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What's your job?


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What does everyone do to get a paycheque? Do you like your job, and what does it involve? Or, if you're not there yet, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I'm a programmer/software engineer/code monkey.I love programming, and I'm good at it, but this job doesn't even involve much programming. I work on a wireless network card. A big hardware company designs and manufactures the chips and sells it to my company. My job is to get this piece of hardware to actually work with real-world laptops, and then my company sells it to laptop manufacturers. The software stack is garbage written by underpaid drones in third-world countries, and they don't give us the code so I can't even make it better. All I do is identify the endless problems with it, and write more code on top to mask the issues. It's repetitive, joyless, and unfulfilling. My life is literally Dilbert, and I'm trying to find a job at a new company that will make me hate my life a little bit less.

What do you do?

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I give lessons in manners and humility to Donald Trump.  Im not very good at my job. 

I get peed on a lot... I'm a veterinary nurse.

I work in the environmental science field.  Primarily doing environmental impact studies for planned or proposed development sites. 

16 hours ago, Jeffery Mewtamer said:

I'm eight days from graduating with my BS in Computer Science...
I haven't filled out a single job application yet, only have one company on my "apply for a job here" list, if I get into the Masters of Computer Science program I've applied to, I won't be able to start until Fall 17, and for them to even consider my application, I need to take the GRE before May, and due to being blind, that means completing their accomodations process, which isn't remotely accessible. I want to test for my Linux Essentials, LPIC1, C++, and a few CompTIA certifications, but again, inaccessible process for arranging an accessible testing session, and I was told by e-mail a few months ago that blind accessibility isn't currently offered for C++ certification exams. And to make matters worse, I can't even get a straight answer from anyone regarding what I'd have to do to start work on a second BS degree immediately following graduation.

Are you going for a job in IT, or do you want to be a developer? In my limited experience, certificates are pretty useless if you want to be a developer. And according to my buddy who does IT, CompTIA certs are not too good. A lot of rote multiple-choice questions. I have the A+ and I feel like I could have passed the multiple-choice test on common sense alone, even if I didn't know anything about computers. He has the third or fourth-level cisco cert and has a very cushy job doing IT stuff. If you're going to be a dev though, writing code would be a better use of your time. Contribute some patches to an open source project, or make something new to show off. That will impress an employer more than any certificate.

That aside, hat off to you man, I can't even imagine how it's possible to write code blind. I don't want to come across as condescending or anything, I'm just impressed. Coding is hard enough with full sight. And congratulations on the degree, you're now a fully qualified scientist.

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23 hours ago, supernerd222 said:

What does everyone do to get a paycheque? Do you like your job, and what does it involve? Or, if you're not there yet, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I'm a programmer/software engineer/code monkey.I love programming, and I'm good at it, but this job doesn't even involve much programming. I work on a wireless network card. A big hardware company designs and manufactures the chips and sells it to my company. My job is to get this piece of hardware to actually work with real-world laptops, and then my company sells it to laptop manufacturers. The software stack is garbage written by underpaid drones in third-world countries, and they don't give us the code so I can't even make it better. All I do is identify the endless problems with it, and write more code on top to mask the issues. It's repetitive, joyless, and unfulfilling. My life is literally Dilbert, and I'm trying to find a job at a new company that will make me hate my life a little bit less.

What do you do?

What would the second BS be in? Honestly if you already know C++ and have time before your masters, learn Python. When I was applying for jobs, knowing both of those came up everywhere. Plus Python can import a lot of modules...and then it isn't a big leap to MATLAB if you want to learn that as well. 

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2 hours ago, Jeffery Mewtamer said:

^Sadly, you'll probably be replaced by a delivery drone once the bugs are ironed out and they become cheap enough for food delivery restaurants to buy Though, if you're lucky, you'll reach retirement age by then.

If Amazon is already using drones for delivery, they probably won't wait that long. The way I see it, the delivery guys will be reclassed into operators: the drones will navigate through the most of the route, but they would require a human to do the actual delivery or to resolve complex situations. Like cruise control, except more complex. It will be basically the same job, except that the operator would be able to drive from the comfort of his office. Whether the lack of human contact in this scenario is good or bad is up to debate.

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The whole self-driving car thing is very exciting to me. I never got a driver's license, and I get around fine on public transit. When I can pay some bitcoin from my phone and an autonomous freelance car shows up at my place to take me wherever I want to go, that will be amazing. Unfortunately, my city is being a dick about even normal human-powered uber, so it's a ways off. The next generation of kids will think of manual driving the way we think of horseback riding. Assuming we survive Trump. All predictions about the future now come with this big asterisk *Assuming we survive Trump.

I think our job as programmers will be the last one to be automated away. Once you can make an program that improves itself, you've already gone full technological singularity.

Edited by supernerd222 (see edit history)
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19 hours ago, Jeffery Mewtamer said:

words

If I had a pizza delivery business and faced this problem, I'd try to integrate the delivery guys I have as seamlessly as possible because a) they already know every nook and cranny of the area of operations, while the newly hired operator might be relocating from somewhere else and b) they already know the regular customers, know how to talk to them and what to expect from them. You wouldn't want to have an expensive drone to get taken down by a bunch of drunken delinquents, would you? On the other hand, you can be super friendly with the nice lady who always leaves extra tips that lives right next to them. As for the issue of a single operator replacing an entire team of drivers, I don't expect the list of employees to shorten that dramatically. A single operator can't be everywhere at the same time,and there may be other conditions that would require personal attention to every single drone, like bad weather conditions. Naturally, the AI may have a directive to automatically do the most safe thing possible (as in, land and wait for the weather to improve when facing overwhelming wind), but then there will be a race for the best possible service under any circumstances between delivery companies. In other words, the same kind of competition that they have now.

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I do janitorial work in local grocery stores. In some of them, I work there in the morning and in others at night. It's a difficult job sometimes, but it can be quite rewarding.

The most difficult part is stripping and re-waxing the floor in the aisles, but it's always nice to see the floor become shiny and white again, because the old wax gradually becomes yellow over time.

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I work in law enforcement.  Did 5 years on the street. 10 in the jail and now im an instructor and also help out in records when there isnt any classes. Its been a rough long road with little pay and but when you love what you do it makes it worth it. 

Advice to anyone wanting to get started in LE... or anything really. If you are doing the right thing for the wrong reason... you're doing it wrong.  

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On 14/12/2016 at 1:18 PM, Jeffery Mewtamer said:

^Sadly, you'll probably be replaced by a delivery drone once the bugs are ironed out and they become cheap enough for food delivery restaurants to buy.

In which case I will spend my evenings outside putting my air rifle to good use, for both enjoyment and the potential prospect of free food :happy:

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Not wanting to narrow it down too much in public, I'll just say "transport" - now, specifically passenger transport, but previously dealing with all sorts.

On 12/14/2016 at 1:18 PM, Jeffery Mewtamer said:

^Sadly, you'll probably be replaced by a delivery drone once the bugs are ironed out and they become cheap enough for food delivery restaurants to buy. Though, if you're lucky, you'll reach retirement age by then.

That said, I'm not convinced narrow AI won't render the degree I just recieved obsolete in my lifetime.

It's a depressing thought and one that's probably coming for most of us in the end! One of the reasons that I actively looked to leave my previous job is that technology's slowly but surely reducing staffing levels, and it was far from secure in anything beyond the short term. What happens next, though, when we're all unemployed and none of us have any money to pay for takeaways or indeed anything else for drones to deliver?

On 12/3/2016 at 4:18 AM, LucyVersion2.0 said:

Rural carrier :)

I love it!

I'm sure that the structure of the industry's different over there, but hopefully you're looked after better than the couriers who work for the private companies seem to be over here!

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