What are we all doing for a living?

From: graphitone17 Apr 2020 22:22
To: ANT_THOMAS 10 of 183
I'm a lead engineer in a service IT department working for a large (~1500 employees) charity, been there nearly two years now and enjoying it. It's a nice place to work, anyone can bring ideas to the fore and the IT department is around 80 people strong, so always others to bounce those ideas off. The past 4 weeks have been pretty hellish though. We been tasked with renting 800+ laptops and getting them configured for end users to be able to work from home. That in itself has been ok, but we've been supporting those end users through setting up VPN connections and have never been busier. Our job would be made a lot easier if people could read manuals.

When I'm not doing the above, the work is a bit of everything, 2nd and 3rd line support, projects, mentoring and coaching.

I would drop it all tomorrow though if drawing portraits paid the mortgage.  :J

 
From: graphitone17 Apr 2020 22:23
To: Lucy (X3N0PH0N) 11 of 183
 (hug)
From: Manthorp17 Apr 2020 23:40
To: ANT_THOMAS 12 of 183
I work in the Cultural Institute of University of Leeds, mostly matching up artists with academics and giving them space and resources to play out together. I also still make my own art sometimes with Greyhair (Shanaz Gulzar).
From: CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)17 Apr 2020 23:41
To: Manthorp 13 of 183
Have you had a chance to play with the new toy yet?
From: craig (CHARTLEY)18 Apr 2020 05:07
To: ANT_THOMAS 14 of 183
My word, we’ve all returned at the same time?

I’m currently a detective in a rather violent and busy part of the world. It’s varied, interesting and generally agreeable.

No such thing as working from home for us, I’m currently sat in work monitoring the carnage going all around our area to see if there’s any trade for CID.
From: Dave!!18 Apr 2020 11:51
To: ANT_THOMAS 15 of 183
I work for an international IT sales and services company and am currently a Service Manager. Currently working on two large accounts managing all of the services we deliver to these two customers across UK, Ireland, Belgium and Netherlands. Keeps me busy, although the regular travelling I used to do is somewhat on hold at the moment.

Been at this firm for 6 1/2 years now, worked my way up from being a lead IT engineer, senior analyst, team leader and now service manager.
From: Peter (BOUGHTONP)18 Apr 2020 12:21
To: ANT_THOMAS 16 of 183
I had been wasting time at a SaaS company, where I was filling the roles of senior developer & team lead, but without the recognition, respect or pay.


I'd most like to do sponsored open source work - fixing bugs, adding features, producing small/focused libraries/tools, etc - but I'm potentially open to any software contracts that are either short-term or sufficiently rewarding/interesting.

From: ANT_THOMAS18 Apr 2020 13:02
To: ALL17 of 183
Unsurprisingly a lot of IT related jobs.

I probably deliberately underplayed my role, for some reason I find it amusing to say I buy cardboard boxes for a living.

Anyway, the main part of my job is to manage the packaging buying for a food manufacturer, we specialise in packing olives and antipasti products going to most of the major retailers in the UK, and a bit of export. Someone else covers the ingredients, but I do dabble a bit on that side. I'm also quite involved in a new project that launched in Jan where we are producing a ready to eat chicken mimick vegan protein (Squeaky Bean in Sainsbury's, go buy some. It is genuinely very good).
Another aspect is that I'm our on site "systems coordinator" and part of our IT Steering Group for the wider group of businesses. We've got two primary systems for running a lot of things, a financial system and an MRP for, you guessed it, Material Requirement Planning. Both have their quirks and challenges and I'm the go to person at my site, I work a lot on the MRP system and it was pretty much setup by someone who doesn't do my day to day so never really cared about how badly it functioned. I've gone in with a mindset of automating out as many manual tasks as possible to vastly improve data accuracy. More accurate data usually results in a couple of things, less shortages, less waste.
From: Manthorp19 Apr 2020 00:07
To: CHYRON (DSMITHHFX) 18 of 183
I've been experimenting with overlaying successive photos with me in different parts of the room (works fine), but of course we're in lock down, and there's no way I can carry out my masterplan of getting the town council to agree for me to site it on the back of the town hall, overlooking the square to get my Rush Hour For Urban animals shots.

I'll let you know when we go ahead.
From: CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)19 Apr 2020 12:40
To: Manthorp 19 of 183
Glad to hear it works! Interesting concept, looking forward to seeing its eventual realization.
From: milko19 Apr 2020 17:13
To: ANT_THOMAS 20 of 183
I listen to customers telling me they want their logo to bounce around next to a football match, then I tell my team of motion graphics artists to make the logo bounce around, then I send the result to the football match and tell our field ops guys when to play the logo bouncing around. 

Not really sure how this fills as much time as it does, but it do. 

Since there is currently no football or rugby or cricket I am now mainly doing parenting and wondering if we’ll survive long enough to be there when the sport happens again. Which I think we will, just about. We also do some cool stuff with VR and AR but that’s not been much to do with me yet and that also is all on hold since it tended to be in the kinds of places that are now closed. 
From: Matt19 Apr 2020 18:32
To: ANT_THOMAS 21 of 183
I am working in the technology department of a finance company. Think lots of transparency and audits by the likes of the SEC, ESMA and FCA in The UK.

The UK used to come under the jurisdiction of ESMA, but then Brexit happened.
EDITED: 19 Apr 2020 18:34 by MATT
From: koswix19 Apr 2020 20:50
To: ANT_THOMAS 22 of 183
I draw pipe fittings to help multinational megacorps rape the earth and poison the air.

Almost 1 year in, it's as boring as it sounds, but hopefully will lead to something better.

Official title is 'mechanical design engineer', but that's rather overstated for what I actually do. We're essentially one level up from blacksmiths. 
From: patch19 Apr 2020 21:23
To: ANT_THOMAS 23 of 183
I work as a network engineer for a.. Christ, what do we do these days? We used to have our own ISP, but then the other ISP that owns us got arsey about it so our ISP team split off into their own company and effectively became the opposition. We do a lot of cloud hosting and integration with public clouds. I spend a lot of time buried in comms racks wondering where that cable is going and why is it there and how is this network even functioning without it catching fire? I look at some of the hosted firewalls that we run and occasionally make small changes very carefully. I try to persuade my customers to spend more money than they want to spend because their switches are 11 years old and we're all going to have some really bad days when the switch fails.

We do anything for the cash, basically.
From: Chris (CHRISSS)20 Apr 2020 18:04
To: ANT_THOMAS 24 of 183
I sit at a desk twiddling my thumbs all day until something breaks.
From: CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)20 Apr 2020 18:36
To: Chris (CHRISSS) 25 of 183
That is dangerously close to um... never mind.
From: Mouse23 Apr 2020 00:13
To: ALL26 of 183
I bought an old job centre building and turned it into a music shop / music teaching studio / music venue. Just coming to the realisation doing all that on my own was a fucking stupid idea so taking in like minded tenants. Got a guy who's built a recording studio so far and was just on the cusp of signing up a guy who produces electronic music but then some shit hit a fan.

After about two decades of umming and ahhing about it I've got all my teaching now working remotely and am currently scrambling with the difference between marketing music lessons to T h e W o r l d as opposed to a 15 mile radius of my building.
EDITED: 23 Apr 2020 00:14 by MOUSE
From: Some call me... (PSYCHO_GEEZER)23 Apr 2020 01:49
To: ANT_THOMAS 27 of 183
I work for a well known exam board that does both academic and vocational qualifications.  My role is basic customer services; phone calls, emails etc about pretty much anything we do.  It's either a basic question/request that I answer/deal with or something more complicated that I pass on.
From: Serg (NUKKLEAR)23 Apr 2020 10:07
To: ALL28 of 183
I take care of the computer plumbing for a big bank so that they can talk to other big banks and exchanges and customers about buying high and selling low (is that the right way?) really quickly. Basically, I work for The Man.
From: Serg (NUKKLEAR)23 Apr 2020 10:09
To: Lucy (X3N0PH0N) 29 of 183
Also, I spend a little bit of time every now and then reminiscing and wondering what Drew (and IxiPete and lots of others) are up to, so I'm both  (bounce) and  :C that you're around but not totally awesome  (hugleft)