Do you like your job?

[flying hippo]

I'm toying with the idea of going back to school and become a programmer. For all of you programmers (Or any other job for that matter) out there, I would like to know:

1. What exactly you do.

2. What do you like about your job.

3. What don't you like about your job.

Thanks.

[Veritas]

1, I am currently unemployed...see the thread about the opening of the Developers Den to find out more.

2. I like being unemployed because it gives me lots of time to program =)

3. I don't like having zero income =)

[eric]

What I do, well I own a web design and advertising company.

I like the fact that Im my own boss and I make tons o money.

Theres not much I dont like about it whats to not like 4-500 per day for 2-3 hours of work cant beat it anywhere.

As for programming I hate it learned C++ Java and VB6 and personally I find it very boring.

[fc34]

Im a free lance javascript/flash/database designer. I also program in many other languages in my free time.

1. Programming is the coolest thing, cause it allows you to command a computer, which is a very powerful tool if u can command it.

2. Depending on the clients, i ususally charge $150-200 for database, and $100-150 for web per hour. Considering that each project usually lasts about 3-5 working weeks (5 days @ 8 hours), its quite a tidy sum.

3. Theres nothing that I dont like about my job. It allows me to work from home, so I can spend time with my kids.

[newbie_of_jan0502]

I'm not a programmer. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express.


As far as what I do, I absolutely love my job. I'm a control system technician, or an Instrument tech. I have a degree from Texas State Technical College that I got about 10 years ago called Computerized Control Systems & Robotics. I've had about five jobs since graduation. Three where in chemical plants one in a refinery, they kind of sucked, but I was just building a resume. One job I had was building automated and robotic offshore drilling rigs, that was a kickass job if your a single guy and love to travel and make damn near 100k USD annually. Another job was designing control systems with AutoCAD, nice job in high rise building in downtown Houston, TX. Now, I work at a power plant which is awesome. Two big figgin' jet engines with a 100 million watt generator stuck to the ends of each. I work inside and outside. The outside work is sensor troubleshooting and calibration. The inside work is the control system itself which is a Westinghouse WDPF it's a Unix base operator interface. The WDPF reads all the sensor inputs, sends outputs and gives a graphical interpretation to the operator of the power plant.

I really enjoy this ****.

[Rakhmaninov3]

I am a computer lab attendant. I babysit the lab and answer an occaisional question about Windows or why somebody can't open a file that's never existed. I make minimum wage and work 7 hours a week.

Then again I'm in college

[henry44]

I'm 45 yo and am in the begining stages of my 3rd career change.
I left collage with a Math Ed degree and started a horseshoeing business (go figure). I loved that business. Hard work and outside enough to enjoy it and lots of fun people and animals.

Old age (32 yo) forced me to leave that to go into public education (rememeber the ed degree?). That took a year and a half to get re-certified and lasted another year in the field. I was rudely reminded of why I didn't go into it in the first place. I hated it so much that my lovely wife made me quit and go back to school. That's where I'm at now.

I'm finishing up my ed masters while starting a doctoral program in math. I love to teach, just not snotty high school kids.

Find what you love to do and do it. Either you'll be able to make a living at that or you'll find some other way to make a living with while doing what you love.

[pattouk2001]

1. What exactly you do.

2. What do you like about your job.

3. What don't you like about your job.

Answers:

1. I'm a computer engineer/technition.

2. I love doing repairs, builds, troubleshooting, learning new things (which I regularly learn everyday) and working with my collegues.

3. An orquard customer.

[danny e.]

for all the college students or high school seniors heading for college soon that plan to go to college:
If you are going into computer science/engineering:

1.) pick a college/university that has GOOD professors. a good curriculm is also important.. but you dont want to know more than your professors when you graduate... sadly at my college that was the case in a few areas.

2.) Study. good GPA looks good on your resume. and.. most of the stuff you learn in college is the foundation to what you really need to know. so study new stuff in your spare time.

3.) Get an internship!!! this i think is one of the most important... especially now that the economy is the "suckiest suck that ever did suck" (homer quote).

[danny e.]

oh .. and what i do:

Office work. it sux, but then again its not programming.

I love programming... or at least the stuff i have done so far. Thats basically all i do in my spare time. yes, sadly i have no social life.

[LicketySplit]

My office is the great outdoors...my pen is a Stihl 046 Super....nuthin like bein ur own boss....






Log earth first...save the other planets for last!!

[danny e.]

LicketySplit : sorta like this?

<a href="http://www.dannyde.com/c2500/tr/saw.jpg">
<img src="http://www.dannyde.com/c2500/tr/saws.jpg"> </a>

<a href="http://www.dannyde.com/c2500/tr/saw2.jpg">
<img src="http://www.dannyde.com/c2500/tr/saw2s.jpg"> </a>

[LicketySplit]

Perfect danny boy, a man after me own heart!! one down, a million ta go

[God in Training]

Not a programmer, but I do enjoy programming at a minor level.

1. Technical Support for software. I don't write the code, but I do track down the bugs so our developers can fix them without a lot of hunting.

2. I like not being the one under the gun to actually fix things and keep everything else working. Instead, I get to hammer at the software to find the things that need fixing.

3. I don't like having no control over when something will be fixed. Things that look simple from my end may take YEARS to be looked at because they aren't a great priority.

I don't know if anyone besides yourself can help you decide if programming is the kind of job you want. Some have the right temperment and skills for programming and some do not. If you have never programmed before but like computers, I would recommend trying a single class (or book) before getting full-scale into learning programming. Not everyone enjoys it - even if they enjoy computers.

A couple things that made me decide against programming as a career (even though I enjoy programming as a pasttime): stress level and time demands. When you program, even as a group, you are under the gun to be done by a set time -- one that often does not take reality into account. Are you willing and able to work long days at crunch time if that becomes necessary? Can you handle heavy pressure to get something to work while trying to figure out why it isn't working? Depending on the type of programming work, you may also have to work with a team. This means dealing with code written by multiple people, some better than you and some worse, and not trying to rewrite what everyone else has done to your style (so long as it works).

Hope my comments help. Good luck.

[LicketySplit]

Danny; what is that? Some kind of poplar or eastern cottonwood? Notice that there isnt much to the stem(length), and looks like its pretty much a water tree....no broad leaves tho so im thinkin some sort of poplar.Did u unfasten ur suspenders after u cut it, or r u just takin a breather??

[HowardDrake]

I program and it switches from being primary to secondary in my work. Right now I've been doing more hardware and less software, but I have been learning Kylix and getting into VB.NET. I miss VB6 already, but Kylix is looking sweet and being a Linux programmer looks good on a resume anyway.

[SuKÄSÄ]

I just had to say it...
ok, so I'm 15 years old girl, working in courses: teaching children and teenagers programming languages.
I love it.
both - working there and programming.
I hope that in "real life" I'll work on programming involved with graphics.
I just love it .

[IntelMole]

1. What exactly you do.

2. What do you like about your job.

3. What don't you like about your job.

Thanks.

Ok, I'm not a programmer yet, I'm going to do a degree in electronic engineering so I'll have to learn C at some point. At the moment though I do a little bit of playing with VBA in Excel and Access (so I'm obviously qualified to comment )

1. Play with VBA

2. I enjoy the creative aspect of programming. Artists create with their hands, so do I. I was given a project by some (dumb-ass) mates of mine who were doing Computing (I left the class, bored me to tears, took up Physics instead) and got bored themselves. They wanted a countdown to a certain time, in Excel.

I played and tinkered with an Excel file for a few days when I got the chance, and learned all about Excel's (awkward) dating system... once I'd finished it, I could then sit back and say, "I made that."

That's a truly great feeling...

Oh, and electronic engineers get paid a fair bit, starting around £20K or just over $30k, rising to around £50-70k, which I guess is about $80-110k... not too shabby

3. Getting stuck Learning the date system on that project was tedious...

Also, getting converting the dates using VBA was okay once I ripped an example out of the MS Help files, but once I tried to compress it to one line instead of four, I ran into all sorts of grammar crap... even more tedious

Hope this helps,
IntelMole

[johnleiwoo]

1. I deliver food

2. The money

3. This guy i work with that nobody likes who hogs all the deliveries cause he's an A$$

[danny e.]

Danny; what is that? Some kind of poplar or eastern cottonwood? Notice that there isnt much to the stem(length), and looks like its pretty much a water tree....no broad leaves tho so im thinkin some sort of poplar.Did u unfasten ur suspenders after u cut it, or r u just takin a breather??

some sort of cottonwood. dont ask me i am the geek in the family. those were my brothers.

[dolemitecomputers]

1. I do phone tech support for a major retail electronics store.

2. Decent pay. 3 1/2 days off in a row but I work 13 hour days.

3. Long hours and not much to offer as far as different positions. We have an IS department but they never hire. I want to get a position in a company where I can get some network experience or where I dont have to do phone suppport. Dont know how much more patience I can have with people.

[Hoser]

Please see the following post, and comment as you see fit.


http://www.tech-report.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4268


Thanx again

[MaximusStuntus]

1) I do program for a living.

2) Decent pay. Great benefits. Work with really cool people.

3) Don't like the fact that a lot of times form takes precedence over function.

[TreeBender]

1. What exactly you do.

2. What do you like about your job.

3. What don't you like about your job.

I'm a graduate student. I minored in computer science as an undergraduate, but I've been programming since I was a child. In my biotechnology Ph.D. program, I've found that my programming skills were more desired than my biology background. My studies have prepared me to understand what the chemists and biologists want, but by programming I can help us to get past hurdles in our data analysis.

In my studies, I've written some proteomics data mining tools, statistical analysis scripts, and quite a bit of software for signal processing. I don't get paid for programming but for research.

I like the fact that to the scientists around me, programming is a dark art, and these programs are perceived as works of genius even though they weren't particularly complex from the computer science point of view. Scientists who can hack code are a highly sought commodity in the marketplace.

What I don't like is that when I want to talk through a problem in coding, I'm pretty isolated (unless I wanted to talk shop with our Perl guys).

[muyuubyou]

Not a programmer, but I do enjoy programming at a minor level.

1. Technical Support for software. I don't write the code, but I do track down the bugs so our developers can fix them without a lot of hunting.

2. I like not being the one under the gun to actually fix things and keep everything else working. Instead, I get to hammer at the software to find the things that need fixing.

3. I don't like having no control over when something will be fixed. Things that look simple from my end may take YEARS to be looked at because they aren't a great priority.

I don't know if anyone besides yourself can help you decide if programming is the kind of job you want. Some have the right temperment and skills for programming and some do not. If you have never programmed before but like computers, I would recommend trying a single class (or book) before getting full-scale into learning programming. Not everyone enjoys it - even if they enjoy computers.

A couple things that made me decide against programming as a career (even though I enjoy programming as a pasttime): stress level and time demands. When you program, even as a group, you are under the gun to be done by a set time -- one that often does not take reality into account. Are you willing and able to work long days at crunch time if that becomes necessary? Can you handle heavy pressure to get something to work while trying to figure out why it isn't working? Depending on the type of programming work, you may also have to work with a team. This means dealing with code written by multiple people, some better than you and some worse, and not trying to rewrite what everyone else has done to your style (so long as it works).

Hope my comments help. Good luck.

Ouch* I enjoy programming much more than bug tracking. I did some programming+bug tracking for embedded systems at Panasonic (****) while in Japan. Great pay but hard, hard job. I find it's hell when you have to track other's bugs. Basically you have to make it work and you're not given any credit.

I do much more programming and less bug-tracking right now and I'm happy with it. If my Qualcomm shares (*ouch*) finally rebound I will retire at 40. Not going to happen .

I find there's interesting job to be done in almost any field - you just have to choose carefully and the market doesn't provide much choice anyway.

[Veritas]

I said:

1, I am currently unemployed...see the thread about the opening of the Developers Den to find out more.

2. I like being unemployed because it gives me lots of time to program =)

3. I don't like having zero income =)

1) I am no longer unemployed. I work for Boeing doing Hardware/Software Integration and Mission Control problem solving for the International Space Station. I have been here for 4 months now.

2) I like my job cause I get to work with people from all over the world. I know more about the space program than I ever imagined possible. I get to travel around the world. The thing I like the most...I am not allowed to work more than 80 hours in any two week period and no more than 10 hours in any given day. They don't want us to burn out and start doing poor work.

3) The current dislike I have in my job is that I am beginning to speak English with a Japanese accent. I have done nothing but work with Japanese engineers all week and I have not had much other human contact outside of that. My 'L's are starting to sound like 'R's.

[muyuubyou]

Hey Veritas that sounds very interesting. Congrats!!

[moog]

1. I'm a grad student (electrical eng)
2. The research, especially programming
3. The writing, all those damn stupid papers (that's why I spend half my day browsing the web)

[pez-king]

I work for a lawncare company.

I like being outdoors and getting paid for it.

I don't like the actual work portion.

[lex-ington]

I don't do any kind of programming.

I am a Land Surveyor and work outside all day. Plan on moving back to the Bahamas pretty soon to continue my career in the construction field.

Don't program at all since I can't keep focused long enough