Your profession ?

Although a bunch of us are in the IT field, we certainly work for massively different companies. I could make a whole lot more money if I moved to Toff's neighborhood, but I like St. Louis too much. Family is here for the most part and getting older; including me

I am a contract IT strategist/enterprise architect (based in Melbourne, Australia) basically translating what the business vision/objectives are for medium & large organisations into a appropriate future state and how they might get there. The hours vary, I am currently away from home (in Perth, Australia) so the hours go up a bit.
My gaming time isn't impacted by my projects/work but what I play is, similar for my reading. So at the moment most of my thinking is on the client project so I am replaying games such as tomb raider (at easiest setting and a full with walk through open alongside), ME2/3 again at easiest settings. For my reading things like Witcher book translations rather than others like Thinking Fast & Slow!

Software engineer for the past 11-12 years. Mostly RnD for the last 4-5 (CTO's office staff they tell me).

Single so there should theoretically be plenty of time to game...
(1-2 hours in reality if I have any energy left after work and walking home and exercising and chores. I usually do if I am really into what I am playing at the time)

At least I get my fill in weekend mornings and evenings

Let's see:

1980: Finished med. school and spent a couple of years as a general practioner. Discovered that I didn't like working as a doctor. I REALLY didn't like it, so I had to rethink what I wanted to do with my life.

1992: Master's degree in computer science.

In between I spent several years teaching anatomy and patholøogy to nurse-wannabes. I also revisited medicine, training to become a radiologist in 1998. Found out I didn't like that too much either. I liked examining pictures, but not utrasound and other procedures with direct patient contact. I've come to realise, I don't like working with people.

So when our local IT department (a company serving and owned by a group of 10 hospitals in the western part of Norway) needed someone to maintain our newly acquired PACS/RIS system (digital radiology), I switched in 2000, and I've been there since. I no longer work directly with PACS/RIS, concentrating on developing software integration solutions and standards for information exchange between health care systems (based on HL7).

These days it's a 8-16 job, my children left home long ago, so I have ample time for gaming, only hampered by the wife and other interests.

EDIT: And in 8 years I'm probably retired, just in time for Elder Scrolls 7 or Fallout 5

pibbur who no longer considers himself a doctor with a degree in informatics, but an informaticist with medicine.

Incident Manager in the "Printserver group" at a place called Koncernservice - which is basically where all the IT support for Copenhagen county happens (not sure if county is the correct term, but in danish it's called "kommune"). But I'm really just a 2nd or 3rd line supporter who's responsible for our incidents getting resolved or visited on time. I also have a lot of other responsibilities, but it's not something I'm getting paid extra for.

I'm sort of responsible for the structure of the print solution in Copenhagen county (which involves more than 3000 printers), basically because not a lot of people know or care about printers. I don't either, really - but someone has to make the calls.

The great thing about my job is the level of freedom our little 4-man group has. Again, because people tend to stay far, far away from everything that has to do with printers - and it's not really something that's a part of most formal educations related to IT. This gives us a lot of independence and we essentially call the shots for the most part, which is just my thing.

Otherwise, it's a standard IT (yawn) job.

IT for about 16 years. I do a minimum of 6-7 hours gaming a day, most of the time of which I am billing the company I work for. If I worked harder I would probably be in a better position and earning more but I earn a reasonable amount to support myself (just over 110k usd) and I value my gaming time more than a higher salary.

A lot of IT / Software here!

I design GUI's. That includes user experience, information design and visual design / art direction. It's pretty long hours and no payed overtime as is the norm in any design shop. I really like the work but I'm a bit burned out on the amount of hours, trying to manage that by taking on less responsibilities at work. We'll see how that works out.

I play games on the train on my commute for 45 min in the morning and 45 min in the evening. Mostly indie games recently since they are usually less demanding system wise and play well on a laptop. All my "freetime" goes to hanging out with my son, wife and dog. Every once in a while I'll stay up late and game at night if there is a new amazing game that I'm playing. You know when you have that new game feeling where everything is super exciting and you can't stop playing. That doesn't happen all too often these days though. It takes more to impress me these days.

IT area, originally even half programmer, half systems administrator (German : "IT-Fachinformatiker"), currently unemployed, starting an "occupational rehabilitation" in April.
Will probably take until the end of this year, then it's the question whether to remain in IT or go into something different.

I'm a military sociologist by trade, but I haven't worked as one for roughly 18 years now. At the company I'm with I have worked as an HR specialist with a focus on IT (time management applications and SAP including helpdesk and systems administration), later I switched to corporate communications as the editor-in-chief of the corporate image magazine. Due to our corp dying in small increments over the course of the last few years I had to switch business areas and ended up in the - well, no surprise here - IT department, where I'm the CRM and SharePoint sys admin, systems analyst and 2nd lvl support guy when I'm not dabbling in SAP projects.
Since most stores are gone by now, I don't have much to do anymore: the less people play with my systems, the less stuff breaks.

With a family, kid and dog I still don't have too much gaming time anymore - just Wednesday and Thursday nights, when hubby the Tai Chi trainer is not home. Currently I use this time for playing SWTOR or taking part in another SF MMORPG's closed beta. But I'm really happy my son took up real roleplaying (i.e., pen & paper) along with hubby and our old GM.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Will probably take until the end of this year, then it's the question whether to remain in IT or go into something different.

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Join us in the underpaid world of fun work! Join us. Join us!

bjon045 said:

IT for about 16 years. I do a minimum of 6-7 hours gaming a day, most of the time of which I am billing the company I work for. If I worked harder I would probably be in a better position and earning more but I earn a reasonable amount to support myself (just over 110k usd) and I value my gaming time more than a higher salary.

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110k sounds like a lot for being able to game on the job....

Depends on where you live, Pladio. Some areas of the States pay a much higher salary than others. That's a fairly standard salary where I work, but we don't get to game. I wouldn't have time anyway, even if it was allowed. We're typically undermanned.

Military vet on the GI Bill. Will probably go looking for a part-time job next year but still enjoying the free time for now.

I'm a teacher at a language school for immigrants. And 10 years ago I had much more time to play games, not so today. The only times I have time to play games nowadays seem to be during Easter Break and during Summer Break.

University lecturer in electronics - been lecturing for 15 years after getting my PhD in magnetic recording.

It is a full day job that you take home with you, as I have to balance teaching, research and administration. Coupled with my wife and two children, I hardly have the time to play games, particularly long rpgs.

So I only play on my 10 year old working laptop when I find some time, so I currently play old games.

SpoonFULL said:

So I only play on my 10 year old working laptop when I find some time, so I currently play old games.

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Sounds familiar . I carry a stick with some old favorites* with me all the time so I can have some USB gaming goodness on my notebook whenever I find the time .

*currently the Catacomb and Blake Stone series, Ultimate Doom/Doom 2/Final Doom, Heretic/Hexen/Deathkings, CyClones and Strife. Would love to install Shadowcaster and Cybermage as well, but I doubt that the latter (which was a fickle and quite buggy game) would run.

Menigal said:

Join us in the underpaid world of fun work! Join us. Join us!

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If it wasn't so grim I'd say "lol".

But the thought to go into "something different" also means the whole direction. I might end up as ab Bibiothecary.

On a regular basis I have an uninspiring but non-demanding IT support job taking 6.5h of my day. Every now and then I teach caregivers at a school in IT and theory of communication. I'm a Sysadmin for a 80 ppl staff but not often present... Not necessary, my systems WORK But that will end this year because of centralization and thinclients.
I play 1-2 hrs a day, max. My wife hates gaming and so do all my family, gaming is seen as time wasting bullshit for kids.

I'm a scientist and I work in a science lab with microscopes, computers and beakers. Sometimes I do ground breaking research, sometimes I invent things using the scientific method. I know a thing or two about science, so if you have any questions about it look no further, and just ask away!!!

I am a statistician and optical measurement engineer. I have a EE/optical physics background, but quickly realized that most people are good at creating piles of data but idiots at analyzing ... so I completed my statistics courses and have graduate degrees in statistics and optical engineering.

For the past 6 years I've been at Corning working in a corporate engineering area, mostly on projects between research and engineering phases. These have included many things that have been released commercially, several 'killed' projects, some put back on the shelf and so on. I like Corning because they spend 10% of their money on R&D, whereas most companies spend ~2-6% ...