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votes
What do you actually do at work?
I’m a young student, and I’m going to start 6th form in 2 weeks (taking maths, further maths, physics and computer science). With this approaching change to my life, I realised that soon I will have to make large decisions which will affect my future career. Despite this, I have little knowledge of what most people do day to day for their jobs, with my knowledge practically limited to a basic understanding of my mother’s work.
For my sake, and that of any other young tildes users, could you explain, without any assumption of previous understanding, what you do at your job, and what that involves.
I'm just making the assumption that you're looking for comments from people who work in office settings considering the demographics here, but I'm gonna reply specifically to your
I have a Bachelors in political science and was on my way to becoming a high school teacher.
Instead, I work in heating and air, with zero mechanical skill prior to getting into the trade. I make twice what I would have as a teacher, and put a number of techs I've met over the years to shame despite doing this 1/4 as long as they have.
What I'm getting at is, the decisions you make may have a large impact on your career, but they also may not. Don't feel like what you're deciding now puts your life on a fixed road.
I have already changed careers a few times in my life (I’m only 33) and now make a living off having this very varied experience. I completely agree with you. I’ll elaborate if anyone’s interested but you’ve said the essence of it.
I would love to hear what you do and how you got to where you are. I've tended to get hired based on past experience not transferable skills
I started self learning programming when I was 10, my first real software was WoW addons which later turned into WoW online databases. From there I did a lot of software freelancing, small jobs, lots of varied bits and pieces in different fields.
At 24 I founded my first startup and spent three years doing data analytics in Hearthstone. This was the most formative moment of my career because it taught me how to do cloud infrastructure, big data analysis, IAC, etc. But due to the need of wearing many hats, I also did the company’s books and learned bookkeeping, double entry and its software principles, etc.
After this I did CTO consulting and ended up doing it for a (now defunct) startup doing a stock trading app. I joined in their Techstars program and helped fundraising, we did a brief b2b stint there as well.
And since then I reconverted purely to management (mainly because code burns me out). I do startup coaching and created a startup accelerator. I’m opening a fund as well now (for Ukrainian startups, to help win the war). But thanks to what I learned that was “out of scope” of my earlier jobs, I know enough to not need a lawyer or an accountant for most things that usually would. This makes many things insanely simpler and faster: just like a good software engineer can quickly know whether something is technically feasible, I also can quickly know whether something is legally and financially feasible.
So now I run a few companies, help fundraise, coach, assist technical founders in administrative matters, assist nontechnical founders in tech, and do my best not to burn out. I think having touched a bit of everything is by far the best thing I’ve done for my career.
This is perfect advice for young people. What you're describing is something that doesn't get enough attention, in my opinion. The society I live in, is so focused on getting on the "best" career track, I don't think many realize there are plenty of options to follow different routes.
Just to echo your experience: I've worked in different spaces and met a lot of people from different backgrounds. There are a lot of Master's degrees making fine woodwork, there are people with very unrelated degrees working in software, you'll find them in auto shops, etc.
I'm a little envious of your job. I started in trades and moved to software, but I sometimes wonder if I should switch back again. I'm in a comfortable role, which is great, but I often miss the fun I had working with my hands and meeting interesting people. My current day-to-day is a lot of talking and dealing with corporate nonsense. Maybe I'm mostly missing meeting people from different backgrounds.
My career trajectory is another classic example of how you start out thinking you've optimized your education for career X, but wind up doing Y, Z, A, J, Q, N, K... and then they all come together in a glorious alphabet soup.
Economics and life happen to the best laid plans, your interests may take abrupt turns that surprise you, opportunities arise that you can't even imagine.
I would love to hear about how you made this pivot. While my current retail management job is great, I am on borrowed time and will likely be laid off within the year so I am looking for options and HVAC has always interested me.
So personally I started at an HVAC school, but I don't usually recommend this to people. Most schools from talking to coworkers are all bookwork, whereas my school was very hands on.
After that I got started with a guy who worked with his son out of his garage doing new construction housing. I worked there for about a year, and that was what I needed to get my foot in the door in the industry. It's very hard to find a company right now that's willing to hire somebody green, and the entire industry will be shooting itself in the next 10 years or so because of it. If you can find somebody just looking for a helper at a small time gig, that's your best bet.
Avoid companies that put a lot of money into marketing. Avoid the billboard companies. Avoid any companies associated with Nexstar. They won't teach you how to be a tech, just a sales guy pretending to be a tech.
Once you have a year of experience anywhere, job hunting becomes infinitely easier.
I want to add my own experience to this to share how incredibly true this statement is. As a middle aged adult who was impacted by the layoffs we had over the last few years, I attempted to get a job for an HVAC company and was laughed at by virtually every local company I talked to. Several of them thought I was an influencer on TikTok and was trying to scam them somehow.
I even went so much as offered to work for free (due to my savings and a long runway--I knew of my layoff well ahead of time) to learn the trade and no one took me up on it.
The few times I had in person interviews, they couldn't believe that a 38 year old dude was trying to get into this trade. Multiple companies discouraged me from continuing the interview.
I have too many funny/sad/terrible stories to share but that's a topic for another time. Oh and this wasn't only my experience with HVAC companies, it was pretty much every trade-company in my city (think plumbers, carpenters, etc.).
That’s so disappointing to hear. I feel like someone walking into any trade at that age is a fantastic opportunity that it looked like they missed out on.
My dad is an electrician and the one time I’ve heard him talk about apprentices was to wish he came across more mature age people wanting to get into the trade. He’s had plenty of apprentices over the years, almost all of them from immediately after high school.
The one mature apprentice he ever had, ended up getting their qualification nearly a year early (I think it’s usually a 4-year apprenticeship) because he was completely switched on and motivated, he knew what he wanted. My dad only had to teach him how to be an electrician, without the extra requirement of teaching young adults how to be responsible employees and contractors and sole traders.
It certainly was just as disappointing to experience this.
What made it worse, or what still makes it worse, is that people all over the place keep recommending this, every other article about layoffs recommends "getting in the trades," every day there is a post on hacker news about how more people need to "get into the trades," it's on this site, it's on every site. People keep telling others to do it. But unfortunately, the reality is none of these people telling others to get into trades have any experience and only recommend it just for the sake of recommending it, it seems.
Having said all that, what I've heard from about 12-15 different people who are in trades or who used to be in trades, is that business owners, your local plumber who runs his own business, or your local dry wall installer who runs his own business, etc., those business owners don't want to hire a 38 year old dude because they can't abuse him. They know that an 18 year old or a 19 year old isn't going to complain too much about not getting paid overtime. Or they know an 18 or a 19 year old has no experience to know that 0 paid time off is terrible. They know that an immigrant who speaks no English doesn't even know how to read a paycheck, let alone how to report a business to their local labor department. So, why would you hire a 38 year old dude who's got 20 years of working experience, who could get you in trouble for not paying overtime or for not even paying them the hours they worked, when you can hire a 19 year old or an immigrant and work them hard for a year or two and then replace them with another 18 year old or with another immigrant who just arrived here?
Not saying your electrician dad would do this, but enough people likely would, and based on my attempt at getting a job in trades, something is definitely up.
I had a conversation with a current coworker who used to repair floors when he was younger. I was telling him my experience and he told me he'd never go back to trades. He thinks back on that time and wonders why he never complained that their bosses for not providing them masks while sanding floors. He thinks back on all the messed up paychecks that the bosses kept promising to correct but never did.
I don't know how much, if any of it really, is true, but I can totally see it now that I've gone through 25 interviews/conversations with local tradespeople trying to get a job.
You know, thinking back on it, I think my dad’s attitude is what set him apart and fuelled his (modest) success. For all my life at least, he’s always worked in a small town, so word would get around about his work, and most of the jobs he got were from repeat customers or word of mouth.
He was never interested in cheaper labour like you’ve described because he spent so much effort and time on building a positive reputation. He was more expensive than some other local tradies, but with that came guarantees — if he installed something and there were issues with his installation, he’d come back and fix it on his own dollar and not charge for the follow-up. Sometimes this would even be years later — I remember one time he had a customer call up to complain water was coming in through their ceiling, and when he went out to check, he realised he missed something when weatherproofing something or other from years prior, so he patched it up on the spot and told the customer to have the water damage repaired and send him the bills. It cost him a few grand at the time, but he always said long term reputation was worth more than money.
All that said, I hope you can get trained up in the trades you want, and out-compete all the scumbag businesses in your area.
I’ve been a union industrial mechanic at a chemical plant for 12 years (worked at this plant for 17 now). Without typing for the rest of the day basically I do the work of every major trade. Some examples are welders, pipe fitters, millwright, crane operator, insulating and cladding pipe/tanks, carpentry, sheet metal work, machining and emergency response. Every quarter of the workday 5 days/week I could be doing anything of those trade or combination. Could be performing a hazardous line break or welding an exotic metal pipe. Insulating a 60000 gallon storage tank or replacing a 800 lb PD pump. Literally hundreds of different tasks. I love the variety. My company sent us to a technical school for a few years but honestly the best training was hands on.
This sounds AMAZING. Are you working mostly solo or are you in a crew? What are the people you work with like? What is their background? I'd love to hear a lot more about your job, if you don't mind sharing.
I’m in a department of 16 mechanics divided into two halves of the plant (used to be more but the company is refusing to fill retiree vacancies at the moment). Typically work in pairs but some jobs require 4 or more due to scope of job or equipment needed. Being a union job there’s definitely a sense of brother/sisterhood in the sense that together we can push issues through that are 1) safety related or 2) labor related (contract violation, unfair labor practice etc). We’re all mostly buddies but you get that many people together there’s obviously personality conflicts at times. We all started as swing shift working chemical operators who ran reactors, pressure leaf filters, loaded/unloaded rail cars and tanker trucks or loaded/unloaded drums. Those of us that wanted straight day shift bad enough and were mechanically inclined bid the maintenance dept..
Once we were awarded the bid we were sent to school for 3 years (company paid tuition and hours/mileage to go). In school for industrial maintenance we were taught about pipe fitting, welding, rigging, hydraulic systems etc.. As I said above the hands on experience was better because there were times we corrected the instructors lol.
If there’s anything otherwise you’d like me elaborate on let me know. Having been at this for a while now I’m sure there’s stuff I’m glossing over because it’s routine to me.
I'm a manager. Which means I talk. A lot. I also communicate non verbally. Emails. Texts. I spend an inordinate amount of time preparing to communicate. Slides. Research in preparation for all the talking I am about to do, usually. There is obviously a lot more going on, but if you were to observe me, without any deep understanding of my job, you would simply see someone who talks a lot. And that is the life of a manager. You figure out which of the 2-3 meetings is most important to attend during the next hour, and you attend it... if it's the sort of meeting where others do all the talking, then you don't really listen, because you are too busy emailing and slacking... if it's the sort of meeting where you do the talking, then all I do is listen and talk, because I can't multi task well.
I think your deeper question is how the fuck do you decide what subjects to take and what Uni to choose and what speciality to major in and what jobs to apply for... And I think the answer is simply which subjects seem the most interesting to you and the most likely to lead to a well paying career. You could major in Computer Science if you love programming. If you love computers and hate programming you could focus on Management Science and Information Systems. I did the latter. Then I took whatever jobs I could get. I worked in technical support, I worked as a dev and a dev lead, I worked as a product manager, now I am a people manager.
GPU architect.
Basically, I work on trying to come up with ideas for how to do certain kinds of graphics more efficiently, balancing power and area. Often these ideas involve taking advantage of things that are easy to do in special purpose hardware but wouldn't be efficient to do in software on a general purpose processor. Then I write the code to model these in simulation, run simulations to test them in various configurations against workload traces captured from various games, build spreadsheets to analyze the estimated uplift or detriment from the simulations, and try to determine how worthwhile the idea is and maybe see if there's a configuration sweet spot. If something looks good then I'll write it up and consult with the folks who work more on the silicon side to confirm how practical it might be to actually implement. Depending how much the idea also needs software support, there may also be a conversation with driver teams, game studios, and/or standards bodies. In short, I try to help make a broad swath of the video games you play look great with maximum FPS and/or minimum power draw on next-gen hardware. (Education: Ph.D. in CS, focusing on graphics.)
I'm a programmer in games development.
I read code to feedback on it or just understand how it works, understanding how it works is important for the next step. I write code, this is rarely completely new projects, so the previous step of understanding the existing code is crucial. I try debug problems in the code so that we can fix them.
I also sit in meetings to talk about features we want to implement, mostly about the code aspect, but can also be about design or feedback on planning or most anything in the process. I also sit in meetings listening and talking about our development process. And there's planning meetings.
For us not living where you live, what age is 6th form?
17ish?
Thanks! In that case, to echo ACEmat:
At that age I thought I was gonna be a chemist, but I switched gear a couple of years later. Things may not be as final as they feel now.
Location: South Carolina, United States
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering
Starting Salary: $66,600 (2018 USD)
Current Salary: $95,000 (2024 USD)
I work for a Department of Energy contractor at a major nuclear site. I recently changed roles. For my previous role, I oversaw several systems and programs for a spent fuel basin. It involved tracking and trending water conditions (mostly with Excel), reviewing procedure changes and new procedures, doing waste calculations, and coordinating sample shipments. I also gave presentations on system health for these systems/programs. I would also go on field walkdowns to support these activities and check the system condition.
In my new role, I’m doing process modeling for surplus plutonium management, mostly using Simio. I may learn other software for the role. I also work a bit on automation/robotics, although I’d like to avoid getting too deep into that. This new job is ~95-99% office, unlike the last one.
When I graduated with my degree, I had no idea I’d end up in the nuclear sector; my senior project had been on electrochemical cells. I really enjoy it! The work is stable, necessary, and generally not high stress. I’m in a lower cost part of the country. I do maintain a security clearance, which can be off-putting for some.
Can I ask what you mean by that? I initially thought “other people hear that you have a security clearance, and immediately think less of you” but that doesn’t seem right... my second thought was “maintaining a security clearance is a pain in the arse for some people, so other people might not want your career path for that reason, but you don’t mind it” which also doesn’t quite seem right?
The latter. You have reinvestigations, you need to keep track of your foreign friends, you have to notify Personnel Security ahead of foreign travel, weed or shrooms are no-nos, there’s psychological evaluations, sometimes (but not for me) you have polygraphs. All of this can be enough for some prospective applicants to say “fuck that”, which means the government/contractors end up chronically short of folks.
I've spent the past 11 years as a locksmith. My daily work included unlocking locked stuff, getting stuff that wouldn't lock to lock properly, making keys using various machines and techniques, and installing new lock hardware. There is of course much more detail to offer, but in general I started each day with a calendar full of jobs to get to. At each one I would primarily be finding out what the customer actually needed/wanted, as most people don't have a much deeper knowledge of locks beyond "it's not working right anymore." Once I figured out the actual issue/desired outcome, I would work to resolve/accomplish it or help the customer understand the limits of the products involved to find a solution that was within their budget but satisfied their goals. A lot of the job was really just looking at mechanical puzzles and trying to figure out how they were supposed to work and why they weren't working at that moment. It was very satisfying work.
However, locksmithing also includes a lot of talking to impatient people who don't understand what it is you do but think they could do it better and cheaper than you can. They won't, of course. They just want you to do it cheaper, with "it" being a nebulous idea of "just make it work, it can't be that hard!" That part was frustrating, but it is a frustrating part of many people's jobs and often really can't be avoided much.
I've very recently made a bit of a fortuitous career change into instructing locksmiths that I am very excited about, but I don't yet know enough of the day-to-day work to offer a clear summary. But so far it has been quite a refreshing change of pace, with much of the work being focused on developing tools and editing presentations to update the curriculum and correct errors.
Before all of that I worked retail, running cash registers and stocking shelves and the like. I was pursuing a degree in linguistics at the time, and was quite certain that my future career was to be academic in nature. (A very helpful conversation with a linguistics professor convinced me to drop out of college, actually.)
Before I'd decided on linguistics, when I was about your age, I had teachers trying to convince me to pursue maths in college, but I preferred language studies and dreamed of copy editing.
Before that, as a child, I wanted to be an inventor.
Decades later, I'm working as an inventor and a copy editor for at least parts of my workday. Despite having no formal degree, I'm doing (in part) jobs I'd dreamed of but put no planning toward. I got lucky, sure, but I also was open to opportunities as they arose and it has paid off so far.
My point, like others in this comment section have said, is that plans are good to have for the purpose of driving you forward, but don't get too freaked out if it feels as if your life isn't conforming to them. There are many surprising paths to happiness or success or career fulfillment, and it is the extremely rare exception for a person to decide in their teens or earlier what they will do and then be correct about it. And yes, the decisions you make have long-reaching consequences. But the tricky thing is, you never know which decisions will have the greater consequences. My choice of college ended up not really mattering. Both times I chose a college, actually. But talking to that customer changed my career path, and talking to this client changed my educational goals, and going to that seminar got me the meeting that gave me a whole new career. You can't know which decisions are the turning points. You can just try your best and hope for the best while moving forward with open eyes and an open mind.
Good luck!
Nifty. We once had a locksmith over to our new house to take care of an inside door we couldn't open (a bathroom door that seemed to keep self locking, this time with a young child who could push the door closed but couldn't yet turn the handle). I remember watching as the locksmith popped that thing open like it was nothing, explained that the previous owners or someone had installed the wrong kind of lock on that door (meant for a storage closet, not a bathroom), and then offered to replace it for us, which we gratefully accepted. I think the total length of the housecall was less than five minutes, but it really felt like watching a master magician at work. (The old door knob almost seemed to melt away with how quickly he removed it.)
I have a ton of respect for anyone skilled in a professional trade! You people can be amazing when doing your craft.
Thank you for the kind words! I always felt a bit like a magician doing tricks (in a good way) when I was in the field, especially when the customers seemed extra amazed. Always made my day!
I tried replacing a door knob and it was a terrible experience.
Your work is nothing short of magic and it's so fun to see your user name :D
Question: I've heard that door locks are basically security theatre when it comes to break ins, would you agree? Also are digital number pad type locks as good as key locks? Not the phone app type digital ones, I mean the ones with physical squish buttons.
First of all, thanks! Flattery will get you everywhere :)
As for the security theater: yeah, kinda. The goal of a decent lock for the average residential user should be to make it annoying enough to defeat quietly that the average criminal would rather break something than learn how to do it all sneaky-like. It won't keep someone out, but hopefully it will slow them down a bit and make it obvious that something went down. Note, however, that a little skill and money can open many common locks while leaving minimal trace, so don't neglect having an alarm or cameras or whatever other security measures are appropriate to the level of security you desire.
As for the digital locks: it varies. Many tech/app companies are trying to make locks with no institutional knowledge of lock making, and it shows. Several "locks" on the market can be defeated by magnets or screwdrivers from outside without leaving a trace. This is bad. I would opt for a digital lock from a company that has been making locks first, ideally for decades or more. Mine is a Yale (which has, to be fair, been bought several times as a brand over the years) touchscreen lock that works really well and seems secure enough to me. Certainly more secure than the window to which it is adjacent. My opinion is (in the US) to go for Yale, then Schlage, then Kwikset if you really need to save the money. But the Yale and Schlage options are better, and they make commercial hardware along the same lines so they tend to know what they're doing more than other brands.
I am a fiction writer currently working under a government grant for arts and literature. So my job at the moment is writing, but there are lots of other things related to writing that I have to do as well. Mainly research, which is basically studying references from movies and other books. I know that sounds like a dream, and I kinda agree. But, of course, watching and reading what I want when I want is very different than doing it as research. And I'm never really on a break, I'm always worried and thinking about the book. There's also the constant planning an outlining, so actually writing is only one of many tasks. I like writing during the night when everyone's asleep and my street is calm and serene. Ideally I would write between midnight and 6am but that is not always possible.
Oh, there's also dealing with government bureaucracy which can be stressful.
What sort of book are you working on? Have you written a book before? Any shorter fiction?
I have been writing short stories since I was 12. This is my first book. It is a science fiction largely inspired by Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the book it is based on. The main difference between my book and most Alien possession/replacement stories is that my character is ambivalent towards the idea of being assimilated -- it is really meant to reflect my own ambivalence towards belonging to groups and society altogether, as I am often torn between the desire to belong and the fear of losing my autonomy. Possible keywords would be "paranoia" and "identity loss" . The idea for this book started with this short story that I shared in a few places last year. I am in the process of rewriting that story, and will probably share the new version on Tildes when it is done.
I'm a high school teacher in Quebec.
Daily life of a teacher is very chaotic, although a high school teacher is more simply structured than an elementary school one.
I have about 3 75-min classes every day, in a 4 classes/day schedule, split in the middle by the dinner. Some schools have 3 classes in the morning, but they start way earlier (7h45-8 am) than I do (9h30-45).
Every day I go to my desk, read/answer emails, make sure I have planned the right course for the right class, go to my class, greet students, announce future exams/homeworks, explain today's class, teach, supervise work, end class and repeat x3.
Outside of class it's writeup students if something bad happened, contact parents, follow up with admin/helpers, plan the next classes, create exams/tests/powerpoints, read, manage projects, attend morning meetings, etc.
I actually really love teaching, I'm lucky to have a "good" school with "good" students and I love the chaotic and human nature of my work. Plus, we got a significant pay raise this year after a month-long strike last year. :)
My job is best described as "developer advocate." I have a blog that's pretty related to my job (but occasionally more related to my hobbies than to my job) if you are wondering what kinds of things I know about and talk to people about.
Mostly, I answer questions that people ask in Discord. Sometimes I look at documentation in order to answer their question. Sometimes I realize the docs are wrong and fix the docs. Sometimes I realize the code is wrong or missing a feature and then either open a ticket or fix the code myself (usually the former, but today I did the latter). Sometimes I have meetings. Often I chat with other members of my team about stuff we need to do to address things our users need.
Sometimes I do live events where I screenshare and talk at my screen for a couple hours about how to do something involving some type of code etc. Community building is pretty important so often I chat with people casually about what I did that day, what video games they're playing, etc. Honestly it's pretty chill, I enjoy it a lot. I don't think my job is very typical.
I am Assistant Director in Housing at a university, specifically focused on essentially social work for the students that live on campus. My degrees are in Psych and Counseling
I review reports that come in from Resident assistants (they're the students that live in the dorms and help other students or write them up for drinking or whatever), identifying students in need of support regardless of whether they're "in trouble" for something or not and assign those cases to my team or myself, I send emails to those students and continue to try to connect with them in person or by phone, meet with them, and try to offer support, referrals, or whatever they need in the moment. I go to a lot of meetings, and I also oversee our training for our professional and student staff so I have a lot of things I'm tracking timelines on and overseeing.
I also pull data from our reports on a regular and as needed basis so I can say how many of our cases are mental health vs academics vs financial need, etc.
I'm a freelance industrial technician. Factories in my area will contact me when their equipment breaks and there is no official support channel from the manufacturer. I either give them free tech support, refer them to someone who knows better, or I schedule a service visit. I bill $200 an hour to drive to their facility and work on the problem until they get up and running again.
Sometimes, I just find an estop button that everyone forgot about but got tripped somehow. Sometimes I have to rebuild a spindle or replace a servo drive. Sometimes I get to modify or retrofit old machines with newer tech, or better design to suit what they are trying to do with it.
I'm happy if I average between 20-30 billable hours a week. It's hard work and I eventually burn out if I do much more.
I have a very flexible, but chaotic and stressful schedule. It can be really satisfying to fix stuff and be a hero, but its pretty intense sometimes. I'm working on transitioning or at least diversifying into other stuff over the next few years.
Worked as a tapping/deburr techinician for 21 days this summer.
Drilled screw holes and later cleaned their sharp surfaces for safer handling and coated painting.
I averaged 10 hours a day, 11 with commute, 15+30+15 minutes for breaks.
Most of my time was spent on tapping non-machinable holes. So my wrist would hurt by the end of the day. If I had to grind steel parts their sparks would hurt my arms and had to scrub them afterwards or they would constantly itch.
I was paid 340$ or 1.66$/h after taxes. A more experienced worker can get up to 740$ 3.1$/h.
I just left a job that I was at for a total of like 16-17yrs over two stints. Literally started when I was 18yo, like a week before my first day of college. I didn't plan to stay that long; it just kinda happened.
Anyway, I was the sysadmin for a small, but global, non-profit. I say sysadmin, but day-to-day, it was more helpdesk/desktop support. Anything from "my printer isn't working!" to troubleshooting issues with the backup system for our server.
Plus whatever other "miscellaneous duties" needed doing. I did some light web design and webpage updating, using HTML/CSS and some JavaScript. Some years ago, I helped with email marketing and social media.
At our conferences, I was in charge of logistics: shipping our materials and equipment to the venue and getting it back home afterwards. I helped our meeting planner determine our A/V needs at these events. During the event, I was in charge of the registration desk, while also playing IT/AV tech, and also being the director/producer for the big general/keynote sessions. Like I actually directed the hotel AV techs to switch feeds, play videos or music at certain times, etc. Sometimes I was the one controlling things from the booth. Most of these conferences were in the US (we're a US-based organization), but I also got to travel internationally for some events: Barcelona, Toronto, and Cancun. I've been to many US cities that I probably wouldn't have gone to on my own. I enjoyed traveling 1-3 times per year for work.
More recently, I was a project manager for a huge 2-3yr project that had us merge multiple CRMs into one CRM. I had to give reports to team members, the whole staff team, and even leadership. I can't say I was a great PM, but I got the experience.
It was an office job and I had my own nice office; before we went full WFH anyway. Casual attire; my typical go-to was jeans, untucked polo/button-up shirt, hoodie, and sneakers.
Because it was a non-profit, the pay was kinda crap. Typically, non-profit employees make far less than our for-profit counterparts doing the same work. My final salary was $67500/yr, as an hourly employee working 40hrs a week. Though I almost never actually put in 40hrs/week worth of work. With that salary, I lived a comfortable enough life as a single person with no kids. Also, I only have an Associates Degree (2-yr degree).
I don't know how non-profits work outside the US, but I think working in smaller or mid-sized non-profits is a great way to dip your toes in all sorts of things. I know specialization is the way to go, but being a jack of all trades was great. The experience is invaluable. Never know when I may need to put those skills to use again elsewhere. I'll be doing "pure" IT in my new job, but maybe some day I'll decide to do something in AV or logistics or assisting with meeting planning. It's nice to have options.
I work at a contact centre. I take calls, answer general questions, raise cases, and babysit pants-crapping software that goes down with alarming frequency due to the intervention of someone in one of the IT teams.
I retrained and passed in 2022 as a ship's ETO (electro-technical officer).
Basically, I just go about fixing things; a lot of lights.
I do preventative maintenance and inspections. The job is vast and there are a lot of interconnected disciplines, so it can be challenging. But I work 7 weeks straight and then get 7 weeks off, specifically with my current company, but there's leeway there. My next trip I think will be 10 weeks, and then I think I get 10 weeks off, maybe.
Others in the industry can do huge trips. Filipino crew members can do 10+ month trips for not much time off, which is wild, especially during covid when they would maybe be off for 2 or 3 months but they were having to do 2 weeks isolation either side.
One of my most favorite bits of my role is that I'm not important enough to care about budgets and constraints.
I was stood in line for tea one evening and someone from another department asked me what I'd been up to, and I said, "I've just sat in front of the computer for a few hours making up stores requisitions. I ordered x, and y, and z."
They said, "That's loads! What is your budget??"
I said, "Oh, erm, I've no clue. I just put in orders, and if someone pushes back and tells me I can't have it, I can tell them what systems they won't have working."
Honestly, if I have to power something down, it means it can't break.
There's such things as a pneumatic pump that you just stick anywhere to suck up water and dump it somewhere else, called a Wilden pump. I love them because they are absolute work horses, and there's not a single volt in them.
(Sshhh, yes the supply air has an electric motor powered compressor! Quiet)
Bit of a ramble. Sorry.
I'm back in work next week.
What are the meals and sleeping quarters like?
I just learned about AODD pumps from your comment. So cool! Basically use compressed air to move to linked diaphragms, and using the pressure changes to move liquids or something like that?
Meals are cafeteria, bain marie service type set ups. Breakfast from 7-8
Dinner from 12-1
Tea from 5-6
Coffee break/morning meeting is 8am
½hr Coffee break at 10am
½hr Coffee break at 3pm
Sometimes get half days off on Sundays, depending on the workload.
My cabin is bigger than my current bedroom (back living with parents because the three year college training dragged me back into the county I'm from originally)
I've got a single bed, a desk, a sofa, and a wet room with sink, shower, and vacuum toilet; like the sort you get in an aeroplane.
Yes, those pumps are pretty straightforward (from what the engineers tell me). You can put them out on deck or pull a hose down into a pocket of bilge that won't drain, and they will just suck. They can be ran without priming and don't suffer from a bit of running dry if you leave it going and the puddle gets cleared up.
But obviously, they're only a godsend if you're in a place that just has service air throughout. So, taps you can connect to and run an airline from.
That's a great question! I went into nursing without even tangibly knowing what nurses did day to day, just the general idea, but still went through with it blind and thankfully love my job.
I'm a registered nurse working bedside at a large hospital in a large city. My work consists of directly managing medical/nursing needs of patients (specifically adults, and those not in ICUs).
Doctors/physician assistants/Nurse Practitioners will order medications/interventions and nurses would often implement or address them.
I physically assess patients, give them medications (orally, intravaneously, injections), manage any tubes/drains (to or from the body), monitor vital signs, change wound dressings, draw blood/collect specimens.
We have nurse assistants who help with this stuff but still help with cleaning patients, help them with eating, getting out of bed, etc.
We coordinate and communicate with various teams related to a patients care, that includes doctors/providers but also social workers, physical & occupational therapy, speech language pathologists, phlebotomists, technicians for tests eg. mri/CT scans, dieticians, and of course family members.
And then make sure all that we assess/give/do for patients is documented in their medical charts.
Part of why I went into nursing was because it was a "real job" and had a direct/clear route to that job. One of my priories graduating high-school was that I would be able to find a job and be financially stable asap (family was poor).
Now that I'm in the field, I've learned that it's an incredibly flexible degree. Bedside is the traditional route but nurses are in office/clinics, care management, hospital administration, community health roles, research, tele health. So a lot of options.
And there are large portion of people who join nursing as a second degree, who had a different career prior. And it's no longer just a female role, I have many coworkers who are male nurses! Don't be discouraged by that if you are a man and think it's a woman's job, it's not!
Much luck to you in your adulting journey! It's not simple to decide which trajectory to start in but remember that it's not a permanent choice, you can always pivot or jump as long as you're learning and building experience along the way!
I went to college pre-med and got a neurobiology degree. I became certified as an EMT along the way and did that and contract nursing for a little. It took getting into medical school for me to realize that I didn't want to spend a half mil and ~10 years to get a degree and a specialization (wanted to be a child psych because my experience with them was terrible). I pivoted into health informatics because it was one of the few medicine related degrees that would take my MCAT and not require me to go take the GRE.
Right after getting my masters I dropped into health tech in an application support position. I hated that a lot of my job ended up being walking people through the training they didn't pay attention to in order to accomplish a fairly menial task like registering a patient. I was offered a job at the university I went to, and used it to leverage moving to another team at the same company. This moved me into "business intelligence" or a fancy word for making sense out of data/analytics and helped grow the enterprise analytics team from 3 people to roughly 20. I moved on to another company because I wanted to move back to the bay area because the weather was nicer and found myself employed at a major academic medical center, this time as an analyst. I've been there about 8 years now and progressed through analyst, engineer, visual developer, and eventually landed in a data science role.
On the side throughout highschool and college I DJed. How much I DJ has varied from time to time, but I realized it would be very difficult to turn this into anything but a side gig, and I didn't want to put in the time and effort really hustling to get regular gigs. Besides, I didn't have a ton of time working full time to get into college and then studying full time to get into med school. But I am intimately familiar with the world, and I must say the day to day as a DJ (when you're not hustling, I should say) is often much more fun than data science. But I might feel different if the two were swapped and DJing is where I made money and data science was just my passion.
As for my day to day, it involves a surprising amount of talking. Medicine is an extremely data complex field, and thus the old adage about data science being 98% about cleaning and processing data and 2% model building is very true, although I might even go so far as to say it's 99.9% about data, at least in my environment. That doesn't mean that I'm spending all my time staring at a screen and the data itself, however, what it means is that I need to have a lot of conversations to understand what people are asking for. That is to say, I'm a professional question asker. For example- someone might ask for a list of all patients who received acetaminophen in the ED. The first step of my job is to parse this sentence into the relevant details. How do we identify a patient in the ED? Do all ED patients look the same? Do we want to know if every patient received acetaminophen, or are there some patients we don't care about, such as those who leave against medical advice after receiving acetaminophen. Is there a purpose to asking about acetaminophen in particular- are we actually concerned about whether acetaminophen was the correct drug given other patient information such as a lab value like liver or kidney function? Are we comparing acetaminophen to other drugs? How do we identify when the patient was given acetaminophen? Are there situations in which a patient is given acetaminophen which might not be documented in the health record? Do different clinical staff record where acetaminophen is given in different parts of the health record? Do we only care about acetaminophen, specifically, or do we care about other drugs which contain acetaminophen or when it's given as a brand name, such as Tylenol? How do we administer acetaminophen - is it only oral tablets or do we sometimes push it via IV drip or other routes? These are just some of the questions I may need to work through to understand exactly what pieces of information I need to pull and where, in order to answer the true question we are trying to solve. This means I send a lot of emails, write down a lot of information, spend time on the phone and chat, and waste endless hours in often ineffective and inefficient meetings. Oh and I spend a lot of time educating people. I happen to have a rather unique background that almost no-one else has, in that I can fluently translate between the clinical and technical, with the occasional need to translate business, operations, finance or other languages between the relevant cooperative parties, of which in medicine there are often many.
Once I have a good enough idea of what the question is, that's when I get to actually go find the information itself. This means programming in SQL, perhaps one of the easiest languages to use (although many feel is difficult to master because of it's simplicity). I pull and structure the data, and then do some basic checks on it. For example if I am pulling the patient's BMI, I might look at the largest and smallest values returned, to see if there are any invalid values and make the determination whether they should be excluded or cleaned from the data. I might need to ask clinical questions about this data if it doesn't make sense but could be correct or needs to be filtered because it represents something we are not interested in for this request. The data may need to be transformed in some fashion, such as extracting a number out of a text field or rolling information up to another level of aggregation such as a count of all patients who had something prescribed at a location. I build the structure to support answering the question and then I get to build a solution which lets them answer the question effectively. The solution is often a visualization, where I get to put my data and design training into action. Building visualizations which quickly answer the most pertinent questions in the most effective way is a skill I enjoy, and one of the few which still utilizes my neurobiology background. Understanding that humans process comparisons of length much quicker than comparisons of angles, for example, is why bar charts are often superior to pie charts in the context of understanding relative performance between categories in a metric. Of note, a pie chart would be more effective here if we simply wanted to know if a category of interest comprised the majority (>50%) amongst all categories.
Occasionally I get to do actual statistics. Most often this is fairly simple and consists of the creation of control charts to understand if a process is changing or has changed. It might also be scatter plots or means of understanding how data tends to group. Sometimes it is assessing normality and comparing groups. It's rather rare for me to be doing what many other data scientists do, which is to predict from data. When I do predict, it's often fairly simple regressions and variations of random forest. Every once in awhile it's more complicated and involves ML or AI (not generative), but we tend to shy away from that quite a bit in medicine because it abstracts our understanding of what's going on. The day to day of this looks very similar to a programmer, albeit one with poor programming skill and often involves staring at a script in a notebook and slowly figuring out, step by step, what functions and libraries to use to manipulate data into the statistical variables that I need so that I can assess an output and determine what needs to be tweaked or what insight I can gain out of it. Lately it's involved a lot of chatgpt assisted programming, albeit I find gen AI to be a poor programmer in completely different ways than I am, and means I've had to start to acquire the skill of debugging the output and carefully leading it through the necessary steps to get at the output I'm actually asking for.
I studied physics and now work in a lab testing semiconductor devices, although most are electrical engineers there. It's mostly doing the measurements -which can be a bit routine - but also includes designing test setups/PCBs, programming the analysis algorithms and then collating the data and presenting it to the other people working on the project. I wish it would be a bit less conputer-based and more moving around and I'd like more time to read papers and get a better idea of the current developments, but I'm quite happy that it's pretty varied and not solely spreadsheets. Pretty often, some measurement doesn't work or something blows up and then it's a lot of critical thinking to find the root cause. We also have a small workshop for small mechanical work. I'm still quite new to working, but I like that it's varied, I need to think but it's not so high stress everyday, and there's a practical/manual aspect to it.
To get a bit more physical/practical work in, I'd like to do a shorter 4-day work week and then find a more outdoors job for the fifth day. I think that could be pretty difficult to achieve as 5 days/week are definitely the standard.
Not really answering your question, but that is a solid set of A levels. You can do pretty much anything with that, meaning you can continue focusing on one of them in uni, or switch to something else if another major interests you more. Point being I don't think you need to worry too much about picking the "wrong thing". E.g. you can do:
physics > physics
maths > maths
cs > cs
maths > business (finance, analytics, IB or marketing stats)
all three > civil, mechanical, electrical engineering or GIS
Liberal Arts majors might be a bit harder to get into, but you could definitely handle the work load if you did get into a liberal arts major. Besides chemistry you've picked some of the hardest A levels there are.
I'm a programmer of a software platform. Senior developer at a ~50 man software company in Denmark. First job right out of Bsc and Msc in computer science.
Daily routine starts with online standup meeting (usually the only meeting I have). Then rest of day I write on the platform to implement new requirements from my product manager. Sometimes an automated alert goes off, regarding the platform that is always running in the background, and we figure out why and fix it. Sometimes our support department sends us customer issues that they can't figure out themselves. Sometimes another developer wants review of their work and I approve it or give feedback. It's pretty chill overall.
I just wanted to say that even though the answers in this thread hasn't been directed at me, reading them is a blast. We got some real diversity here and a bunch of jobs that I didn't even realize existed.
I work for a 'Full Service Digital Growth' agency (which is pompous-speak for a marketing agency that has all the stuff you need in-house and doesn't need to hire e.g. external designers) in Data Management / Governance.
My background is in psychology, and then I did my masters in User Experience / Human Computer Interaction.
I really like my job! I'm now officially at senior-level, and expecting a lead-role in January. That means I get to start running my own team, BUT I'm not stuck in a 'manager' career path. A teamlead is, in my experience, considered the person with the most technical experience, who is also organized and assertive enough to direct their team's capacity and time - who, together with upper management, helps prioritise the work-requests the team is given.
My actual work is essentially dependent on how 'full service' a client wants to be. Most of our clients are companies with 100-500 employees, that may or may not have their own marketing department. A marketing department is a lot more complex than, I dunno, people sitting around trying to think of a silly slogan to come up with. A lot of it is actually Data Analysis - where the behaviour of their consumers is investigated by looking at e.g. how they interact with the company website; how quickly their customer service handles issues, how aware their general target audience is of their brand etc.
This can be quite a lot of work, and usually a 'normal' company won't have all of the people they need in-house. That's where my company comes in, and me with it. The client will ask for help with e.g. having more people complete a purchase on their website. My job is then to look at how they currently 'analyse' their customer behaviour, and help my own team with whatever solutions they come up with. Then it's on me to make sure the data is as pure as possible, as well as try to get all the data centralised in one place. A company will usually have a tonne of different software they use for different ends. E.g. Payment software for their website so customers can pay for their transaction; software where (if you're a chain of restaurants for example) all the customer reservations are saved in), software for your customer service calls to be registered in, software for your website analysis etc. etc.
I'm responsible for creating integrations (connectors) so that we can get all the data from the softwares in the same place, and then be able analyse their client base behaviour much better now that we have ALL the information. A lot of my job revolves around speaking to the developers of these software's, speaking to the various people at the clients company who control individual software-parts for the company, etc. and then making it all understandable for my own team and the client.
Long comment but it's a neat job and you get to be in tech without being a software developer! It's also a very good field to be in. Data Analysis in itself is sometimes a little difficult to find your place in, but if you toss in the ability to create the connectors/integrations yourself, you'll get recruiters banging at your door up the wazoo in my experience.
Edit: oh and daily life: 40 hours that I make sure stays at 40 hours and not 60. I work from home 2 days a week, and at the office 3 days a week. My day consists of checking where we're at with each client-project in the morning, and then deciding what I'll work on that day. Because my work is so interactive, I'm often waiting on people to get back to me. So, it's really important for me to balance deadlines - if I mistakingly think I'm low on work and take on another project, that will come bite me in the ass when the people I was waiting on an answer from all come back to me expecting an answer from me, but I've overcommitted myself and can't get back to them in a timely manner. I need to be well-liked and thought of as competent by external software people, or I run the risk of being stonewalled if I need to ask for a favour or a difficult technical question for my clients setup. I'm also a woman and in a heavily male-dominated field (tech I mean, not marketing as that's 50/50 leaning to more female dominated in my experience), so that means I'm unfortunately judged harder on being disorganised, as it's socially expected of women to be better at that (read up on Emotional Labour if you're interested). It's not an issue almost 90% of the time, and it's probably what's made me be a great candidate for a teamlead though! Just something to keep in mind if you're wanting to be a fellow woman in tech.
I just wanted to say that I thought your description of a team lead was excellent and fits well with how I perceive my own job as a completely different sort of team lead.
I do some scripting, which is like coding but very very light weight, and I don't have to make any architectural choices at all. The company makes software and hardware that collects all kinds of data from real world environment. For example, say they are installing a thermometer with signal receiver in a long rock tunnel, is it better to use this kind or that kind of antenna, over what kind of power or frequency, using what kind of wiring on what channels, and what temperature range is acceptable -- that's the engineer and site supervisor's job. They make those decisions , then they make documentation on it, and pass it onto me to script and implement the system. These temperature and other kinds of sensors are then connected to a software system with green/yellow/red little lights. The rest of my job is keeping an eye on thousands of these little guys. If things aren't green for some reasons I help the engineers troubleshoot them and get them green again. It's very very straightforward.
The biggest skill requirement for my job is actually soft skills. I might be called on to talk to clients in a variety of situations, and it's up to me to figure out what they need before we have that meeting. For example, did they just buy our tech and are celebrating and want to know how to use it? Or have they installed and ignored it for months and now someone up top is coming to inspect and they're freaking out looking for someone to blame.
The engineers' jobs are very cool. They get to travel to exotic locations around the world to physically install these arrays of hardware. Sometimes it's a tropical paradise, sometimes it's a bug filled jungle, sometimes it's somewhere frigid, deep in a mountain or on a floating platform in the ocean, sometimes they're sent because they have overseas family they can hang with after the job is done. Sometimes they get to ride helicopters. The travel is great for younger folks who want to see the world and paid a lot of money for it (they get old and have kids and some of them move on to my 100% remote job). You can find jobs like that for engineers in agricultural, energy, explosives, geotechnical, infrastructure, marine, resources etc types of companies. Energy and resources are big huge ones, like oil and gas and mining for rocks kind of places. They sometimes stay at a job site for 2 entire weeks working 12 hour days, then they fly home and take a whole week of no work back at home. Those kinds of overtime add up real fast into big bucks territory, but as one gets older and want to have pets or partners or kids it becomes hard on you and them. Overall would recommend both our jobs.
I'm the Director of Technology for a television production group.
My day to day looks like talking to the production companies, working out what they need from IT and making it happen as best as I can.
We run an in-house written video hosting platform with exports from shows that are developing, tasters of show ideas and full masters of shows we have made in a back catalogue. I've just implemented a commenting system for reviews and added a bunch of small functionality to make it a mix of vimeo and FrameIO. Why? Because I can and it's useful in the long term when we send stuff out for content ID matching to pesky youtubers who steal shows and upload to try and monetise our work.
I run the M365 environment. The cybersecurity systems. The phones (SIP), firewalls, routers, networking, you name it. I did 11 years corporate IT and 18 years of independent. I am across Windows, MacOS and Linux. I can write powershell scripts, I can write Bash scripts. I can write php, java script (although not well without AI help, but I understand what it wrote and can fix it's mistakes).
I've learnt most of this from being a complete geek. It helps in my everyday work, I never did college or university. I came out of school with a low average C in nearly everything. I was plump, introverted and had no idea of what I wanted to do. I was lucky enough that my school did a sixth form with a GNVQ in Business that gave me an awesome understanding of how companies actually work and I think most people should have to study this. Understanding corporate world, public limited and charities gives you a great base of how things work in the adult world. Essentially, everyone just wants to make money (except for a few humanity believers who want to change the human race for the better).
Good luck with your studies and a career path. Something worth listening to is Everybody's free to wear sunscreen, it might not make sense now, but it will.
I’m a programmer, been working for almost 5 years. In that time I’ve worked for two companies doing the same job, and that job was completely different between the two. I can go into the details, but other programmers in this post mostly have it covered.
The point I want to make is that your job is largely going to be defined by the company you work at. I hated my first job and love my second job. They’re the same title, same idea, much different work.
Another thing that I struggled with and eventually learned during the first three years of my “career” is that your career doesn’t define you. This may be a problem specific to myself or American culture, but my self worth was intertwined with my job as an identity. Breaking free of that mindset was difficult and necessary.
Since you’re taking computer science classes soon, feel free to ask me any questions about what that path can look like.
I’m a “recruitment officer” for my workplace. The recruitment team is one of the several teams under the “People and Culture” or “HR” (Human Resources) umbrellas.
My actual day to day work is mostly sending emails to people from all over the organisation, and helping translate complicated company policy into actual advice for the managers who are hiring to fill a vacancy. For example, the policy might say “recruitment should be fair and unbiased for all applicants to have an equal opportunity” which is a bit vague. So then I explain to hiring managers that the practical way of achieving this, is to make a list of questions you want to ask before you get to the interview stage, and ask every applicant the same list of questions.
I’m expected to know most of the company policies (and relevant laws) so that when a hiring manager has questions (or more often, tries to take a shortcut) I can explain what needs to be done.
One of the reasons I love my job is that I’ll often get a question which isn’t clearly addressed by the policies, or where two policies seem to disagree. I then get a wonderful puzzle to solve — if this policy says X and that policy says Y, then what can we do to satisfy both X and Y in this unusual situation that doesn’t come up very often.
I definitely thrive in rules systems, so the bureaucracy of corporate jobs appeals to me. When I was in high school (I think approximately the same grade/age as you at the moment) I had a number of people saying I’d be good as a lawyer, and I believe that could still be true with the skills and attributes I have, but law never really appealed to me.
I work for the government inspecting buildings to see if they are being built according to what was approved.
I am mostly in the streets driving from house to house. We are 25 people covering all the city. Our sector is for private buildings. Mainly houses and business.
My area is a poor neighborhood and lots of people dislike or are afraid of it, but it is super chill. Since it's poor/low income, they rarely do things by the book so there isn't much buildings to inspect and I don't notify them to do it because contracting an architect is expensive. I only go after more richer people who I know is doing things wrong trying to get away with it.
So I mainly notify people who are keeping construction materials on the sidewalk and inspect buildings.
I do this only on Wednesdays and it takes 3 hours more or less. The other four days I go at the office, drink coffee, make small talk and check if there are new buildings to inspect for the upcoming Wednesday, this takes 30 to 60 minutes.
So I end up working 10 hours per week.
I work in public health policy overseeing a portfolio of research spanning across all areas of health. I help identify areas of interest to fund research in, review and authorize research, identify and visit non profits to partner with, manage research compliance, set and negotiate terms and conditions with nonprofits and research universities, and approve human subject research protocols.
The work involves understanding public interests and needs, how organizations operate, regulations, laws, and generally being able to bridge the deeply technical to people who are just trying to make the world a better place. Day to day is a mixture of establishing processes for work and approvals to occur, reviewing and approving requests, meeting with stakeholders, and strategic planning. Plus all the other stuff that goes on in an organization. Managing people, budget, etc.
My background isn't in public policy; rather I started in math and IT. I worked in nonprofits and universities, and branched out. I've been a director of IT, director of engineering, and director of operations, plus a bunch of IT developer and systems roles. Branching out exposed me to public policy, where I picked up experience in a few areas of national interest. I picked up some advanced degrees including an MBA, taught a few classes part time, and eventually pivoted to something completely different.
I second many other people here: don't be afraid of change and branching out. Keep acquiring new skills and perspectives, especially those outside your current role, and you will have the flexibility to do anything you develop an interest in later. You can try lots of different things in a career if you develop transferrable skills.
Don't underestimate the power of effective communication and budgeting.
My current job title is Lead Engineer, but feels a little misleading because I am the predominantly the team lead of a small group of developers at a small company. In addition to actual software development, I handle our about half of our project management, run our (Technical) side of meetings, make all architectural decisions and changes, and handle most tasks that would traditionally fall to an IT department (servers, networking, security, troubleshooting). I wear a lot of hats, but it is nice to have the autonomy and see the direct impact of my work as compared to larger companies that I have worked for.
I knew that I wanted to be a computer programmer even in high school as I had been programming as a hobby since I was a kid. While I did get side gigs as a programmer early, it took me a while to actually get into that sort of job full time. I worked in roles such as tech support, IT, system administrator, and security and abuse administrator before finally moving into development.
I think you have a solid set of classes you're taking and gives you a lot of broad choices for jobs. I also want to reiterate what a lot of commenters have said that even if you make a career choice early, it is definitely possible to pivot to something unrelated later and be very successful. Of my friends and coworkers (and my spouse!), I am one of the only people that hasn't made significant career changes.
I work for a 2-4bil financial institution as a Data warehouse Manager. My team is small so I wear a lot of hats.
Some days I'm hearing about a new issue in our systems that people need a hand with. Some days I'm writing queries to get data for an audit. Some days I'm focusing on driving data usage throughout the company.
I do a lot of things and so does my team. We are very flexible and do our best to support every department. Financial institutions that are small in the US ( probably similar across the world ) are very behind the times with technology. Not because they don't want to be. Change is hard in finance but also in the minds of people that have been doing the same thing for 20 years. My favorite and most frustrating part of my job is changing people's minds and perspectives.
Advice for getting out into the employment space: be flexible, be hungry, and be a little patient with job growth. A lot of younger people, myself included, are a impatient with getting to that next step. It will come as long as you are seen as the "hey that person could help with this, they did awesome last time" and advocate for yourself. Be seen and be heard.
I'm a professional cook. Not a chef yet. In my own opinion, at least. Family and friends may disagree with me there, hah.
I think I fell in love with foodservice three years ago after I quit logistics for the second time.
I started out washing dishes and had the head chef at my first restaurant take me under his wing and put me on fryers one busy Friday night when someone called out.
It's been a wild ride since then and I've both loved and loathed it depending on where i was personally and mentally, but I can't seem to shake loving doing it.
Even when I'm in the weeds with service popping off and tickets all over my board, and the pressure is on. That's prime time to hit flow state.
It can be hectic, insanely busy, as well as emotionally and mentally taxing.
That being said, the friends I've made in the kitchen, and will continue to make are really a "forged in fire" sort of bond. There's not much else like it, and working with people as interested and passionate about food as you are is awesome if that's your thing and you have a passion for it.
Well, I have a job you’re very familiar with already – high school maths teacher. Still, a peak behind the curtains can’t hurt. Obviously, the biggest part of the job is being in the classroom and delivering lessons. However, at my school, a 100% workload for teachers is 23 lessons @ 45min per week — less than half of a typical 100% workload of 40ish hours a week. So what’s the other half? A lot of it is sitting at home or in the office preparing tomorrow’s classes, creating new worksheets, writing exams, grading exams (you have no idea how long this takes, and math is one of the easiest subjects to grade already, since at least the errors are usually objective).
Preparing a class often takes me nearly as long as actually holding it, since I have to make a lot of decisions: Does this topic require prior knowledge that might have been forgotten and needs a refresher? Should I plan any group activities? If I try to let this class do a discovery task, are they going to learn things or is it just wasted time because it’s too hard for them? How much time do I need to plan for these exercises? Do I need to reword anything on my worksheets?
The holidays meanwhile are a good opportunity to do more long-term prep-work. After all, you don’t just need worksheets, you also need to think about how much time you want to spend on topics, what the important goals are, whether the current material you have reflects those things or needs to be changed…
At the moment, in my second year on the job, this is all a lot of work. I’m told by my colleagues that it does get much less over time – at some point you have all those questions answered and just need to fine-tune them to the specific strenghts of the class and whatever events cause you to miss out on classes.
I'm a software engineer. Graduated college just over a year ago, but I had a full-time job with a consulting firm during most of my degree. I got a job with a large tech-focused company after graduating.
Typically my day starts with standup (and a coffee), where my team meets to give incremental updates on what we've been working on. It's a good opportunity to ask questions if I'm stuck on something, or to learn more about what my coworkers are working on.
Most of my day after that is just working alone at my desk. I don't meticulously plan my day, but I'm usually doing one of a few things:
I also have meetings depending on the day. Several of these are operations meetings, the rest are typically design reviews where we read, mark up, and discuss a proposed design. I also have a weekly meeting with my manager where we talk about my career, upcoming projects, and any challenges that I'm facing.
The other side of my job is operations. At some companies, there are people in designated roles (like Site Reliability Engineer) that manage operations across many teams, but where I work we handle our own operations. Engineering is where we build the service, operations is where we keep it running.
We have a few weekly operations meetings where we sit down and review our team's dashboards. If any of the graphs look weird or are showing concerning trends, the last week's on-call takes note of it and looks into the issue.
Every 8-12 weeks (depending on the size of the team), I have a 1-week on-call shift. During this shift, I get paged if our metrics are showing signs of customer impact, or if another team thinks my service is causing issues. It's a 24/7 responsibility–I've been woken up by my pager at 4am before. I'm expected to respond to all pages within 15 minutes, so I have to stay pretty close to my work laptop during that week.
When I'm on-call and not actively working on customer impacting issues, I go through our operations ticket queue and investigate any low-severity alarms. These indicate that something isn't quite right with the service, but it's not severe enough to require my immediate attention. Usually investigations consist of looking at a graph (we do a lot of graph analysis), log diving, and digging into code to see what happened.
Overall I'm very happy with my job. On-call can be a lot of work, but it's not as bad as I originally thought it would be (ideally I wouldn't have any after-hours responsibilities though). There's a lot of big-picture politics at the company, but I'm pretty well insulated from that since I'm an entry-level IC.
I think I've made a similar post before, but I'm a Technical Analyst at a large company for our newish Point of Sale app. I've jumped through the following positions:
Intern (+ Intern Project Manager
and de facto Tyrannical Ruler of the Internsfor a project)L1 Support (+ L2 Support + L3 POS Support? + Knowledge Administration) for the primary call line
L2 Problem Management +L2 Network Support (+ L2 Support + Monitoring) for major incidents
L3 Support Analyst (+ Knowledge Management + DB Analyst) for our CRM application
L3 Support Analyst (+ Knowledge Management + QA Analyst + Software Deployment) for our Point of Sale application and the payments systems
Technical Analyst (+ Payments Architect + Deployment... Guy + QA & Training Analyst/Support + Knowledge Management + L-whatever Support) for our new POS application, the new payment systems, one of the supporting applications, and occasionally any of my old applications, and whatever my boss needs to throw me at?
If there's a point in there, I guess, it's that flexibility leads to a lot of opportunities, but likewise of course don't let people take advantage of you. If you have the space and management visibility then sometimes it proves you out for a higher position - or to prove you're resilient if you get restructured.
I've been lucky enough to work with one company my whole life, though, which doesn't sound typical to other millennials or gen z professionals. And despite the number of hats I have it's because I'm primarily on project work and get to pace myself well.
Fix shit
Wait, no
Paperwork
I'm currently a gardener, my last two jobs before this was driving a subway train and working at an farm in zambia, the job entailed everything from finding people who will buy the meat to driving away poachers at night. I have never really cared for office type jobs so i have always searched for active jobs from army to post carrier, there's always a need for physical labor and while the apy is absolute shit at least i don't have to feel like my work isn't impacting anything.