I only worked here for 6 months and considering I worked damn hard to get this position in first place, feels like its a waste to let of it so early

Ah yes, I understand, and I think I would also stick around a bit longer then. Hopefully, it'll look good on your CV.

 

[Pladio]

Cutting tool Specialist.

The long and short of is, I worked in a machine shop for 10 years estimating machining times of jobs.

Now travel to machine shops and recommend carbide tooling to go on their CNC machines to improve on machining time for the parts they are making. Being doing it now for 16 years and most likely will for another 20.

I did not know this job existed.
What type of cutting tools are we talking about ? Is it within automation systems ?

 

[Myrthos]

I actually work for a big company. There definitely is politics involved and sometimes you have to go with the flow, but at the company I work at it isn't as bad as some mention here. A downside is definitely the tendency for bureaucracy. The upside however is that there is a wide range of career opportunities and at least in our company you are somewhat encouraged to explore them and improve yourself. In that respect, what I have experienced is that although it is said that there are HRM people working with you on your career, they are not. They work for the company and their goals. Obviously this might differ in other big companies, they are not all the same I suppose, but I am the only person working on my career.
What I also notice in the big company I work for is that impression is everything. You might suck at your job, but as long as you give the impression to the relevant people that you are good at what you are doing, you can have a growing career in that
I never invested much time in career opportunities. I have been a bit of a slow grower in that aspect. I also believe that you can advance too much in your career and might end up at a position that might pay better, but that you actually don't like all that much.

 

[Pladio]

Definitely nailed it there. I'm that one poor sod doing all the work, while others get promoted for talking themselves up.

I. HATE. POLITICS. AND. MANIPULATION.

That's not my strength. My strengths are attention to detail and diligence but I never get a credit for it because I am bad at talking myself up/bragging about my work/make it sound like I am a wonder girl/Jesus/cure for cancer/whatever.

Aren't you doing flowers now ?

 

[Pladio]

I probably wrote something about my job and my attitude towards it already, but here's some detail if anyone cares:

I work for the biggest municipality in Denmark - and I know many around here seem to think our work is important. It is, in a way - because it's part of a huge system that's put in place to make life livable in Copenhagen.

Problem for me, though, is that I have a very low opinion of how people have chosen to structure society - and even if Denmark is established as the "happiest" place in the world, I still think it's a bad joke in terms of the potential. We might be very fortunate in terms of equality when contrasted with places like America - but, believe me, there's no shortage of corruption, sexism, racism or incompetent leaders around here.

Now, I'm not personally suffering in any way - but a lot of people are, and most people are quite affected by how we (consciously or not) divide people into classes or levels of value. I have the utmost lack of respect for that mindset - so I could never, ever, feel comfortable supporting a system that destructive.

Meaning, there's really no formal job I could hold that would make me satisfied or happy on the whole.

Like all systems governed and monitored by man - it's subject to the failings of man - and they are many and wide.

For my own part, I'm lucky in that I've been given an unusual amount of freedom and trust to do what I do, because I work in a relatively exclusive area (print management) - and of all the areas that are kept dry under the umbrella known as IT, printers and print management are largely unknown entities in terms of people having any kind of formal education in the field.

There's really no established course you can take that will teach you about printers - so the vast majority of people who deal with IT really have no understanding or - more importantly - interest in printers or how to manage them on a large scale.

This means my group (we call ourselves the print-server group) - is pretty much left to its own devices - because no one else around here can really tell what the hell we're doing anyway.

That suits me very well indeed, because I don't really work well with people telling me what to do - unless they really, really know what they're talking about - and that's very rare in my experience.

My salary is modest - but not terrible. I would earn at least twice what I earn if I was working in the private sector - if not three times as much.

But I despise the private sector and I could never function where money is king.

So, I make do with my privileges and freedom and I'm reasonably happy where I am, when the circumstances I mentioned above are kept in mind.

Large companies tend to employ other suppliers to do that work for them. It's usually called Managed Print Services who then put all of the "fancy" toys onto the system to ensure it works properly. Nuance's Safecom is one type of software that allows for print management and is one of the largest. Sometimes other companies such as Canon or HP would use their printers with Safecom.

https://www.nuance.com/print-capture-and-pdf-solutions/print-management-solutions/safecom.html

This usually helps in the management of paper and ink costs, which in turn ends up reducing power costs as well.
At my company now, they have reduced their printer estate by over 20%, same for paper and ink over the last 3 years.

Interesting thing about Procurement, is that I tend to work in a wide range of areas, including print management

I would certainly not consider myself an expert, but I'm sure I could hold my own in your team