What is your occupation?

[Wongo]

Getting a bit bored at work, so it is time for a post.
Tell us
1. What you do for work
2. Do you like it
3. Why

If you are no longer working then tell us what you used to do before you got lucky.


Ok I will start as usual, I am computer programmer. 80% of the time I enjoy my job because I get to use my Mathematics and logic a lot. The other 30% is dead boring.

Cheers

[DaveInOz]

1. Software functional sizing analyst (function point counter)
2. Yes
3. Because it is analytical without the presure of being software analyst (last job). Also because I'm an expert so noone questions anything I do it makes work much easier when you are the most knowledgeable in the place

[ozwinner]

Brain surgeon.
Life usually livens up when I drop one of the slippery little suckers.
Otherwise, its same old same old, cut, fiddle, sew.

Al

[Wood Borer]

Technical Service Manager for a large business telephone supplier.


It has it's ups and down, more ups than downs. Downs are long hours and solving complex problems with minimal information from impatient customers.

Perhaps I need to see Ozwinner about a changeover brain.

- Wood Borer

[Driver]

I’m the general manager of quite a large manufacturing company – part of a much bigger business. I won’t identify the company – only because my involvement with this bulletin board has nothing to do with the business. The company has no connection with woodworking or tool supply, by the way.

Do I like what I do? Emphatically, yes. It’s a great job.

Why?

The real answer to that question is – people. A company is defined by its people, not its balance sheet and profit & loss account; not its machines and buildings; not its products and services. What distinguishes one company from another is its people.

You read and hear a lot of cr@p written by the gurus of the business world about company culture and the latest trends in management styles (jeez, I’ve seen a few of them come and go over the last three and a bit decades! ). But what really counts is people: their skills and abilities, their experience and judgement, their personalities and talents and – most important of all by several country miles (that’s roughly several x 1.6 country km) – their attitude.

You can make up for quite a lot of deficiencies if you’ve got people who care. You can even overcome the latest trendy management culture thingy if your people want to do a good job. I’ve achieved that several times!

Col

[ozwinner]

Now theres something novel, a company that cares. :confused:


Nurse, more chateau, O positive.



And pick that brain up off the floor!!

Cheers, Dr Frank

[jshaw]

1. Molecular biologist

2. Yes, when it's going well but not when it's going round the u-bend.

3. When it's good I get to do all sorts of problem solving and end up with a warm fuzzy glow, not unlike when you finish something nice in the shed. Currently the latter, though. Been trying to clone a gene for months that just refuses to cooperate. Also hate the short-term contracts - a boy needs stability!!!!

And just for Al, I used to work on Alzheimer's disease - our work often turned up sloppin' about in a bucket. Yes, they are slippery little buggers.

John

[silentC]

1. Says on my business card "Senior IT Consultant". Actually just a hack programmer trying to make his way in world that's gone crazy, where everything moves too fast and no-one stops to smell the roses.

2. I've often said that I hate it. I certainly hate computers. Actually, I'd be mad if I did hate it - it has everything I need from a job: it pays rather well; I can telecommute; there are plenty of problems to keep the grey matter sparking; the customers don't have a clue what they want, don't know what they've been given, and don't know why they needed it in the first place. OK, I love it really.

3. Because it beats the hell out of working for a living and they let me do it from 500km away.

Dave gets my vote for "first time I ever heard of someone who actually did that for living". I've read about it in textbooks but never thought for a minute it was a 'real' job

[LineLefty]

1) Transport Economist/Consultant for the countries only Transport Research Company.
It's not hard to google the company name..................Basically we scavenge any contracts we can get that are vaguely transport related. Got any?

2) Yes

3) It pays O.K better than the Public Service. The variety of work is the main attraction though. One minute I'm in the office desigining a public transport plan, the next I'm out hammering traffic counter rumble strips into the road.

Thinking of abondoning it all and starting a furniture making apprenticeship like that metal-toothed putz in the Federal Govt add. Wife says no.

[LineLefty]

Jeez DaveinOz

A Software functional sizing analyst?

I'm sure you just tell people that you "work with computers"
I can empathise though. When the hairdresser asked me the other day what I do - I said I'm an "economist" and she replied, "what, like cooking and stuff?" Thats right, as in home economics.

I looked up a definitionof FPC though, and now I'll certainly look at this Access DB I'm developing a bit differently.

[Rocker]

I am now a gentleman of leisure, but I used to be a geologist. I chose that job because it promised a life of adventure and exploration. In those days there were still a few parts of the world that were coloured red in the atlas, as remnants of the British empire. For my first job, I had the choice of joining the geological surveys of British North Borneo, Tanganyika, or Bechuanaland. I chose Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and spent six very happy years working there. In later years various jobs took me to Ethiopia, and Iran, and to North Queensland and the Northern Territory. Geology has some drawbacks; demand for geologists is very cyclical, and you tend to spend the best years of your life languishing in the bush without female company; and you often cannot do woodwork until you can put down some roots somewhere.

On the whole I enjoyed my work a lot; it didn't make me much money, but I got paid to visit places that most people never get the chance to see, and I got a good deal of satisfaction from unravelling the geology of the areas that I mapped. Oddly enough, you can get quite a thrill from discovering a 700-million-year-old glacial deposit in the north of the Northern Territory. But I suppose my greatest claim to fame is NOT discovering the Century Lead-Zinc deposit in NW Queensland. CRA found it 10 years after I was mapping there. Oh well, you can't win them all

When you get too old for field geology you can always program computers, so I did that for a few years, courtesy of the NT government, who were kind enough to give me time to teach myself Unix shell programming.

Rocker

[PAH1]

Second Molecular biologist on the board

I enjoy what I do, given enough time and resources theres a damn lot of good that can come from what I do. The hardest bit is simply that nobody else actually understands what you are doing. If you think that woodwork is an expensive hobby and major equipment is needed, science and in particular molecular biology has that in spades. When was the last time you used a wood that cost a million+ dollars a kilo?

[DaveInOz]

Dave gets my vote for "first time I ever heard of someone who actually did that for living". I've read about it in textbooks but never thought for a minute it was a 'real' job

Thats cool too - big fish in a small pond etc I like to say to project managers "If I say it will take 2 days, it will" who can call me an exagerater

I looked up a definitionof FPC though, and now I'll certainly look at this Access DB I'm developing a bit differently.

If you are interested in FPC or software metrics and estimating I'm happy to answer questions, well the ones I know teh answer to anyway. (via PM obviously)

[silentC]

well the ones I know teh answer to anyway

C'mon Dave, you know the routine - if you don't know the answer, you make something up.

[jackiew]

my business card doesn't actually have my job title on it for 2 reasons

1. it means they don't have to pay for new business cards if they promote me ( little did they know that I would be resisting promotion strenuously )

2. i can give myself any job title that the company feels would be appropriate when dealing with customers

I think I was described as a system specialist on my residency and citizenship applications. Software Engineer would probably be about right. around 18 years working on telecommunications software in various shapes and forms.

yes i like my job .... the pay beats working in Bunnings or Coles hands down, fairly flexible working hours ( although the downside is that management has no qualms about ringing up at 10pm or on public holidays and asking one to go in ).

I get to surf the internet while I'm waiting for things to compile( though sometimes I get carried away and then I have to work back to make up ).

about 30% of it stretches my brain alarmingly . the remaining 70% is routine and ranges from the bearable to the screamingly boring ( writing test harnesses is the pits ).

It would be nice if the male/female ratios in the industry were a little less skewed but I've never been aware of any discrimination against me ( and have sometimes found being a girly advantageous when getting job interviews ).

I get to go to work in trakky daks in winter and shorts in summer and no-one cares if I wear makeup or not. And best of all at the moment I can go home for lunch and potter about the house which means that the job would have to deteriorate alarmingly before I start looking for another one.