Author Topic: What is your occupation?  (Read 5548 times)

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Offline FlamingCobra

  • An Experiment In Weaponised Annoyance
  • 28
Re: What is your occupation?
Right now I work as a layout designer for the university newspaper.

 
Re: What is your occupation?
I'm an archivist, deciding what will be written in future history books ;) Currently working at a state archive, but I'll move to a city archive in august with more responsibilities and more diverse tasks (and also better pay ^^)

 

Offline Ghostavo

  • 210
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Re: What is your occupation?
Software developer, currently working on maintaining and migrating a (very) large number of applications for a government drug regulatory agency.

A lot of fancy words for programs that print lots and lots of spreadsheets and reports basically.
"Closing the Box" - a campaign in the making :nervous:

Shrike is a dirty dirty admin, he's the destroyer of souls... oh god, let it be glue...

 

Offline WeatherOp

  • 29
  • I forged the ban hammer. What about that?
    • http://www.geocities.com/weather_op/pageone.html?1113100476773
Re: What is your occupation?
Certainly more of us that work in some shape or form for different levels of the government than I thought.
Decent Blacksmith, Master procrastinator.

PHD in the field of Almost Finishing Projects.

 
Re: What is your occupation?
I just sent out a resume for a kitchenhand job at a place where you buy Pasta in cups.

 
Re: What is your occupation?
Sheash, get out of that and design tools for water and wastewater operation and maintenance. Probably make a killing over the next ten-twenty years as this very important and ignored infrastructure needs replacing.
It's a nice thought, but I have the wrong degree. At least if I'm reading you right. Water distribution and waste-water treatment and disposal are more the realm of Civil Engineers. If you mean salt water disposal wells, some of the tools I've worked on have been used there as well. Temp and pressure are generally a lot lower, so the need for my equipment is fairly minimal in those applications unless you just have to inject water into a low permeability formation because of location and the need to stay well below usable aquifers.

My skill set is pretty specialized towards high pressure (15,000 psi) and high temperature (350F to 600F) seals and temporary plugging devices to be placed at the bottom of wells 9000 to upwards of 20,000 ft deep. Everything has to fit in a small round hole, and internal diameter has to be maximized under most circumstances. It takes a while, but you eventually get a kind of instinct for how to design this stuff. A few initial calcs to put boundaries to the design space, and then the design is just adding the necessary features and some validation calcs at the end to prove I really did know what I was doing after all.

It's not an extremely portable skill set. Well that's not fair. Some of it may port ok. What won't is the rather large body of oilfield specific knowledge and techniques. We're one of the few companies I know who still design using 2D cross-sections, because 99.9% of our components and assemblies are radially symmetric. And me being able to rattle off the nominal ID of 5.5" 17 lb/ft casing isn't going to be a lick of use outside of the upstream industry.

Plus I can't move. Finding a place where my wife and I can both work was nearly impossible.
"Wouldn't it be so wonderful if everything were meaningless?
But everything is so meaningful, and most everything turns to ****.
Rejoice."
-David Bazan

 

Offline WeatherOp

  • 29
  • I forged the ban hammer. What about that?
    • http://www.geocities.com/weather_op/pageone.html?1113100476773
Re: What is your occupation?
Sheash, get out of that and design tools for water and wastewater operation and maintenance. Probably make a killing over the next ten-twenty years as this very important and ignored infrastructure needs replacing.
It's a nice thought, but I have the wrong degree. At least if I'm reading you right. Water distribution and waste-water treatment and disposal are more the realm of Civil Engineers. If you mean salt water disposal wells, some of the tools I've worked on have been used there as well. Temp and pressure are generally a lot lower, so the need for my equipment is fairly minimal in those applications unless you just have to inject water into a low permeability formation because of location and the need to stay well below usable aquifers.

My skill set is pretty specialized towards high pressure (15,000 psi) and high temperature (350F to 600F) seals and temporary plugging devices to be placed at the bottom of wells 9000 to upwards of 20,000 ft deep. Everything has to fit in a small round hole, and internal diameter has to be maximized under most circumstances. It takes a while, but you eventually get a kind of instinct for how to design this stuff. A few initial calcs to put boundaries to the design space, and then the design is just adding the necessary features and some validation calcs at the end to prove I really did know what I was doing after all.

It's not an extremely portable skill set. Well that's not fair. Some of it may port ok. What won't is the rather large body of oilfield specific knowledge and techniques. We're one of the few companies I know who still design using 2D cross-sections, because 99.9% of our components and assemblies are radially symmetric. And me being able to rattle off the nominal ID of 5.5" 17 lb/ft casing isn't going to be a lick of use outside of the upstream industry.

Plus I can't move. Finding a place where my wife and I can both work was nearly impossible.

Ok, I understand now. Yeah that is pretty specialized.
Decent Blacksmith, Master procrastinator.

PHD in the field of Almost Finishing Projects.

 

Offline deathspeed

  • 29
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    • Steam
Re: What is your occupation?
Certainly more of us that work in some shape or form for different levels of the government than I thought.

You can include me in that group.  I'm a research analyst for my state's social services department.  Our primary tool is mainframe SAS to collect data from a wide variety of sources, but as a unit we are all self-taught since no training is available.  The last formal technical training I had was a college FORTRAN class in 1987.  We also use Excel a lot, and I have learned that although I used to think I was advanced with that I actually know almost nothing. 
Maybe someday God will give you a little pink toaster of your own.

 

Offline CP5670

  • Dr. Evil
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Re: What is your occupation?
I'm originally a mathematician and just started working as a researcher at AT&T Labs. I'm working on designing machine learning algorithms to forecast people's phone usage patterns, in order to optimize the wireless phone network and the cloud service running behind it. I have ended up hopping around between various different fields and used to build automated investment strategies at a hedge fund, face recognition and fraud detection algorithms at a tech startup, and military sensor and radar systems at a government research lab. I like getting into different things and do a mix of academic research and building systems, but have been mostly changing jobs because of layoffs. At one time my dream was actually to become a game developer, back when we were all building Freespace campaigns here, but I went more into math and research instead. (the game industry has also changed a lot over the years, not sure I would want to be in it today)

 
Re: What is your occupation?
I was previously doing Unity3d programming for an AR agency but my project was a bit of a dead end. Now I'm just staring at databases for a beleaguered investment firm.

  

Offline Nyctaeus

  • The Slavic Engineer
  • 212
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    • Exile
Re: What is your occupation?
"I make cool things! Or at least I think so. People pay for them... Sometimes."

Freelance graphic designer, mostly doing logotypes, brochures, posters and other kind of advertisement as one-man studio OrionLabs. I was working on UX and webdev as well. Currently I'm switching to more interesting comissions, as 3D artist for young indie game studios. I want to work as professional enviro and vehicles designer in the future. Working for CD Project RED [Witcher 3] is my current dream job.
Exile | Shadow Genesis | Inferno | Series Resurrecta  | DA Profile | P3D Profile

Proud owner of NyctiShipyards. Remember - Nyx will fix it!

All of my assets including models, textures, skyboxes, effects may be used under standard CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

 

Offline Blue Lion

  • Star Shatterer
  • 210
Re: What is your occupation?
Developer for Social Security. Modernizing the systems and adding in new things.

 

Offline Firesteel

  • 28
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Re: What is your occupation?
I'm going back for my MS in Computational Media in September (I was one of the weird people feeling withdrawal from academia immediately after graduating). I'm hopefully going to be doing a bunch more narrative focused stuff and if I have time keep writing plays. Maybe I'll even try and switch into the long haul for a PhD because why not.
Current Projects:

- Video Critiques of Freespace
- Re-learning FRED

 

Offline Jeff Vader

  • The Back of the Hero!
  • 212
  • Bwahaha
Re: What is your occupation?
I am an "ICT specialist" at our municipal IT service provider, doing second-level support stuff regarding workstations, mobile devices and peripherals. In a nutshell, our customer support will ask customers  "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" and "Have you checked if it's plugged in?" on the phone. If/when that fails, we go on-site to say "I turned it off and on again and it works now." or "I plugged it in and it works now."

Seriously speaking, we do also have our weird issues, widespread problems and what not that we also get to solve. And being the lazy bum I am, I'm always looking for ways to do my job remotely and automating repetitive tasks so that I wouldn't need to lift my ass off my chair.
23:40 < achillion > EveningTea: ass
23:40 < achillion > wait no
23:40 < achillion > evilbagel: ass
23:40 < EveningTea > ?
23:40 < achillion > 2-letter tab complete failure

14:08 < achillion > there's too much talk of butts and dongs in here
14:08 < achillion > the level of discourse has really plummeted
14:08 < achillion > Let's talk about politics instead
14:08 <@The_E > butts and dongs are part of #hard-light's brand now
14:08 <@The_E > well
14:08 <@The_E > EvilBagel's brand, at least

01:06 < T-Rog > welp
01:07 < T-Rog > I've got to take some very strong antibiotics
01:07 < achillion > penis infection?
01:08 < T-Rog > Chlamydia
01:08 < achillion > O.o
01:09 < achillion > well
01:09 < achillion > I guess that happens
01:09 < T-Rog > at least it's curable
01:09 < achillion > yeah
01:10 < T-Rog > I take it you weren't actually expecting it to be a penis infection
01:10 < achillion > I was not

14:04 < achillion > Sometimes the way to simplify is to just have a habit and not think about it too much
14:05 < achillion > until stuff explodes
14:05 < achillion > then you start thinking about it

22:16 < T-Rog > I don't know how my gf would feel about Jewish conspiracy porn

15:41 <-INFO > EveningTea [[email protected]] has joined #hard-light
15:47 < EvilBagel> butt
15:51 < Achillion> yes
15:53 <-INFO > EveningTea [[email protected]] has quit [Quit: http://www.mibbit.com ajax IRC Client]

18:53 < Achillion> Dicks are fun

21:41 < MatthTheGeek> you can't spell assassin without two asses

20:05 < sigtau> i'm mining titcoins from now on

00:31 < oldlaptop> Drunken antisocial educated freezing hicks with good Internet == Finland stereotype

11:46 <-INFO > Kobrar [[email protected]] has joined #hard-light
11:50 < achtung> Surely you've heard of DVDA
11:50 < achtung> Double Vaginal Double ANal
11:51 < Kobrar> ...
11:51 <-INFO > Kobrar [[email protected]] has left #hard-light []

 
Re: What is your occupation?
I retired as a Computer Application Engineer & System Developer, Labview Programmer for one of the auto test labs.  Specializing in Data Acquisition and Control.

 
Re: What is your occupation?
After my first finished study (humanities, mainly history and German philology) combined with geography I didn't find an adequate job with a perspective for more than a few months, especially if you have to raise a little child. So I decided to start from scratch and got some kind of "integrated degree program".

Now there are 14 more months to go until I'm done. After that I will work at the court as a law (enforcement) officer (at least that's what the translation website calls it, I'm not sure if there's a real equivalent in english), in my case at the labor court. It's a mix of making formal decisions, writing bills for lawyers and court management stuff.

It never was a matter of the heart, but the conditions are almost unbeatable if you have a child. Fair payment, regular working hours and the possibility to (almost) decide freely how long you stay (as long as the work gets done).

Ironically I now earn as a student almost as much as I would have earned after my first study for a long time. So it's again 3 years of time-consuming learning, very little spare time and additional tuition, but it's worth it. (Counts the days until September 30th, 2018  :D)

 
Re: What is your occupation?
I'm a computer science student, but over the summer I'm working at TomTom, updating and in some cases creating internal automation. It's really interesting, actually, and I get to solve real-world problems and see a different side of the software world than you get in academia.

 

Offline Mpez

  • 27
Re: What is your occupation?
Ex-English teacher. Moved to secretary jobs, as they're less stressful, less time consuming (preparing, staying up late to check tests etc.) and more stable in general. The downside is starting quite late (after 10 or 11am or even 3pm) on most days, so difficult to balance with family life.

 

Offline Mikes

  • 29
Re: What is your occupation?
I teachez ze Enlishz to ze Germanz!  :nod: :lol:

 
Re: What is your occupation?
It took me 5 years to barely stumble through a B.S. in Physics (God I wish I'd gone engineering), and nothing for a few years after that when grad school didn't seem feasible for any number of reasons, followed by some part-time tutoring.  At the moment I'm a high school physics teacher.  To be frank I find it rather unfulfilling, and I'd much rather be doing something else if I could figure out what the hell that should be.  Though to be even franker, given the opportunity, I'd gladly take doing nothing whatsoever.

Mongoose, if it is any consolation, my high school physics teacher was a true inspiration for both myself and my classmates who had the privilege of learning with him. While it may be an unfulfilling position for yourself (and if you are truly unsatisfied then by all means do what you need to do), it has likely opened the door to greater understanding of the physical world to those whom you teach.

That being said, I am currently an engineering student working at Amphenol where I design, build, test, and deploy machines that automate connector assembly.