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Devs/programmers/geeks/etc: If you get paid to work with/in tech, what do you do and do you enjoy it? Why or why not?
I'm a recent cs grad considering where I want to work in the vast field of technology. I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who love what they do. Thanks!
LOL. You won't want to hear from me, but you will anyway.
I'm a software developer with 20 years experience, currently specializing in .NET, SQL Server, and ASP.NET for my sins. It pays the bills, but it's basically a bullshit job that exists only to make rich assholes richer.
If working as a janitor paid as much as my current job does, I'd go back to mopping floors and cleaning toilets in a heartbeat. Unlike most software development work, sanitation work is actually necessary, and I'm cleaning up after other people either way.
I'm currently studying to get Linux+ certification in the hope that sysadmin work won't feel quite as pointless.
I worked in an enormous multinational for a while, and this was precisely my experience. I literally remember having the same thoughts about "at least cleaners are improving things for other people". The stress and misery put me in the hospital.
For what it's worth, moving to a tiny startup was a huge positive change for me. There's no such thing as perfect, and I took a substantial pay cut - but I make decisions, debate with people who actually care about what they're doing, and build things that I can be proud of.
I have quite literally refused to go back even for 4x the money.
I'm an Android developer. I like it a lot. Lots of interesting problems to solve all the time. Also compensation for mobile devs right now is fairly good.
What first attracted me to mobile development was being able to show people what I worked on. That was impossible when I was working on back-end server software.
Me too. The great part is also just the "tactile response" from the software you make. Mobile apps can be interacted with more directly than most other software, you can carry them in the pocket and access them whenever you wish.
I work in VR gaming as a backend engineer. I make the servers do things. I love my job. I work for a small startup with ~25 people. Every week my job changes. I work on Kubernetes, AWS, the ELK stack and code in Go, Python, shell, and/or Groovy (Jenkins Java-esque abomination). My company doesn't make any games but instead makes a VR game viewing platform (PM me for more information - I don't want to clog this post) so I don't have to deal with gaming "crunch".
Early stage startup - at heart I'm a back end developer, but the nature of the job means I'm an everything developer.
It's often stressful, lower paid than other options (albeit with the chance of a big payday in the future), and carries a huge weight of responsibility - for myself, for the product, and for the rest of the team who are also betting on our success. There's always a possibility that the company won't make it. And there's very little that could convince me to give it up!
I get to play with all kinds of different tech, the steep learning curve is a genuine necessity to get the product out there, and everyone around me is just as excited and motivated about what we're doing as I am. There's almost no paper-pushing because we don't have the scale to need it, nor the resources to waste unless absolutely necessary. We make decisions, build things, and send them out into the world.
I have to echo every last bit of this.
I'm back-end, occasionally front-end, always sysadmin and DBA, architect, and everything in between. I've even had to manually upgrade an out-of-date (but pretty fantastic) back-end framework so that an up-to-date database driver could be used in place of the legacy driver that the framework was originally built around.
It can all be pretty overwhelming, but it's exciting and I'm completely willing to take on the risk :)
I work in health IT doing data analysis. I'd call myself a data scientist but frankly most of what I do is very simple analysis - the challenge is more often getting to the data than it is doing complicated analysis. Healthcare has plenty of money and honestly not a lot of talent. There can be a large barrier to entry, in that especially for data analysis they will want you to be certified in some fashion (usually in the EHR if not some other certification). But you get fairly good healthcare, great benefits, and amazing pay.
Being vague for anonymity, I write programs that assist with manufacturing. It's very inconsistent in scope, one day I'm making a web app to monitor some process and the next I'm interfacing with some code from the 70's written in an obscure dialect of fortran. The pay isn't amazing as far as dev jobs go, but it works for me a student. I have nice flexible hours and don't have to deal with the silicon valley libertarian tech-bro shit. I do not particularly enjoy it, but I'm also of the opinion that there aren't many jobs in the current economic system you can enjoy.
I work for a pretty big company working on some very old software and outdated languages.
It's not too bad, and the pay is good. I definitely still like working in the field, but still not 100% sold on this specific job.