What's your job?

toshj said:
I have a small headhunting firm. Have done it for 15 years.

Pros: lots of flexibility, work with friends and enjoy employing people - I take their careers seriously and it can be very rewarding watching the team develop. It's also fascinating being right at the forefront of big conversations that can change people's lives from a career perspective.

Cons: stressful, low volume/high margin business means that each mandate can make or break your month/quarter/year. Employing people during this crisis is unnerving too. From a remuneration perspective you're normally much better off either working for yourself or once you've got 15+ productive staff working for you - the middle bit can be frustrating, which is where we're at at the moment. It's in this environment I seriously consider going back to working for myself.
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A bit off-topic but you seem to be a man in the know. I noticed on Linked-in a lot of jobs don't state the salary of a position that's being advertised I'm guessing the reason for this is so you don't show what your paying to competitors who might use that information to poach staff from you by offering them more. However as if I'm offered a new role how do I then handle the question regarding my 'expectations for compensation'? If I aim high I feel I'm risking pricing myself out of job but then again I don't want undercut myself either. Any advice on the best way to handle this?

Finance Business Partner for a large firm of consultants who specialises in Wealth, Health and Career products.

Pros: Decent money, good office (well WFH for the last 4 months), great benefits, get a lot of satisfaction when forecasting and planning goes right.
Cons: Long hours

I can honestly say I don't mind the commuting part.
 
After years of doing IT consultancy at a very high level for HP and various partners, I semi-retired in 2015 and took a job as an IT technician in a school.

Pros:
Hours are very flexible
It's 5 minutes walk from my house
Free bits and pieces of IT
Nice sense of community
Feels like I'm giving back when I help a kid
Cheap (or free) software licenses for things like Photoshop, Office, Windows, Solidworks, Fusion, etc. etc.

Cons:
Pay is at the level I wouldn't even have got out of bed for in the past
Teachers can be....demanding and a bit odd
Fixing old junk can be annoying
 
Job: safety engineer in an engineering consultancy (for now, handed notice in a little while ago :D)

Role: Writing documents which argue why something will be / is safe, reviewing safety management documents, running workshops to gather information from the technical experts, documenting risk assessments, building and maintaining hazard logs to keep track of hazards etc. Sometimes bidding for new work and the odd bit of project management too.

Pros: Get an overview of some interesting engineering projects, sometimes an interesting problem solving element in how to approach a particular project, get treated reasonably well by my employer and a decent wage.

Cons: Often feels like you're pushing paper round in circles for no reason and not making a difference to anything 'real', because we don't have any influence on what actually happens on the ground most of the time. Some of the jobs that come in are pretty mind numbing too (like 'review each line item in this 1000 row spreadsheet recording a bunch of information which you barely understand and have no context for' kind of thing).
 
Operations Manager for a freight Forwarder Global (import/Exports) Ocean Air and ground transport.

Pros
  • Pay is pretty good
  • in the past ive traveled a lot as my previous position was systems trainer/tester for a cluster of countries
  • Freebies, free upgrades from airlines etc. .
Cons
  • Can be very long hours
  • Deal with absolute clueless idiots that think its fine to load forbidden Chinese food in their containers which are pulled by customs
  • Logistical nightmare when overloaded with 40+ containers arriving at once, get one thing wrong and the repercussions can cost thousands.
 
Freddie1980 said:
A bit off-topic but you seem to be a man in the know. I noticed on Linked-in a lot of jobs don't state the salary of a position that's being advertised I'm guessing the reason for this is so you don't show what your paying to competitors who might use that information to poach staff from you by offering them more. However as if I'm offered a new role how do I then handle the question regarding my 'expectations for compensation'? If I aim high I feel I'm risking pricing myself out of job but then again I don't want undercut myself either. Any advice on the best way to handle this?
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It's difficult to say - also we only recruit into a very specific part of financial markets, and it's very likely to be done differently than other sectors. My clients will pay the going rate, but they frequently don't care if a candidate is at one level of seniority or another (as long as the gap isn't too wide) they simply want the best possible candidate. As such, advertising a salary isn't ideal in case they price themselves too low for any specific candidate, whilst it puts them in a stronger position to negotiate if the candidate is paid low.

In your situation I would try to come up with a number based on:

- current comp
- what level of comp you want to be in within the next few years
- bonus expectations
- what you can estimate to be an average for your level of experience, in your location and within your sector
- how much you want the job - the less you want it, the more you ask for, whether you have to travel further for it, longer hours, etc.

My wife once asked for a ridiculous salary rise for a position that she didn't really want because a) I told her they'd offer it to her based on her candidacy and the nature of the firm and b) because she felt there was no way one of her peers was paid that amount. She also didn't really want the job and was hoping they'd baulk at her demands and end the process. She then had a difficult decision, but ultimately turned it down. It would have taken her from about £35k to ~£70k if I recall!
 
IT Technician (aka IT monkey)

I look after Systems and Infrastructure for a Medium Size Steel Manufacturer. I Manage a Nutanix Cluster both on site and offsite for DR, along with the network and Desktop Support.. and anything else with a plug on the end of it. I've been in the job 3 years now. I was a Mobile Phone technician before this for 13 years but got made redundant. I got kinda lucky to land this job as I had no real experience in corporate IT and it's how I see a real IT job, Hands on with hardware and not stuck at a desk with a headset on listening to people complain.

Can get stressful sometimes, and when the VPN drops at 3 in the morning, or the old Citrix Environment decides to just stop working is urgghh. I'm currently halfway through migrating to RemoteApp for our ERP software.

All in all the jobs not a bad un.
 
IT Manager (Security Sector)

Pros
  • Salary, car, company pension contribution.
  • International travel (not as cool as when you’re younger but still enjoy it).
  • Important accounts, government, etc.
  • Great team.
Cons
  • Been with same company 10 years now so can sometimes feel limiting and tedious.
 
Locum GP

Pros:
Own boss
Part time and flexible
Decent pay
Rewarding job/high satisfaction
Most patients
Wide variety of surgeries and taking away good experiences
Much less stressful than being a GP trainee/salaried/partner
Dictate my workload: admin work/private/prescriptions/home visits etc

Cons:
Limited company
No NHS pension
Little continuity in patient care
Some patients
Erratic schedule at times, last minute bookings and cacellations
Irregular working pattern and chasing up practice managers about availability every month

Plan is once we decide where to settle down look for permanent job with good prospects/partnership.
 
My full-time is Daddy Daycare, and has been for 9 years. Looking after my two has been the most demanding, difficult and stressful job I've ever had. I also have zero income and have zero financial independence.

I started out in IT support when I left school/college. I worked my way up through various levels of tech support in the publishing world. I used to work for the published that produced Max Power amongst other magazines. It was a good stint for many years. After that I moved into a IT managerial role with a secondary school in England. Whilst I was there I founded EP-UK and built and customised high end pcs. I was one of the first (if not the first) to offer anodised cases in the world, and now I see every man and their dog is doing it ;) I ran into trouble in 2007 when I got hit by the recession and people stopped wanting my luxury items. Whilst I was wondering what to do I took it upon myself to take on a degree with the Open Uni and 6 years later I was awarded a BA honours in History. A massive personal achievement for me and something I had been wanting to do since I was 18. I'm now 46. I finished my degree whilst I was bringing up our firstborn, which was no mean feat in itself.
 
I'm currently a digital forensic Investigator for the police but am due to leave shortly for the defence sector. Prior to this I have been in IT since 2006.

Pros:
- Helping put genuinely awful people away.
- Exposure to the inner workings of the justice system, being in the box etc.
- Public sector in the services so pretty secure and process driven.
- Flexi hours (have that at new job too)
- Retail discounts all over with blue light card
- Good exposure to tools and courses in the latest advancements in mobile forensics like bypassing phone security & extracting evidence
- Unaffected by things like covid

Cons:
- Overall onboarding and training experience solely depends on the quality of your unit's management. My experience was not satisfactory to a standard I was happy with.
- You see a lot of things that you wish you had not but it's part of the job... May lead to desensitising
- Role is stagnant after soon enough hence why most stay a couple years then go private or elsewhere.
- Pay rises are difficult to negotiate because local government....
 
Siliconslave said:
I manage the technical side of a software sales process by lying less than sales and more than engineering
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:D:D:D I had to laugh at this, as i work on the engineering side of a big software dev company, and frequently get roped into escalations where a customer is unhappy about something because the presales/sales guy has clearly overstretched the capabilities of the solution / undersized a solution due to budget constraints.
 
toshj said:
It's difficult to say - also we only recruit into a very specific part of financial markets, and it's very likely to be done differently than other sectors. My clients will pay the going rate, but they frequently don't care if a candidate is at one level of seniority or another (as long as the gap isn't too wide) they simply want the best possible candidate. As such, advertising a salary isn't ideal in case they price themselves too low for any specific candidate, whilst it puts them in a stronger position to negotiate if the candidate is paid low.

In your situation I would try to come up with a number based on:

- current comp
- what level of comp you want to be in within the next few years
- bonus expectations
- what you can estimate to be an average for your level of experience, in your location and within your sector
- how much you want the job - the less you want it, the more you ask for, whether you have to travel further for it, longer hours, etc.

My wife once asked for a ridiculous salary rise for a position that she didn't really want because a) I told her they'd offer it to her based on her candidacy and the nature of the firm and b) because she felt there was no way one of her peers was paid that amount. She also didn't really want the job and was hoping they'd baulk at her demands and end the process. She then had a difficult decision, but ultimately turned it down. It would have taken her from about £35k to ~£70k if I recall!
Click to expand...
That's really helpful, thank you for taking the time to respond.
 
Search Engine specialist, by that I mean I sit at a desk in an office and people in the company ask me what they need and I google how to do it, they look at me blankly, then I have the joys of doing it because they don't want to. Usually it's creating printed material and websites for brands for small companies but responsibilities range from sticking stickers on envelopes to re-doing the whole IT infrastructure. It's a varied role, I'm paid well for what I do but there's pretty much no progression without massively stepping outside of my comfort zone.
 
inferno said:
Use to fly 777s and 787s, now.... unemployed, let's see for how long.
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Sadly there’s a lot of that going around. I used to fly A330/A340 and have also been made redundant. Hopefully I’ll get my job back sometime next year if I’m lucky.

In the mean time, I’ve no idea what I’m going to do!
 
Area sales manager for a drainage and plumbing manufacturer

Build long standing friendships with customers
Not stuck behind a desk

Always chasing targets

Money not bad. Up to last couple of years used to get some right bonuses, now it's all about the share holders!
 
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