What's your job?

[Pipe & Slippers]

Management Accountant/Spreadsheet Jockey in Financial Services managing a team of 3, whittled down from 7 over the years

Pros

• Compensation is ok
• I’m very competent at the BAU workload and enjoy the pressure of month end accounting – it’s like sitting an exam every month
• Office banter is quality, despite being surrounded by accountants – missing that at the moment

Cons

• Tied into work cycle: Month ends, which means you can’t take holiday 4 working days either side of any month end. Year ends which means you can’t have any time off over Christmas. Those 2 are really beginning to grate after >25 years doing similar work, and not just with me - OH, friends and family are affected by restrictions on my availability
• Unremitting pressure of non-BAU requests where everyone thinks I’m an expert on everything else combined with a growing tendency for people to try and hang responsibility onto anyone else, rather than stepping up and taking decisions and the consequent accountability themselves
• Long hours/exhausting/the work itself is a bit dull – I’m dead by the time I knock off work on a Friday

 

[PlacidCasual]

Solicitor.

Not something I could easily recommend to most, if I put my hand on my heart.

Don’t worry you’re a solicitor you probably don’t have one.

 

[Quartz]

I am retired.

 

[NVP]

I am retired.

 

[Siliconslave]

Job title: Presales Expert for a large software company

I manage the technical side of a software sales process by lying less than sales and more than engineering, demoing software and consulting on target architectures. I also do some though leadership, business case creation, public speaking at conferences & lead project teams for POCs.

Pros:

- Interesting variety to the work. I get exposure to a lot of different industries - had a customer selling viruses and molds online the other day (government agency).
- Lots of travel (not so much anymore) to see customers, mostly UK based.
- Plenty of training available & lots to learn on the job as well
- Allowed a certain amount of scope to do things the way I want, cuts both ways but can keep my own hours pretty much.
- Good pay

Cons:
- Lots of travel (not so much anymore) - a surprising amount of customers are in the middle of no-where as office / warehouse space is cheap. Sometimes away all week
- Can be long hours, have flown out to Dubai for a 2 hour meeting, US for a day etc - luckily i'm mostly UK based.
- High stress - very high value deals hang on what we do

 

[Nitefly]

Don’t worry you’re a solicitor you probably don’t have one.

:_[

 

[Bickaxe]

Dogsbody, Maritime and Coastguard Agency

I work on the survey and inspection side so it's mostly bookings for these jobs alone the South Coast.
We have a new system that covers inspections and certification so I've been heavily involved in that which is good considering I'm still at the bottom of the ladder.

Pro
Job security
Varied work
The stories from ex seafarers
Career progression opps

Cons
Processes and legislation
The public
The Coastguard being the only ones you hear about
Pay (no increase for last 8 years, 1% this year I believe)

 

[skaif]

Job title: Deputy head of secondary

Basically help run the secondary part of the school. As the techy in the school and now with the results of covid and the impact this has had on education, in kinda the go to guy for all tech related education issues.

Pros : Genuinely love what I'm doing. Haven't felt this fulfilled in a while! Getting paid a decent amount finally after getting not enough in the UK.

Cons : Owners can be a bit awkward. That can lead to issues and power struggles.

 

[fobose]

Services Supervisor in a large bioscience company. The role consists of many tasks as I've been here so long things have been pinned on to me. Main responsibilities: Procurement, coordinating equipment service and repair, H&S coordinator, line management of 5 staff and many other stuff I cant be bothered to list.

Pros:
- Secure
- Flexible (WFH when required etc)

Cons:
- High stress with lots of scientific equipment breakdowns
- Feel under paid
- Lots of other things but I wont go in to details

 

[Super-Spy]

Playboy Photographer

Pros:
- Lots of travel
- Surrounded by beautiful women
- Partying

Cons:
- Too much travel
- Fed up of shallow women
- Not enough sleep

 

[NVP]

For the last time LEAVE ME ALONE YOU FREAK.

 

[JustBen]

Job - Enterprise Architect
Pros - Decent pay, decent company, decent boss
Cons - New role for me so still getting used to not really be a techy IT person anymore.

 

[Worthy]

For the last time LEAVE ME ALONE YOU FREAK.

Hahaha!

This thread is so interesting. It's great seeing how varied peoples jobs are.

I'm either Principal Azure Architect, or Principal Azure Engineer, or Principal Azure ****kicker, depending on what day it is. Basically I design and build systems in Azure.

Pros:
I moved to cloud because I hate the DC environment with a passion. Not having to be in a DC never gets old. Turns out I enjoy the technology itself as well, so that's a bonus.
Cloud is still a new and fancy tech to a lot of people, so they act like you're some kind of hero.
Pay is decent as it's still new and fancy to a lot of people. This won't last.

Cons:
It's so varied that one week you can be deploying applications globally, with local performance no matter your location, all fully synced and instantly available on whatever platform you may choose. The next week you'll be getting complaints about one guy who isn't getting an MFA notification. As it's still quite new you get labelled as "The Azure Guy" rather than it being treated as a platform like any other and having to have specialists in each area that may run on it.

That's about it really. It's just a job and technology I fell in to at the end of the day. I don't hate it, and I put effort into doing it as well as I can do, but that's about it.

 

[RSR]

Cloud Engineer

So I engineer diffferent types of clouds.

 

[Martynt74]

Cloud Engineer

So I engineer diffferent types of clouds.

I saw a lovely cumulonimbus earlier. Was that your handiwork?

 

[Hades]

Model employee?

Smooooothly done

 

[Greebo]

Senior Bean counter.

Pros: I can pretty much do what I want when I want

Cons: The buck stops with me if we run out of money

 

[RSR]

I saw a lovely cumulonimbus earlier. Was that your handiwork?

That one was probably one of my colleuges designs, I am more of a specialist in cirrostratus formations.

 

[Maccy]

Performance Test Engineer

Pros:
Work with a good team who know their stuff
Pay is pretty good
Flexible working (generally)
Have worked for a lot of different companies/clients over the years and picked up some good knowledge

Cons:
Sometimes long hours/commutes
Work can be a bit samey after a while
No real career progression as I'm currently freelance

 

[krooton]

Business Analyst, covering marketing, CRM and web.
Live and breath a combination of Oracle/SQL/Salesforce/PowerBI.

Pros:
Great company with great benefits, who truly recognise and reward performance.
Pay is good, I'm earning more than I ever thought I actually would, lol.
Awesome team members.
Looking to be flexible working as we have weathered WFH flawlessly.

Cons:
Industry is struggling due to Covid. Though we are one of the biggest players, so if we go down, the whole industry is ******.
American head office can make for awkward meeting times.