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thegleek wrote:

My title claims me to be a Senior Programmer Analyst, which someone said earlier is having the skillset/education to do all the work which others get paid 2-3x more. Oh well.

Titles are BS.

thegleek wrote:

One thing I loathe more then anything is moving on to the NEXT job... Especially all these stupid damn recruiters. I think their sole mission in life is to get anyone employment cuz their client charges $250/hr so you get hired in at $30-50/hr so they get a cut of the profits.

I've dealt with them from both sides of the equation (looking for job / looking to hire someone). Yes, the majority of them are slimeballs.

thegleek wrote:

So far, I just ignore these things. I don't find 6-month contract-to-hire jobs very appealing.

They were great ~15 years ago, when if you had even half a clue you were pretty much guaranteed to be able to line up another contract before the previous one even ended. Things are different today; it's a recipe for potentially being unemployed 6 months from now.

just brew it! wrote:

They were great ~15 years ago, when if you had even half a clue you were pretty much guaranteed to be able to line up another contract before the previous one even ended. Things are different today; it's a recipe for potentially being unemployed 6 months from now.

Not only that, but why the hell would I leave my current job (which pays way less) but gives me the security of having health insurance for myself & wife, 401K, and several other benefits. That's the only reason why they dropped the "95k salary" BS on me.

thegleek wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

They were great ~15 years ago, when if you had even half a clue you were pretty much guaranteed to be able to line up another contract before the previous one even ended. Things are different today; it's a recipe for potentially being unemployed 6 months from now.

Not only that, but why the hell would I leave my current job (which pays way less) but gives me the security of having health insurance for myself & wife, 401K, and several other benefits. That's the only reason why they dropped the "95k salary" BS on me.

And at that point it becomes a gamble on whether the job market will turn around before your COBRA coverage runs out...

thegleek wrote:

So far, I just ignore these things. I don't find 6-month contract-to-hire jobs very appealing.

My wife is doing this right now. The company she technically works for is a fly-by-night operation that is giving off a lot of sketchy vibes. The "-to-hire" part looks good, but it looks like it's going to be a long six months putting up with shoddy invoices, paychecks and coordination issues. I shudder to think what filing the taxes next year is going to be like.

As for me, I'm currently a Java developer for a contracting firm. It's been good, bad, interesting & dull depending on the contract. Right now it's challenging and interesting. Like others, management gets in the way a bit... but only a bit. And there are some work satisfaction issues that add a lot of value to the job personally. Doing good deeds and all that.

maiden4life wrote:

I hate managers that think they have to micro-manage; it is so counter productive.

The question you should ask yourself is why your boss feels he/she has to micro-manage you. I can assure you it's not for lack of other things to do. That's not to say that you're at fault, but too many people automatically assume that micro-management is a problem with their boss.

Vrock wrote:

maiden4life wrote:

I hate managers that think they have to micro-manage; it is so counter productive.

The question you should ask yourself is why your boss feels he/she has to micro-manage you. I can assure you it's not for lack of other things to do. That's not to say that you're at fault, but too many people automatically assume that micro-management is a problem with their boss.

You obviously don't know some of the people I've worked for. When you micromanage *everyone*, and actively screw up stuff the people under you are working on, that's a problem...

Micromanagement is *always* the problem of the boss. An inability to let go, delegate or realize that people must be free to do their job their way and not yours.

I have never seen a micromanager that was anything less than incompetent or megalomaniacal. Ever. I've been in the working world including the military for over 30 years. A good boss knows how to get good work out of his or her employees without behaving like a jackass. Inspiration and leading by example are key. Vision is a plus if you can get it (so incredibly rare as to be nearly non-existent I'm afraid).

Off rantyness - I'm actually paid pretty well for my part time gig but I'm actually considering dropping it for a much lesser paying job at a co-operative or collective because of the way my business is run. My friends at these places seem much happier and it's a much looser and more friendly atmosphere where the employee is not always automatically wrong. Case in point - my car was stolen Sunday before work. Luckily I have another beater but in order to make a report I had to wait over 2 hours for the police. I kept my boss apprised the entire time and even gave him the number of the police report. He still wrote me up for being 2 hours late. He could have told me not to bother coming in because he'd write me up but no. I'm this close to being pissed enough to run for the board of directors.

destroy.all.monsters wrote:

Micromanagement is *always* the problem of the boss. An inability to let go, delegate or realize that people must be free to do their job their way and not yours.

I tend to agree with this. If it is as Vrock was saying and a person actually needed to be micromanaged then could you still fault the boss for not letting that person go?

Absolutely flip-mode. I've had people I had to stand and watch them do the work in order to make them do it. I hated it, they hated it but I was not going to get written up just because whenever I walked away they wouldn't do anything or come up with a litany of excuses. Had I been the boss I would have fired them. If your people are incompetent you've only got yourself (and h.r.) to blame.

Yes I do. I went from working as a grunt in the steel manufacturing industry to playing a somewhat important role in the medical field. I'm a medical lab technician in 2 areas. The first is in a hospital where I stick needles in patients arms, hands or feet to get blood to be tested & then set said blood up in the various analyzers. The other job is in a microbiology lab where I set up various types of samples (anything from urine, to throat swabs, to tissue samples......even body parts that needs to ground into mush) so we can find out what kind(s) of bacteria are growing on said samples.
Where else do you get to inflict pain on people just to do your job, or get to cut pieces off of an amputated body part.
Management at both places know we know our jobs well enough to leave us alone, which is another reason to like my job.

Love my job, for the moment. Graduated college with an economics degree, worked as an analyst for a real estate firm for what seemed like two seconds before the economy tanked, and I live in a state heavily involved in the housing bubble. I'd dabbled with getting my MA/MS in Econ, but the short stint actually crunching numbers got me to realize that while I loved the field, doing it day in and day out was possibly the most boring fate imaginable.

So, guess that ended up being a blessing in disguise. Love spending days off catching up on the state of the science, but practicing.. don't miss it.

Couple odd jobs later, I help run a family business. Number of employees varies; a core of about 18, balloons to twice that if the order book justifies it. (We're in construction) Don't make as much as I'd like for where I'm at in life, but.. its enough to max my Roth every year, plus some extra, and unlike some of you poor souls, whose pain I know from the past, the owner and his family couldn't be much better. Slacks a bit on occasion (aka, occasional Monday morning hangover), 'cause its good to be the boss I guess, but otherwise is great.

Like some of the rest of you, guess I'll ride things out were I'm at, especially since I'm happy here, despite 50-60 hour weeks. Maybe if business picks up, I'll lobby for pay hike.. could end up here longer then I suspect.

Glad to hear most of you are doing good alright, though. Some parts of the country are in much worse shape then others, and if a homes under water, can be hard to escape.

I enjoy my job (and it is definitely the best job I've ever had), but that is also part of the problem in a sense. I do software almost exclusively, whereas in school (and in my other jobs) I was always more of a hardware / embedded systems guy and the longer I stay here, the less chance I have of moving back into an industry like that. Also, although we do research and development (which I love), we don't really work in areas that are of strong interest to me, and it makes it difficult for advancement since most of my coworkers have extremely strong academic backgrounds in our research fields (at one point, all my bosses from my 1st line manager on up had PhDs from MIT). In a sense, I was extremely lucky to get this job in the first place since I don't have the strong academic chops, and didn't have any proven software development skills. After 5 years though, I would like to change geography and move into a job that is more in line with my interests (or give up and go back for a PhD).

I just don't hate it...

I just don't hate it...

Use to get upset at work almost every day. Then i decided "What for?" It just gets me/keeps me, bent out of shape. So i started looking at the funny ways people act. Where i work they talk about Diversity. We have a vietnamese guy, Koi. It's so funny, he tries to talk spanish with the mexicans, with a vietnamese accent. Sometimes he talks about what other people do and will say. He's just Stupido like that! I told my kids what he says and they cracked up.
We have radios to communicate with, since the place is kinda big. He will call me on the radio and say, Please come to batch deck, RIGHT NOW! then mumble some stuff on the radio that no body understands.
We also have the 2 minute rule. Certain people will always call for assistance. We know it's something small and so we wait 2 minutes for them to call back, We Got It. Then we tell them ther #1. Makes them feel good.
And Reshanda. She's crazy. She's from the woods in North Lousiana. She gets to talking about snakes and ol home cures. While the whole time she has the biggest smile i've ever seen on someone's face.
Last, but not least is Snake Bite. This guy could never tell a lie, not to save his life. He's just brutaly truthful. But he gets to talking about wierd stuff he's done. He told us once about a girl he was with and how he bit down on her ***** (some place i could never see myself being. ) and she hollered out. And then another time was about his circumcision at the age of 26!!! . How he was showing it off to his sister in law. and his wife right there. Then he's right back to the business at hand.
So try this out. It could be a better day.

I hate my job. It's not that it's a bad job (it really isn't), its just that there's no career path or advancement for me.

I went to school for business. I enjoy business and I'm good at it. But I work in IT doing technical support for financial enterprise programs. The software (email, ticket tracking) is TERRIBLE and makes our jobs harder than need be. The software I support is coded really bad (you LOOK at it the wrong way and it'll stop working) and our development is lazy. There are certainly career advancements into senior technical support and consulting, but I have neither the skills or desire to move forward.

Today we had a good argument involving management.

We ran out of the good velcro we use to hold down computer modules, etc in our vehicles, one of the other apprentices was sent to the manager to try order some more, and he just went mental complaining that it costs 3x as much to buy as the crap velcro (which doesn't stick very well) and that they bought this chemical primer to wipe the surface before you stick the crap velcro on to help the issue.

Ok, so instead of just buying the good velcro in the first place because of "cost", they buy the crap stuff, which doesn't stick properly, falls off the vehicle, which they have to buy a chemical primer to get it to stick, so there is more cost there, then that makes the job take an extra 10-15 minutes of screwing around finding the primer (they got one bottle to share amongst 30 or so workers), actually using it on the surface, then sticking the crap velcro down.

Mind you, it has a warning on the label that it causes drowsyness, dizzyness and irritates skin, so you are supposed to use a respirator, use chemical resistant gloves and for good measures safety glasses, we don't have a respirator and they won't buy the gloves because they are too expensive.

@AMD Damo -

Sounds about right for any medium- to large-sized company...

Why do anything the simple way when you can make it into a bureaucratic mess.

Vrock wrote:

I learned a long time ago that I don't have to like my job...I just have to not hate it.

If I had my way, I would never have a job. But, as I lack the entrepreneurial skills and ambition to make myself independently wealthy, I'll continue to work to provide myself and my family the best standard of living possible. So long as I don't absolutely loathe what I'm doing, I consider it a fair trade off.

This is me pretty much to a T. I run servers that host webapps that our company sells as SaaS. I get to learn new things and I am moving into the SAN arena for the past year. I get to play with new hardware and software all the time. I enjoy the 'project' side of the job, but its inane policies and what not that drive me down. And the users. Man do I hate the users. Not personally really, just from a 'you keep interrupting me from doing something I enjoy and asking questions that have already been answered 4 times' kinda way.

I am turning 31 in September and I make enough money now really, but more is always welcome! I foresee keeping this job another year or two at least and then starting to look for a more dedicated SAN admin job for a bunch of more money without as many tentacles.

maiden4life wrote:

Just sitting here at work thinking to myself....Do I like my job? Desktop support is fine but you get to that point where a job......is just a job. Approaching 40 and it seems the time window is closing on learning new things. Technology motivates me, but the job market is so cutthroat. I am lucky to have a job at this time, but maybe I just need to push myself and move on to the next step. Anybody else feel that your job is just a job? What motivates you?

Well I have been in your shoes and up until 6 years ago. Thing is I broke out of my comfort zone of Desktop Support to learn new IT things. I landed a job as a Analyst within my IT division and was exposed to a plethora of things. Mostly Project Management and software life-cycle. From there I was afforded the opportunity to specialize in something which turned out to be SharePoint development. Desktop support provided me with a good grasp of all things IT that it was relatively easy for me to switch to development. While at my age (pushing hard on 40) I am a very junior developer I am learning new things almost everyday. I never once thought I would be coding for a job always thinking I would be on the infrastructure/hardware side of the house. I absolutely love it. (except when my code is wrong and I am hunting for that bad line of code)

I do have to say that the company also makes a huge difference in your job. I have worked for three fortune 500 and companies before this one and they all sucked. The company I work for now, going on 10 years, takes care of its employees.

just brew it! wrote:

thegleek wrote:

My title claims me to be a Senior Programmer Analyst, which someone said earlier is having the skillset/education to do all the work which others get paid 2-3x more. Oh well.

Titles are BS.

They may be BS but they mean everything when hunting for a new job especially in IT. While most people with the job dont hold much to them those searching for jobs desperately want them to be on their resume. This is more so evident when a company refuse to use industry standard job titles for certain jobs and make up their own.

Currently a nurse working at a suburban hospital. Shifts vary between 12-18 hours and alternate between day/night on a regular basis. The benefits are great, the pay is okay, but I absolutely love the job. My only complaint is the fact that I need to decompress a bit in between the days I'm off. Sometimes I need to take some Melatonin to reset my circadian rhythm cycles, but to a certain extent.

My doors for advancement are always open and growing in numbers. Along with opportunities to go back to school and have majority of the tuition paid off.

There is such a demand in nursing right now. I know several people, some family, some high school friends, who went back to school 4-5 years after graduating college and who had no problems finding jobs here in the central IL area. And they all said the same thing: plenty of room to advance, too.

I'm starting to like my job again now that I'm no longer in end-user support. I'm a QA analyst/technical writer for a K-12 web application and I'm very anonymous in a company of around 2500 employees. I'm not incredibly well-paid, but the bills get paid and there's still money leftover for savings, 401k (company match) and dicking around. But more importantly, it's rarely more than 40-45 hours a week and I haven't had to travel overnight since my daughter was born, though that will change in April. I can work, get paid, and I'm not married to my job so I can pursue something else for fulfillment. I don't have to rely on my job to give it to me.

derFunkenstein wrote:

But more importantly, it's rarely more than 40-45 hours a week and I haven't had to travel overnight since my daughter was born, though that will change in April.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of business travel even though my kids are all grown now (youngest just started college last summer). It comes in waves; there have been stretches of close to a year where I haven't traveled at all, and periods where I've been sent out of town multiple times a month. I'd mind a lot less if they weren't typically on such short notice -- getting more than a week's advance warning is unusual, and I've even gotten a call at home at 9:00 PM on a Sunday evening telling me to pack a suitcase and bring it to the office first thing Monday morning.

That totally sucks. I always knew about travel ahead of time because it was scheduled with a school. I used to spend my entire summers on the road - our conversion people would get data set up and sent to the client and servers configured, then I'd go on site and train for 2-3 days.

I never went anywhere interesting. Places like Greencastle, IN or Cairo, IL. The farthest I ever went was eastern Oklahoma to this little bitty town of about 300 people that was literally in the middle of a national forest reserve. I had to get a hotel an hour away in Poteau. Occasionally I'd wind up in Chicagoland or St. Louis metro-east, but otherwise I played an awful lot of Diablo in my hotel room.

Most of my travel is to DC, various military bases, and defense contractors, since we're a DoD (sub)contractor. Seen one base, you've seen 'em all, pretty much. The ones where I'm wearing my marketing hat (which I'm not terribly comfortable with...) are the most stressful. Just let me talk to the other geeks, damnit! Yes, I know some people really get off on talking to the bigwigs... but my most stressful trip ever was when I had to give a demo of our system to the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not my cup of tea!

I'd have to say that the most interesting work trip was to Israel (we have both a supplier and a customer there)... I suppose that makes up for a few of the crap trips which were not only an inconvenience to me, but a total waste of money for my employer as well!

Wow. I think I would **** my pants. Literally. And depending on what's going on in the middle east, the same would be true for a trip to Israel.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Wow. I think I would **** my pants. Literally. And depending on what's going on in the middle east, the same would be true for a trip to Israel.

Yeah, I was comfortable around O-5s and O-6s (dad retired as a LtCol), but a 4-star would be a bit much.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Wow. I think I would **** my pants. Literally. And depending on what's going on in the middle east, the same would be true for a trip to Israel.

For the demo, I was literally worried that I would short out the keyboard of the laptop that was controlling the demo system, I was sweating so much! (Didn't help that they decided to stage the demo in an aircraft hangar in Florida, in the middle of summer... 100 degrees and 100% humidity.)

Israel actually isn't *that* scary, as long as you stay away from the border areas that are in range of the Hamas rockets...

Captain Ned wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

Wow. I think I would **** my pants. Literally. And depending on what's going on in the middle east, the same would be true for a trip to Israel.

Yeah, I was comfortable around O-5s and O-6s (dad retired as a LtCol), but a 4-star would be a bit much.

The kicker was that I went into this thing assuming that our Director of Business Development would be there with me to answer any high-level non-technical questions. At the last minute, they decided that only one person from each vendor could be present in the demo area (security concern, I guess). Our Director didn't know how to run the demo rig, so...

We eventually got the contract, so I guess I didn't screw up too bad...

I absolutely love my job as an IT Admin with a small team at a large, publicly funded university (in Europe). I'm my own boss, I get to delegate the stuff I don't like to to, get paid very well, have five weeks of vacation, no overtime, have a great (USD 1'000'000) budget I get to manage and have a lot of highly intelligent people around me that appreciate my services. On top of that I can take whatever work-relevant courses I like (during work hours, all paid). I consider myself very lucky. Pretty much a dream job for me.