Tell us a little bit about what you do everyday. Do you enjoy it? Do you feel like a productive member of society? If/ If not, do you care? Would you probably like to do a different job than the one you have now?
I'm a mid level manager type at a tech company. My boss is great. I love some of my coworkers. I make a decent wage. I have a tiny commute. I enjoy tremendous flexibility. I really dislike what I "do". It's kinda mind numbing. It's only occasionally challenging. The company I work for is owned by private equity dicks. ~10 million cash flow per month isn't enough for them, 18% growth should be 35% and so on. It's crazy to think about. But hey. I've got kids to feed and a mortgage to pay. My handcuffs may not be golden, but they're at least a really nice stainless steel.
I'm a programmer in the financial industry. In general I enjoy it, though I don't really feel like a productive member of society. Maybe once a year I have a moral crisis about working in an industry that I hate and feel is fairly detrimental overall to society. That said I really like my boss and the problems we have to solve tend to be interesting. I do plan on trying to switch industries while staying a programmer, but my current job will pay for most of grad school, so it won't be until after I get my masters.
Me too, at the moment. Embedded programmer, credit card machines now, but lots of other devices in the past.
It could be a lot worse! I had to leave a job a few years back, for similar reasons - I was working for a company that made training gear for military exercises - weapons simulators, etc. Very cool stuff to work on, and all non-lethal - it was even stuff designed to save lives, by training soldiers in proper weapons use. But I could not escape the fact that I was in the war business, and so I had to leave it eventually.I'm a programmer in the financial industry
Maybe once a year I have a moral crisis about working in an industry that I hate and feel is fairly detrimental overall to society
Yeah, back when I was in college I was thinking about pursuing cyber security, but a little research quickly indicated that I'd most likely end up making software that helps 3rd World Despots better silence critics. Currently I work on one of the myriads of markets that isn't the NYSE and while the problems are really interesting it's hard to feel right about what essentially amounts to helping HFT and my general distaste for the fact that it's legalized gambling that masquerades as a retirement strategy.
I herd cats and cry in the bathroom edit for real description: I am in charge of up to thirty kids by myself at a daycare in a rich Dallas area neighborhood. they range in age from five to twelve. I have to make them sit quietly and do homework after they've had a full school day. I also have to come up with organized activities they can do as a group, which is a little difficult when about half of them are young teens and the other half have the cognitive abilities of flagamuffin an untrained dog. I am paid poverty level wages for this. our summer program starts soon. it runs a full workday instead of just after school and we've enrolled fifty. I would prefer to be unemployed.
Yeah, that was weird. I guess on the internet no one knows you're not a dude. To his credit, though, he gave you a dog. I don't think flagamuffin ever forgave him for making him a dog.
Sure, you should be gendered and represented as you identify and want to be gendered and represented. I understand that. I knew that I could relate to your feeling unhappy about being misgendered because I know I have corrected people and taken offense at their assumptions. But I realized I also have been misgendered and not minded or even felt good about that, so I was struck by the dichotomy. Sometimes I am deliberately obtuse about my gender and I think that is when I am pleased that people get it wrong. Sometimes I am open and state my gender and then I get pissed that they get it wrong. And then sometimes, middle ground. I just hadn't really thought about that dichotomy before and was a little surprised to realize it. At any rate I can relate to being misgendered online and unhappy about it; and of course you shouldn't indulge it or any similar mischaracterizations that sit poorly with you.
I feel greatful when I misgender someone and they correct me, It's not something I mean or want to do. There are many ambiguously gendered people in Portland and when all you are focused on is pouring booze in people's cups because there is a line to the door It's easy to get tunnel vision and go on instinct. I'm suprised at how gracious people are when they correct me. I do stop, make eye contact, if passing a drink or making change press their hand for a moment and say I'm sorry like I give a shit. I'm trying to let them know I mean it in the few seconds I have before I push on to the next drunk. The look I get back has ranged form a bemused "silly boy" to "it's really ok." If someone was pissed or hurt I wouldn't be at all suprised.
Every day: I try to get organized to do the real work or at least to define it. As soon as I figure out how to create a personal mission statement, I'll teach a workshop on it.
Oh you mean work for money? I teach workshops and courses in universities, mostly graduate students. Some of them can't write, so in addition to other things, I try to teach writing. I was inspired by hubski to create this blog for my students.
Do you enjoy it? Usually very much.
Productive member of society? When I was little, every day at dinner, my father asked my sibs and me, "What did you do today for the benefit of humanity?" and on it goes...
I'm a mathematical artist. I love it. And I feel like a productive member of society. I give courses on math and teaching and math creativity and will be starting my own math learning center this fall. I will soon be a new columnist for the country's math teacher journal, writing on math and creavitivity. (I've got the first column due on Monday and it's not ready -- but there's no minute like the last minute!) I would not be doing a different job given the choice, but I would be doing more creative work and less work work. I'm getting there...
Hi ao! I wrote a little about it in a comment below. But when I got done with my math undergrad, I didn't actually want a job with math and so I joined the circus. Some years later I decided I wanted to be a high school teacher and went back to school, but life continues to throw curve balls at me and I'm never sure where I'm going to end up!
That sounds pretty neat! Any thoughts on sacred geometry and the like? I'm curious as to what kinds of courses you go into, and what you mean by the phrase "math creativity".
I'm a professor of math and math education. Taught university in the US for 10 years and then moved to Norway to work with the national center for math education. I give courses to teachers, mainly, but also pupils, students and the public. These courses are on any topic: an area in math, or teaching or testing, but my favorite courses are in math art. I starting making math art about 10 years ago. You can see some at nakedgeometry.com. I took the name as a play on "sacred geometry".
I was hired in February of last year as a customer service representative for a small IT company, after moving a thousand miles from everyone and everything I knew against my will and having no previous work experience. I started by answering phones and trying to get an idea of what to do. One month later, I had earned my CCENT under self study. This caused me to be promoted to a network operations technician. I proceeded to earn my CCNA R/S in September, after taking some time to familiarize myself with the clients and some basic IT knowledge. This led to another raise and some more responsibilities, as well as some shift changes and whatnot. I only work four days a week now, Thurs-Sun. I work alone on my shifts. I deal with users, remote network and server management, and handle the SCCM patching for over 2500 devices for one of our clients. I'm also back in school full-time for a B.S. in IT Security and have plans to take my CompTIA A+ exams later this month. As a matter of fact, last night one of our clients had a crisis situation. I worked a 15 hour shift, went home and slept for an hour, and went back to work. Out of the past 24 hours, I have worked for 23, and remain on the clock for a few more. Outside of an actual work environment? I listen to music, I try to read, I use the tools at my disposal. I try to go to Lodge meetings, but more often than not my other obligations get in the way. I chat online with distant friends and try to make some new ones. I feel like a productive member of society and don't think I'd choose a different career, or a different lifestyle. It gets lonely at times, and there are nights I can't quite sleep, daydreaming about how everything could have gone differently - but I wouldn't trade this life, or my choices, for the world.
Good stuff, man. This is how you do it. Learn more and move toward the back end before all the customer contact hollows out your soul. I'm B2B now and it's a lot easier, but I still want to stop talking to customers routinely. Seems like anything in this field becomes a hell if you stagnate.
I try to take the stairs instead of the escalator every time I change floors, every day I am in a place with multiple floors. I try to walk outside for at least 30 minutes every day, so long as the weather is fair. I try to write every day, but don't manage that often. A passing average perhaps but not an A. I read every day. Not always books, not always short stories or even poems, but at least articles, online conversations, enough that words enter my brain via my eyes and keep the flow moving, every day. Life would be very boring without reading, for me. I allow my cat to get in my face and sit on me and be needy every day. I feed him and make sure that he has water. I eat vegetables every day. I try to make them whole vegetables though they are often frozen and then microwaved. I try to spend time with someone that I like and like to talk to, physically-in-person, every day. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it is not. When I went to Virginia for my employment this week I realized unfortunately that I do not get along well with either of my direct coworkers. However, there were still people there I was glad to see, and spend a little minute with chatting. I say thank you every day. Productive member of society? I pay my taxes. I mostly don't cause harm and certainly not wide-scale. I think that if you are not happy you are probably not a productive member of society. With that thought in mind I would say that yes I try to be a productive member of society every day. What good can I do a group if I am not doing good by myself? At least, primum non nocere.
Right now I work in a residential aftercare unit which houses 18-21 year olds who have a history of being in care, so they can learn to live independently etc. Very rewarding work and I enjoy it a lot. Really get to form good relationships with a lot of the young people, and there have been a lot of success stories. Recently finished my masters in social work though so hoping to move on to a full time social work job soon once graduation/registration and all that malarky is done and dusted!
That sounds like a good job to have. There's no way I could do it myself but you must get a fair bit of satisfaction for doing something worthwhile.
IT infrastructure architecture, specializing in web hosting. I work for a financial company and we host large enterprise level web applications for major banks that they use for lending and crap. I spend a lot of time in IIS, XML configs, various WCF services, PowerShell scripting, automation, deployments and support, load balancing, and a lot of SSL certificate stuff. Oh... and I drink a shit ton of coffee and sit in boring meetings a lot.
I do tech support of enterprise firewalls. It's kind of fun, but it's not just the PCs I've been dealing with forever, so I have to really try and pay attention, and I can't just screw around like before. I've fixed systems that are essential in some way to things like hospitals, police departments, casinos, something to do with NASA, big banks, etc., but it's not direct enough for me to avoid the occasional feeling that what I do doesn't especially matter. I kinda flip-flop between wanting my work to have a direct effect on people's lives, and being satisfied with digging into a new and complex system and mastering it. Just coasting along here until I figure it out, I guess. I'm 24 and still figuring out what to do with myself. Haven't been to the full-course university, just CCNA courses at the community college. I have vague interests in things as disparate as biology, English, foreign language, linguistics itself, sociology, and various physical and low-level elec/comp engineering, and no real idea what would make me happy, and certainly not the money or time to try all of them. What really chaps my ass about this job is that it's never done. I guess very few jobs are ever done in full, but I never feel like I'm done in any sense. There are tickets that open and close, and are done with, but there's a steady stream of them, always getting more even before I'm done with my current ones, so closing one doesn't feel like anything. Getting them down to where I can see them all on one page feels like some mild progress, but it's all destroyed by the time I get in the next day. So I think I actually want something project-based. This is what we need to accomplish, here's our resources, here's our plan, yay we did it, done. And then I can have a list of the things I helped to accomplish and not just a nebulous blob of trouble tickets the details of which I barely remember past a day. But I do also like the idea of getting into sysadmin or internetworking, being one of the guys who keeps the internet going. And then when the apocalypse comes we can hide out in a fortified datacenter and start building the new techie world, huehueh.
Software engineer at an embedded systems place.. Just graduated (Bachelor's) in December, so I've only been at it for about 6 months full-time. I really like to program, but I actually feel like I don't do a lot of it where I work. It's all just like <5 lines of code changes here and there on a massive code base, and then a bunch of testing and documentation (our system has to go through the FDA). Oh and our build system suuuucks and takes like 8 hours for full builds. We usually only have to edit the UI of this thing, which compiles in like 3 seconds, but every time we want a beta build, release candidate, or official build, it has to go through this 8 hour process. It's pretty easy to mess up, too, because our source control is also messed up. I don't plan on staying there for too long. It's decent money for being straight out of college, but I'd much rather be at a place where I can spend more time coding. Overall, I don't feel like a productive member of society, at least not yet.
I do web design and web development and everything in between. I also produce/edit videos occasionally (typically marketing / internal corporate videos these days). I quit my job last September. Since then I've been freelancing full time. It's been a wild ride. I work and play all day every day. I don't get dressed until about 3pm...if ever. I have too many clients and projects and stuff going on at any given time. My life is a never ending to-do list. Typically I wake up around 9am or 10am. I lounge around and deal with emails and clients until about 11am or so. I shower somewhere in there. Then I start whatever I'm working on. When I get tired or need a break, I go do something or switch projects. I am constantly interrupted by emails and phone calls which detracts from my productivity. Around 6pm, the real work begins. Then I actually work-work, sans interruptions, until the work is done. Sometimes it's 8pm. Lately it's been 3, 4 or 5am.
I have just started a job in a project I've been volunteering on for a good few years. Supporting individuals and families after a suicide bereavement. In essence I facilitate peer support groups, perform outreach to reduce stigma, train professionals and hope to add to the Postvention research base- altho there is much more than that. I feel as though I'm doing what I should be right now and def feel like I am being a productive member of society. I am also doing a postgrad in the evenings and in the future will most likely move towards completing an MA and see where that leads me.
During the day I'm a Senior Relations Rep for a non profit disability service. The title doesn't really make sense for what I do, but I typically run the help desk for our electronic health records. I am the "IT" of electronic health. I also create all forms for said ehr, create reports, answer our information and referral line, etc. I do enjoy it and I plan on being there for some time. At night/on weekends I'm an EMT for my local emergency squad. I don't see myself being there too much longer to be honest. I've been an EMT for 6 years and I'm over it at this point. It's a rewarding job, but not sure if it's worth it for me to stick it out much longer. I'd really hate to get to the point where I start to hate all my shifts. I don't think I'd be able to provide the proper patient care at that point so.
I'm work from home in my underpants doing administration/development for a specific software package for large companies. It's often a lot cheaper for companies to high me part time to maintain their system (monitoring, upgrades, bulk updates) and some project based development stuff then it is to higher sometime full time with benefits and what not. However, I definitely don't feel like I'm contributing to society in anyway. Just padding my bank account so my kids can buy toys. Eventually I'll snap, sell all my stuff and go live in a yurt in the forest.
I work within my state's department of health as a student assistant. Right now I'm working on revising my bureau's policies and procedures, plus some other small projects. They don't keep me very busy (at least yet?) but they pay me quite well, especially for an intern. It could be a lot worse I suppose, but I would like a job where I'm a bit busier and feel more productive. I do need to pad out my resume you know.
I am the owner of a small cleaning business. I started it last August, just myself cleaning, and I now have 63 clients, two property management companies, and 3 employees. I do really enjoy it, despite how stressful it has been lately. I wasn't expecting this sort of growth, and sometimes I feel like I'm stretching myself too thin to keep everything running smoothly. I like how I've created jobs, and I want to treat my employees well. Right now, I have a temp worker for the summer. She's moving to another state, and I'm teaching her the trade so she can start her own business. I can't imagine not being an entrepreneur of some sort. I like the independence, and I like how I earn what I work for. I also pay my employees on a commission basis, so they earn what they work for, too. The harder/more efficient they work, the more they earn.
It's mostly word of mouth. The only "advertising" I've done is donating gift certificates to local charities' silent auctions and I used Thumbtack at first. Everyone needs a cleaner, but not everyone trusts random cleaning businesses, so word-of-mouth is key to building this sort of business. That and doing an extremely professional job.
I'm a physics graduate student. Largely that means I spend my days trying to find errors in a calculation that is obviously wrong, sitting with my head in my hands trying to figure out how to approximate something that seems impossible to calculate, or trying to figure out why my simulation/numerical code is blowing up. Occasionally things make sense and those are the best days. I don't really feel like a particularly productive member of society, but all in all I'm pretty happy with my job (disregarding the pay) and I'd be happy if I can keep working in the field.
I work in animal control. I care for and adopt out animals at a city shelter. My original goal was to work in policing after I received my degree in criminology back in 2012. However, after working in the field of animal rescue, I didn't want to do anything else. I love what I do every day, and it pays well enough to enjoy life. That's all that really matters to me.
I work for a small medical billing company in Northern New Jersey as a Claim Specialist in the department of Data Collection. Pretty much I have an office job where I look up medical records for patients of clients of ours and scan onto their bills, notarized documents, call patients looking for no fault and workers comp insurance information, open up mail we get and other officelike stuff. Last week, I spent one afternoon cutting checks because the accounting department was short of people. My job is okay but it can boring and repetitive at times. However, it's a lot better than my old job which was a janitor. So I am really grateful that I have a job that doesn't have me working weekends and smelling like garbage when I get home. Eventually, I would like a different job that would pay me more money and make me feel more productive but for now, I am good with what I have because it could always be a lot worse.
QA consultant for a large company. Essentially a glorified videogame tester. I don't feel particularly productive - but that's mostly because I have ideas that I would like to make happen (that I don't have the time to make happen because of said job - I'm not ready to take a leap of faith to make things happen yet, it would be EXPENSIVE). I DO care because I'm part of something big and the people there are great. But to be honest, if I had the opportunity and funding to start doing what I want, I'd leave. But until then, it most certainly beats any other job I could get.