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What's the most enjoyable part of your work?
Whether you work indoors or out on the field, with your hands or with your mind.
Whether you create things, fix them, sell them. Or whether you work with people or look after them. What gets you up in the morning, keeps you going through the day (or night) and makes it enjoyable? (or bearable!)
Software engineer/Dev Ops.
I really like when it's basically just a big puzzle that I have to solve. Pulling in experience, creativity and attentiveness to solve something that is either perplexing or adding a lot of value.
Ditto to this. My favorite part of the job is when I get to do the job. My least favorite part of the job is when I have to deal with business things/people that keep me from doing my job.
I have exactly two meetings a week: one with the 4 person fully remote tech team, where we play an online boardgame . And the other is the "all hands", which is a bit more serious, but we usually end with another game (think werewolf). Rest of the week I can do my job. Small companies are fun.
I’m an introvert and detest meetings but what you are describing seems lonely.
I am often given leeway to work on long term architectural projects or technical debt of my choosing. Eg we migrated the majority of our app to typescript but there was one section of some of the most legacy code that you get to a certain point it's just
anyall the way down. I spent the last three weeks with a peer getting it typed. Almost 200 files later we had finally did it, and in the process we found many bugs that you wouldn't have noticed just reading the code. I think we may have solved a few of our oldest 'cannot read property of undefined' tickets (ones that have survived multiple ticketing system migrations.)Untangling these knots are some of the most fun I have in this job.
I love Typescript! It's my favorite dynamic language (my favorite static language is Rust).
Totally agree. It's pretty straightforward work and you're constantly being rewarded as you go, with easy progress visibility. Migrating JS code to TS shares the same joy as powerwashing.
I've done some shenanigans with TypeScript at a previous job.
I feel the exact same way as IT Sys engineer, everything feels like one giant puzzle. How do I chain everything together so that multiple security appliances, software, end point management systems, netflix access, laptop provisioning and on boarding is seamless across multiple business? The Imposter syndrome is definitely real but its what also makes things exciting as there's new shit every day and new tech every other day.
I make, among other things, wedding rings. The best part of my work is when customers send me messages after their ceremonies to tell me what a wonderful day it was and how much they love their rings.
The best of all time was a couple whose rings I made in early 2020, sent them off without a thought and heard nothing back, which is perfectly normal and I don't mind at all. But then, out of the blue in late 2022, I had an email to tell me that despite covid getting in the way, they had eventually managed to get married and even included a picture of them both with massive grins on their faces. That one made my eyes leak a bit.
I'm a process engineer at a electronics manufacturing company making printed circuit board assemblies. I think my favorite way to describe the job is that I'm a baker that uses over a thousand ingredients to make a different cake each day. The best part of my job is easily the variety of work I get to be a part of. Some days it's solving very technical questions about why certain defects are made. Other days I'm doing long term planning for what equipment we should invest in. Then I could be working with my hands on very small and intricate boards to fix various issues. Overall, I could go else where and make more money and have better benefits, but I've never found a place that lets me do this level of work and actively encourage me to be curious. I owe much of that freedom to my direct supervisor who is also a very technical engineer, but is a surprisingly good manager.
I supervise a team of process engineers and technicians. Depending upon the line that they run, some get to make hundreds of different products while others are stuck making only a small handful. My company encourages our engineers to be creative and allows up to 6 hours per week to be spent on creativity or personal development. Sadly, if you asked anyone on my team about how they spend those hours they would laugh at you and say they are too busy just keeping their lines up. Over the last couple decades we have lost a dozen or so engineers that corporate refuses to replace due to cost constraints. This causes burnout and increases turnover which creates a negative loop with long periods where even the bare minimum of engineers is not met. I think half my time is spent trying to help distribute the load or to take up any tasks that I can do for them.
Back when I was an engineer I loved troubleshooting and coming up with new designs. Now that I’m a supervisor, I really enjoy helping the newer people to better problem solve and especially like being the cheerleader when anyone from my team gets a win.
Hey mate, I don't know you, but you sound like a great supervisor and I'm sure your team enjoys working for you. It's great when a team is well-lead from above, as it inspires everyone involved.
What gets me out of bed and what I enjoy about my job are separate things really. What gets me out of bed is that I believe that the charity for which I work is doing something worthwhile and that I need to do my job in order for them to operate successfully.
What I enjoy though is very different. I enjoys the beautiful places in which I work. Even if I am having a terrible day, I can always look up over some great landscapes and take a break and get out into them. Some are at their best in the summer, but one in particular peaks in the winter – it is a truly wild place and thrives on the drama and bleakness of winter.
I enjoy the people I work with: mostly intelligent, positive and committed and who work as a team. I grew up with Star Trek as a model for the working environment, but was so often disappointed with the actual environments that I found myself in – until I began working in conservation and for a charity, when it all began to align.
I enjoy the varied problem solving: things break is so many unique ways and for so many unexpected reasons and there are so many possibilities for improvement: the universal pleasures of anything approaching an engineering role (which is where I am at the moment).
I work in public health, and I've recently been explaining similar feelings to my 18 year old, as they consider what field to go into.
Like any job, there is a lot in my work that is mundane, difficult, boring or annoying. But underneath that, I always have a level of satisfaction that I am contributing something beneficial. And working with other like minded people that are intent on doing good really is quite nice -- most of my close friends are people that I work with.
The opportunities that my career brings me are varied and interesting, and I find all of this to be more important than a high salary, at least once I hit a level where providing for my family felt secure.
I manage a team of software developers, as well as still do some developing myself. I work in print-manufacturing and our technology stacks are very diverse - from our e-commerce platform to our actual production software that builds the things we print/engrave/cut/etc. Its a small team, a great leadership team I'm apart of, and we have pretty much free-rein to choose what technologies we build with and work on. We have a unique domain model that is fun to solve and I get to focus a lot of time on writing (something I always wanted to do), and mentoring younger developers. Not to mention the office/production facility is just a quick jaunt from my house.
OMG, you have what - at least to me - sounds like the perfect job!
!!!!!! Wow, good for you!
Thank you! It is quite the good deal for sure. One thing I could also complain about if that I'm below the industry median in pay - but still can afford my life with what I get so I don't complain a whole lot.
Great, so you're also a saint! lol :-D Kidding of course! Seriously, that's wonderful for you!
In my pursuit of happiness, my partner and I have begun learning how to be happy with "just enough". We're were never so much into getting a bigger house than "the Joneses" next door or flashier cars, or all that competitiveness...but, certainly there was a time earlier in our lives together when we bought into a few minor areas of capitalizism (the whole, well, every family should have X or Y or Z) sort of thinking...which sort of made us feel like we needed to work harder for more salaries to get X or Y or Z...but we think differently now. We've recently begun to shed things - especially material objects - which are empty sorts of things that we feel don't need to make us happier. We sold our home (with a yard that was way too big for us to manage), and are living in an apartment as our offspring preps for heading to colege...and our intent is to downsize to a smaller, cheaper home in a lower cost of living area (though still has fast internet ;-)...so, we;re on our way...but would be nice to get a job that covers our minimum.
Thanks again for sharing!
I have a similar position. Great smaller development team in a medium sized company. In recent years I have transitioned into writing less code but I still keep on top of things spending a lot of time doing reviews and testing ensuring quality across the board. It is great to work with both skilled senior and junior developers, see them get better and often be smarter than you, but you still have an important role to fill to keep the good team culture and code standards. I take special pride in good testing and reviews. We are never afraid to deploy to production, even on a Friday, because we trust our process. A great feeling seeing a massive rewrite or new feature released without any errors or downtime because we prepared everything well.
Oh wow, I am trying so hard to get us to the "deploy on Friday fearlessly" point in our team (and I think we will, its just a matter of when). I'm glad you're in a good spot with your team! I love the code review process too. One skill I think I really bring to table is debugging and I want my team to really spend time learning how to debug things more effectively.
Another thing I think I need to work on in my role is Project Management. Would love to know how you've handled some of your rewrite projects and what your ups and downs were.
Of course we don't deploy everything on a Friday. Some things are probably better for start of the week, but mostly I think it is important to simply deploy often. If something is hard to do, it should be done all the time. Small incremental deployments, perhaps with feature flagging and if we want to be extra careful only use the new code for a specific set of customers. Which all can easily be reverted with the change of an environment variable. This approach we can usually avoid "big-bang" releases where tons of things changes at once, but it does add an extra overhead of code cleanup and intermediate code because we basically have parallel setups in our codebase at the same time until everything is set and done.
I bake artisinal bread. It's not as flashy as the directors and technicians here, but I figure I may as well spend my youth doing something I like before I figure out the rest.
For me, the best (occasionally worst, if they don't look good) part of the job is taking them of the oven, since it's the culmination of the previous day's work. Being able to see with your own eyes how well you made each loaf is very rewarding.
The free food is another plus ;)
I've been a baker and a "flashy" director/technician. Don't feel badly that you're engaged in the art of feeding people well. I find a good loaf of bread more soul-satisfying than the latest trivial tech bling any day - it's shameful that the work to make it doesn't pay a fraction as well, or command the same respect. You've mastered one of the oldest and most essential technologies, and you've got pride in your work whether it's recognized or not.
I just recently started baking (mostly sourdough) and it's incredibly satisfying. It seems that quite a few people in technical fields really like baking, because after spending all week building abstract invisible things it's incredibly satisfying to be able to hold (and eat!) something physical you made yourself
I've worked in restaurants. I've worked in roofing. I've gotten my undergrad in education. And now I'm a bank teller.
I think I just like smoking weed in my life, so in each career path, I realized that smoking weed in a restaurant makes me too anxious, roofing is too dangerous, education is too irresponsible. Frankly, so is bank telling, but I've been doing it long enough now that my brain can compute it (or rationalize it, for my next therapy appt) into simple data entry.
I like buzzing just enough to block my own PTSD from past CSA experiences, while giving me a way to comfortably make conversation and connections with customers we help at the bank. Maybe it's irresponsible, but I have found it help me find peace. And I really like what I do! There's a lot of downtime, but I enjoy the peace and quiet and have no problem meditating thru the quiet.
I think having a level of professional detachment is important for work environments. Nothing wrong with working to live!
I work in cyber. I have to deal with a lot of boring, grc and managerial crap.
I also get to design and perform threat hunts. As a curious technical mind with a creative side, it's a beautiful way to spend my time. But on top of that, I get to teach others. That's the French fries on the hunting burger (cherry on top doesn't quite give it justice).
Also work in cybersecurity. Favorite part of the day is logging off
Many, many years ago, as cyber was becoming so sought after (well, i suppose that may not have subsided), at least for people who have a background in cyber, i seriously considered pivoting to a career in it. In many direct and indirect ways, over my entire lifetime, it has seemed that many people state that i have (apparently) great aptitude for opSec and tech security sorts of realms. I think it was the George Clooney character from Oceans 11 - where he's always casing places, seeing how to break down their defenses, how he would get into a place without detection, etc. - that many friends have compared me to him. Not because i'm some prodigy with this stuff (I'm not), but rather that my brain simply alwasy seems to bring thoughts up (and thoughts that to my friends seemed unique/creative), and i'd simply mention things to friends...so, friends would often suggest for me to "get into security, you have the mind for it".
But, then, i learned that behind all the cool, fun (and yes, i'd imagine challenging) work, there's all this GRC and managerial stuff to contend with. (At my job i partner with the cyber folks all the time.) Hey, every job has its good and annoyances, so i'm not knocking cyber for it. But, that was enough to put me off of it - at least as a career. I admire folks who are in cyber, because i still think its an awesome, can be fulfilling from a creative perspecitve, AND essential pursuit for our society.
Kudos to you for being able to do it, plus teaching - that must hit anoither set of dopamine receptors! :-) 👍
I think the trick with cyber, which I have comprehensively failed to do I might add, is to find a place where you can do the cool stuff without getting bogged down in the admin. Small team, red team engagements, no audit requirements… we can dream sigh
Still, it’s a great area to work in because the landscape is always changing, so you always have loads to learn.
I work in cyber, my dream job would be full time bug bounty hunter.
Companies offer rewards for finding vulnerabilities. You just work on whatever you want, whenever you want. Your not a contractor, you have no external expectations placed on you. If you can't find anything you just move on to something else. Other than writing a report when you find something (which isn't very hard) there's not much paperwork to it.
Now, you have no consistent pay, no benefits, and no structure. It wouldn't for me since I'm the primary provider for my family, but maybe someday it will be an option
That's actually a great idea for a career!
...Except, yeah, that would be the same constraint for me too. Nevertheless, it certainly woiuld not have been something i would have thought of...so while not yet an option, who knows in the future when my offspring are off to college/live their life, etc.!?! Thanks for sharing! :-)
I've started playing around with it as a hobby.
At the very least it's a fun pastime that could net some cash 🙂
That's a very good idea!!! ;-)
If your interested, there are a couple of programs out there for this, HackerOne and BugCrowd being the most popular ones. They act as a middle-man between you and the companies, so your identity never has to even be known to them. I've heard mixed things about HackerOne, but in my (limited) experience it's been fine.
It's hard to parse out quality reviews since the barrier to entry is so low, and some people turn in low quality bug reports and get mad when they don't get a 20K payout. Some companies (like google) also have their own independant programs.
If you want to just have fun, check out the US Department of Defense program on hacker one. I don't think they pay out very much or very often, but their scope is huge, any resource you can hit from the public internet is fair game (meaning literal thousands of sites). What makes it fun is that the DoD has tons of busted old sits sitting out there that people just forgot to turn off, so it's more interesting (in my opinion) than just running a bunch of scanning scripts against the latest wordpress or React site.
Most of my job is desk-y but sometimes I get to go out in the field and I loooove it. I live in the Arctic so I feel like it’s an especially lucky place to be able to do that.
I also get to be in helicopters quite a bit which is awesome :)
The paycheck.
That's about it. I'm good at what I do, and I think I'm a good leader of my organization. But there is nothing about it that gets me up in the morning except knowing I need to have that paycheck continue to come in every 2 weeks.
I think that's under rated. I think sometimes we look too much to our jobs to be fulfilling. There are so many ways to be fulfilled outside of work. Having a good job with good pay can be enough.
I have an office job. The job as such is pretty standard, except that the customers never show up voluntarily. I'm not in a charity, but who comes to me is desperate and broke usually. A great thing is that over time, you still often enough build a mutual level of trust. When they're concerned about something I might tell them "hey, we know each other for years, you should know I'll get it done in time for you!". And I know that at least two customers refer to me as "Uncle Satures" at times :D
A great part about my job is that no two days are the same. You simply don't know what happens next, and often enough it's something you never had before or not for five years. Given that I'm one of the most experienced in my department I often help new coworkers as well.
However where it all shines is at a level that doesn't have to do with the job as such: The atmosphere between the coworkers who are there for a longer time span is amazing. We refer to new coworkers as turtle babies - 95% of new coworkers are gone within two years, but the rest stays on board forever. And these coworkers, who know each other for 10 or 15 years have sort of a band between them that is just amazing.
Also, in everyday life our bosses don't intervene in the work. They stand back as much as they can. They set the direction and build the guiardrails, everything else is up to us. Sure, they check from time to time, and they are always available for questions, but the day-to-day-business is left to us. "You guys are too expensive for babysitting" as my old boss coined it.
I'm a production technician in a tshirt shop for a couple more weeks, but I'm a fully trained graphic designer and a self taught programmer. My favorite stuff to do is the random odds and ends I can snatch up, covering for our graphic designer when she's out sick, writing small scripts for Illustrator to do common tasks like automatically labelling designs with their physical size, troubleshooting everything that goes wrong with printing, heck, even just replacing the ice maker in the fridge.
I'm not sure if it's a "variety is the spice of life" kinda thing or what, but my favorite part of the job is everything that isn't my job.
Research scientist in cell biology. It's the experiments! Oh my goodness soooo fun. First, designing the experiment is like figuring out a trap for truth. How do I build a box that is so logically tight, reality cant slip out and is forced to reveal itself? Then figuring out what is going on is practically orgasmic joy. Its like peeking into the mind of God...and then sticking my fingers into it!
I've wanted to be a research scientist ever since I was a kid! That's got to be a really cool job :)
I'm the senior technician at the locksmith company I work for. Most of the work is pretty darn satisfying when you complete it; the clunk of a safe finally opening, the smooth operation of a perfectly repaired and reinstalled lever handle, that kind of thing. But my favorite thing, the thing that makes me want to be there is the moment when I do something that's easy because of experience that looks like magic to the client. "How did you do that‽" is the best part of my day.
I've played around with lock picking (thanks LockPickingLawyer!) and there's definitely a dopamine rush when it finally pops.
I'm not particularly good, I think the most complex lock I've ever popped was one of the Master LOTO locks, and that was only once when I was lost in thought haha
Nice! A lot of locksmiths hate LPL for various reasons, but I've always liked him myself. Our company buys his tools sometimes, and I'm kind of an "Information wants to be free" sort of person from my adolescence, so I think informing the public about security vulnerabilities is a good thing.
Wait why do smiths hate him? His information has always seemed correct and helpful
Exactly. There's a lot of grumbling among locksmiths about "trade secrets" and "giving criminals tools and exploits" and "making locksmiths look bad by making picking look easy." I philosophically agree with getting the info out there, and pragmatically I don't mind customers wanting better locks. Worst case scenario is a customer decides to buy their own crap and I get to (probably) fix it when they can't figure out how to install it. And if they didn't need me or my hardware in the first place, that's great! I don't want to waste people's money. They do that enough on their own to keep me in business. I don't need to keep secrets to make money. Best case scenario, I get to sell and service better stuff. I prefer that anyway. Plus, I'm not too proud to admit that I learn a lot from his channel. I don't know everything, and I'll take free info from anybody if it's good. Same thing goes for Bosnian Bill (may his channel rest in peace) and Deviant Ollam (super sweet guy, came to my shop and hung out once). Good resources are good, and I like people learning as a general concept. Until I find out that these guys suck for a real reason, I think it's silly to hate on them.
Very rarely, I get the opportunity to deeply investigate software for hidden malicious code. Like, reverse engineering executable, or packet sniffing decrypted traffic from a dubious Chinese tablet.
Really only a handful of times in the two years in my position, but IT WAS SO COOL AND FUN. I really wish I got to do that more often, instead of emailing vendors security questionnaires :/
I'm a web developer and I used to work for a small agency where I had a lot more interaction with our clients. One of the most enjoyable parts for me was seeing clients be impressed by features I'd implemented from scratch. Or little things like simple animations to give the UI a little more pizazz. Or them just being really pleased with the software I wrote for them in general.
I also used to work for a larger company that did elearning software development for trade unions (electric, plumbing, carpenters, etc.). A lot of the joy and satisfaction in that job was knowing that my work was helping develop the next generation of union trades people. I'm very pro-union and it made me happy knowing my work was bettering the lives of blue collar folks.
Before all of that I worked for another small agency that did a lot of local work for businesses. Most enjoyable part was seeing our work in action locally. Whether that was watching a hair salon start as a pipe dream and go on to thrive in part because of our efforts, or working for half a year to prepare a new website for a music festival and then attending that festival. It was just nice knowing I was contributing the local community in some way.
Now I work for a much larger company and the most enjoyable part is harder to place. I don't get to see people use the code I write and in fact the code I write is a drop in the bucket compared to the combined hundreds of thousands of lines of code written by my co-workers. I get some of that same satisfaction when I demo a specific feature I mostly developed and everyone on the call is pleased with it, but it's not the same. I can't even derive joy from the end result of the work because it's all ad-tech. I really want out, but then I'd have two 1yr durations at jobs on my resume and I think that looks bad.
I think the most enjoyable part about this job is that I have a pair of Junior Devs I work with and I try to help them out and guide them. I'm probably that annoying old man (I'm only 35, but they're fresh outta college) that's a stickler for code cleanliness and readability. But I enjoy helping shape the next gen of developers a little bit. And I'm aiming to get into a management position in the next year or so.
Well, I hate working, so much so that I've almost designed my career around the concept of reducing manual work and eliminating inefficient processes whenever possible. I started my career doing contract negotiation and legal department administration, and have since shifted to implementing and managing legal technology that essentially automates a lot of the work I used to do. There is nothing more satisfying to me than taking a contract process that used to require the slow, manual effort of 2-5 people (including attorneys), and using software to automate that process so it can be completed by 1-2 people in a fraction of the time, with less reliance on the legal team. Everyone wins.
I work as a Night auditor/front desk at a hotel with around 170 rooms. I'm literally the only employee in the hotel from 11pm until the breakfast crew shows up at 5am. That is 6 hours where I don't have to deal with coworkers and hell, the breakfast crew never needs to talk to me about anything. So really I don't have to deal with coworkers until the morning person shows up at 7am... if she decides to show up on time anyway.
So what I'm getting at is that I like the solitude. Given the hours and the type of hotel that I am at most guests are already checked in and in bed by the time I get there for the night. The only time I have to deal with guests is in the morning starting around 6am.
The best part about my job is that it's a job.
I was a music teacher for 7 years, and that was anything but a job...it was a lifestyle. My entire life revolved around my career.
Now, I work remotely making 3x my teaching salary, and I get to "leave the office" at 3PM. It's just a job, and I like it.
I'm the Development Coordinator of a massively-growing City..I wear a lot of hats and every fay is a different form of chaos and putting out fires. I love the variety of problems even if the stress is sometimes overwhelming. It beats the monotony of working Development in a major city where you work on one kind of permit or plat every day for years.
And the end result of what I do is good municipal Development. I'll have developers yell and scream and threaten to sue us, but in the end their shit gets built, looks great, and doesn't flood the neighbor's property.
I'm in permit processing for a city like this and have worked in my position for about 6 months. I'm one of the informal troubleshooters on my team for software and technician mistakes, the kind that lead to customers calling us in confusion. Figuring out how to fix stuff and make things better makes me happy. Every permit is different and we have so many different kinds. The regular, everyday processes we do are what get me out of bed in the morning, though - it's just something that makes my brain tick. I love the variety and the fact that every day is a step toward exciting new things and better living for our residents. I don't even live in the city I work in, but it's worth the commute and I would totally live here in a few years when I'm better suited to apartment or condo life.
I used to be the permit tech, so I know how much work it can be when you're the only one. Also, my tech just got promoted to finance, so I'm having to get reacquainted with all that work while trying to hire a replacement, lol.
I'm engaged in the best part of my job this week - watching a multi-million dollar healthcare IT project go live. [I'm not going to get into specifics because I'm working in a pretty narrow product niche, and it's simple to figure out my identity if I name it.]
Months of struggle, testing and debugging, site visits, coordinating with all levels of vendors, clinical, and technical staff go into this process. It's solving a vast multidimensional puzzle of technology, people, spatial arrangements, logistics, and a little bit of aesthetic judgment. Seeing everything come together successfully allows letting go of every anxiety and frustration involved in bringing the effort to fruition. It's exhilarating, plus the product is something that actually makes life easier, safer, and more effective for the clinicians and patients.
And then I get to go party with the other people who made this happen with me - we'll celebrate each other's hard work, competence, commitment, and decency.
I work in film at various capacities. Some people listed this as the reason that they hate their jobs, but it's why I love mine: I'm immersed in film 24/7. I work 12 hour days, get off and hang out with other people on the crew, usually watch a movie after that, and typically into the night I'm answering emails and answering questions about production. When I get onto a production after having a hiatus, it's like going into a different reality. I image it's how theater actors or ballet dancers feel (basing that solely off of Black Swan). Just being a part of a collective piece of art is the most amazing feeling in the world and I could live my entire life on set.
And then there's reality TV show productions. Those are just paychecks.
Marriage and Family Therapist.
Obviously it is more complicated than this, but I occasionally chuckle at the fact that people would pay me to tell me their secrets.
But the satisfaction is there in spades when you can help someone accomplish their goals. And when you see people overcome depression, repair a marriage, etc., it feels quite satisfying to know you got to journey with someone through that season.
I work in Government audit, Performance Audit specifically so it's actually really interesting stuff, we get to pull data from government, councils and other public bodies, media from news agencies and information from third party reports and compile it into reports detailing what Central Government, Local Government and other public bodies are doing well and what they could be doing better. We also make recommendations on the back of our reports, present them to parliamentary committees and the big ones tend to get a lot of media attention.
The job itself is fun and the benefits are great but I love it because I feel like I'm doing something good for people, it feels like I'm helping my country out and the people that live in it.
Analytics Director for a large corp. Our biggest focus is our workforce population other teams takes care of manufacturing processes.
The paycheck.
Less cynically. Having an impact, feeling trusted and valued, mentoring.
Traveling engineer.
At the moment, R programming. I’m not a programmer, or any kind of “tech” job (notwithstanding a bit of a power-user of the company’s software tools, like most experienced knowledge workers).
I’m currently a supply chain allrounder, my title is Supply Planner but at a small-ish business that makes me also a procurement guy, inventory controller and product database admin.
I’m also studying a postgraduate degree in Data Science at the moment, because my hunch is that most of those functions, which in larger organisations are individual roles, will all be redundant. A purchasing clerk could be an LLM with automation tools plugged into the ERP platform with some interpretive capability around the company’s data. A bot could discuss requirements with stakeholders, figure out the optimal supplier, pricing, quantities, delivery timeframes, etc. and transmit a purchase order to a vendor with little-to-no oversight required.
I think supply chain managers will still have a place in a business, but rather than supervising a team of people, they’ll have to be at the intersection of domain knowledge, business strategy and a deep understanding of emerging technologies. I intend to make myself a paragon of this new breed. But I digress.
My current subject at uni is Data Wrangling with R. I did some rudimentary Python in a previous subject (and toyed around with BASIC as a kid), but this is the most I’ve ever gotten into learning a programming language. And as soon as I started to see what you can do with a dataset using R, my mind was buzzing.
See, there’s a fair whack of data analysis involved in my job’s various functions, and Excel was the tool I knew. But if I was working with any reasonable sample time of sales data for statistical analysis, and joining it in a model to a reasonable number of product or customer dimensions, I’d pretty quickly run into the limits of what Excel is designed to handle. I’d divide my data-related tasks as such:
Allow 10 minutes of blue-wheeling every time you change a filter. Sit at the computer without touching anything. At least scrolling
RedditTildes on your phone on company time is justified.Three weeks in, and I’m spending more time in RStudio than Excel. Two different tables from the ERP database have different names for the same field and format dates differently? No problem. Few lines of code. Written once, written forever.
Those supplementary lookup tables that roll up classifications intuitively but don’t exist in the base data structure? Sure, maintain them on a spreadsheet. But a line of code reads that spreadsheet into my working data every time you run it. No manually importing it and setting the joins in every report you make.
It’s like stepping out of an iron lung and strapping on a jetpack.
I help people find jobs, I help employers find employees, and I help place people into on-the-job training positions which helps them gain skills for more sustainable employment.
What I love about my job is simple. When I’m able to help someone apply for a job or obtain a job that pays more, it feels great. Job income determines so many things - where we live (or if we have a place to live), the food we eat(or if we have food to eat), and so much more. Income can be life changing, and I do my best to help people into better opportunities to help them out of dire situations.
Working with people through the employment process can get heavy. People are stressed out, some cry because they were fired and they are worried it means no one will hire them ever again. Getting to pull them back into job searching, applying, cheerleading them through interviews and getting hired is what I love.
Sending a resume to an employer who is looking for someone with their skills and the employer hires them, I love that too.
I tell people it’s the only job I’ve had where it’s a good thing when we don’t see our customers again. :)
i'm "on the floor" R&D for a beverage company. i'm the employee who will take care of all those weird projects, troubleshooting, and dataflows. i was recently QA manager, but this new role is a better fit as there is very little that gets mundane. if i dont like the project i'm working on, just get it off the plate and i won't see it again. QA manager is a lot of routine and special projects are few and far between, which is a quicker burnout, imo.
I'm a teacher at an extracurricular English language school (called Eikaiwa here in Japan) teaching kindergartners and elementary school students. I enjoy many aspects of my job, especially because I basically play games and do arts and crafts with the kids for money, but the most gratifying part is seeing their progress. Watching kids who've struggled with certain aspects of English finally grasp them, and the little buzz of joy they display when they're praised for it fills my heart right to the top.
As an example, I had one student who had only been doing the half of their homework and left the optional parts unfinished. I encouraged them to try and do everything, and the next week they came back to show me that not only had they done all the homework for that week, they'd gone back and done all the homework they'd missed previously! On top that student joined the class only recently, but has been flying past the other students and is learning very well. That kind of stuff makes me really, really happy.
I'm in software QA, used to be a sys engineer, sys admin, and before that software QA. I found my love of scripting while I was a sys engineer and wanted more of it, so when I was randomly offered another QA job that wanted me to automate testing, I jumped at the chance. Each day that I know I'll be automating stuff, regardless of the language, I'm excited! My latest is Python, but my first big job was with Ruby. I've dabbled in a bunch of other languages, and they've all been fun! AppleScript, shell, VB, expect, Perl, AutoIt, JS, k6, and others. I've tried programming a bit, even made a Blackjack app for the Palm Pilot back in the day, but for some reason I just find more joy in scripting actions. I find even more joy in combining the tools to make bigger beasts, and my sys engineering background helps me a ton.
So each day I know I'll be scripting a new test, or even getting to watch my beastly regression tests pound away at our search engine, I get up a little quicker, start work a little earlier, and shut down a bit happier. I still don't understand it, but am thrilled I get to do it for a living.
I really don't mind the fact that I gave up 24/7 pager duty that would wake my wife up more than me, but I still have to deal with being one of lesser valued links in the chain. Meh. I get to script!
I'm a manager for a 3rd party valet company that primarily deals with a casino. It's kind of petty, but being a casino we get our fair share of people that come in acting like they own the place because they spend a bit of money here. Stuff like entering through the exit ramp, dumping trash out of their car into the garage, going 30+ mph through the garage, parking their car right in front of the doors and telling us to leave it there, etc. As the manager I'm the only one who can kick people out for acting like an asshole, everyone else has to go through security who almost never wants to do anything about them. I truly take a lot of joy from telling people they've gotta go when they're acting like a huge ass. It's only for the day and I know they'll be back tomorrow, probably still acting like an ass, but it's nice to think I'm probably souring their whole day.
Sadly there are the actual high rollers who i'm not allowed to kick out, but I'll say the people dropping 3-5k a month at the casino tend to be more likely to act like they own the place than the people dropping 50k+ a month.
I’m a union industrial mechanic at a chemical plant. Basically I perform work from every major trade minus electrical. I love the variety of work and the setting. It’s the type of work I dreamed of as a kid because it was ‘manly’ work and similar to what my dad did(although these days as a daddy to three sweet kids I’ve redefined the term manly). It’s technical, loud, dirty, smelly and sometimes fun. Additionally it opened me up to a new hobby with welding. Make side money with repairs and tig welded artsy stuff
I'm a manager for a tech-fitness company with a cult like following. Every single time someone I sold to comes back and tells me how our product changed their lives I find it super rewarding and it recharges me to keep plugging away.
Definitely not something I ever got to experience with any other company during my career.