I work in IT and we have truly self steering teams without formal hierarchy. Not everyone is used to it and IT people can be interesting characters, so it's quite a process to get the team to perform well.
I work at a small MSP. Things work pretty well considering how little long term planning happens. We're good at ignoring embers, but great at putting out fires.
Not a job but a internship that recently ended.
Helping Ex-entrepreneurs with getting their administration right and filling taxes for them (with them). The unfortunate thing is that they’re usually heavily in debt, varies between 15k to 80k.
After we help them, they can go into an official project - to help them pay the debt for 3 years and the rest will be waived.
However the interesting part is majority of these people refuse to actually participate well. Often not coming to appointments, refusing to pick up calls or text back. Even though what we do is free. They don’t have to pay anything for our help.
The amazing thing is whenever we actually manage to help people, some of them really show gratitude. Such as baking stuff for us, purchase cake and such. One time, a woman even cried out of gratitude and another time told me his life story which was wild (as in nearly died but stayed alive).
It was an stressful but very interesting internship.
well, I'm still in the training process, but I'll be drawing blood. I think that's interesting as hell!
Sounds cool but I draw like a preschooler.
Professional vampire. Noice
Seeing how the banking industry runs on the inside. I work in ATM rigging. Banks operate in a state of complete chaos if you were wondering. I've never seen an industry where money wasted/lost just doesnt matter to them. Join a credit union. Seriously.
I used to be a senior system analyst at a major financial institution. You are so right.
The wiring money system is so rickety it's amazing it functions at all. Zero accountability.
Can you elaborate? Any links you can point to that explains more? I've always wondered how that all worked. Seems like there way more human involvement than there probably should be for something which seems like it should be as simple as sending an RPC...
At least at our institution, the code to track and manage incoming and outgoing wires was so old that it ran on at least 4 layers of emulation. Of course, not a single person knew how to maintain it (and this is a billion dollar financial institution).
But after a wire is sent, especially to smaller, non-us banks, it can literally be received via teletype or fax with relevant account information and recorded by hand at the receiving bank.
If you send to the wrong route or account in that instance, it basically disappears for you and you need to contact the receiving bank, which sometimes uses and intermediary bank,. If that's the case, you need to find the intermediary bank and find the exact person who wrote it down, who then can find, hopefully, what account the money went to and fix the problem. This does not work 100% of the time.
It's ludicrously analog and prone to errors and it's amazing it works at all.
Just how ungodly unstable almost every towns infrastructure is. Water mains failing at alarming rates, massive sewer backups, people in charge of this shit have no idea what they're doing and the ones who do, won't spend the money until something catastrophic happens.
So it's not just the tech industry
Definitely not haha. I won't name the town sauce I don't wanna doxx myself or upset said town but, they had 39 main breaks last month just due to old failing mains and bad valves. You'd think maybe as you're turning those mains off and hit find that those valves are leaking, you'd wanna maybe note that so you can replace them later? Naaaah why do that? They mostly shut the main off. It's fiiiiiiiiiiiine.
For people at large, nothing. I'm a data engineer. Eyes immediately gloss over when I tell them. I do have a tool that is a one stop shop potential violation of PII rules.
What's PII?
Personally identifying information.
The online training videos at my workplace use the same artificial lady voice as the tutorial lady voice in the game Hypnospace Outlaw.
That i get to travel Australia to all these remote places.
And i get to go on container ships sometimes and always get lost
Mine is that I don't have it.
I get to have perks cuz no one can get any work done nowadays withough an IT department.
From an outsider's perspective it would be the places that I work - which I am not going to reveal in any detail to avoid doxing myself, but include nationally and internationally important historical and archaeological sites.
From my perspective, although they are certainly interesting and I love working at them, it doesn't play a particularly prominent role in what I do day-to-day, so it would be the wide range of problem solving involved: I lead a team dealing with maintenance, compliance and health & safety for a national charity.
My efforts reduce time spent in incidents for on call engineers. I actively allow them to work less, and they usually fight me on it, hahaha.
I'm an automation engineer working for a large cloud operator.
I'm a software engineer on a team that is known around the org to have the worst on-call load out of anyone else. You are definitely underappreciated if your work saves them lots of time!
Keep fighting the good fight. In my experience with SRE/automation work, people tend to fight change just because it's change and not realize just how much time they're spending on toil and similar tasks.
Oh there's lots of buy in from the top. We can't continue to scale without automation.
It's either happening with the current operators, or without them. :)
That we ingest several petabyte of data from our customers every month.
I design lots of things that go to space
I get to pet a lot of dogs
I'm a software dev, but I also do all the design architecture and infrastructure work. I like that there are new problems to aolve every day so it doesnt get so boring.
I get to play with pills
I work for a bank, so it’s interesting meeting all kinda of people and understanding how they do their banking and what they do with their money
Do I need one or two of my ADD pills to make this shit bearable
I film blind people for a living. Hearing their stories is always so inspiring.
I also film puppies, so could be worse!
Professional vampire. Noice
I get to invoke and tease people about one of thier biggest fears that terrify them and they pay me to do it.
I've only had two people back out on me. After they make it through they are always so happy they conquered it, it's awesome watching the process from start to finish.
I also sometimes remember that my job feels routine to me and I do it without thinking most it the time but it's a crippling fear for most people and I do it 5 to 15 times a day on a tropical island without a second thought.
I work in IT and we have truly self steering teams without formal hierarchy. Not everyone is used to it and IT people can be interesting characters, so it's quite a process to get the team to perform well.
I work at a small MSP. Things work pretty well considering how little long term planning happens. We're good at ignoring embers, but great at putting out fires.
Not a job but a internship that recently ended.
Helping Ex-entrepreneurs with getting their administration right and filling taxes for them (with them). The unfortunate thing is that they’re usually heavily in debt, varies between 15k to 80k.
After we help them, they can go into an official project - to help them pay the debt for 3 years and the rest will be waived.
However the interesting part is majority of these people refuse to actually participate well. Often not coming to appointments, refusing to pick up calls or text back. Even though what we do is free. They don’t have to pay anything for our help.
The amazing thing is whenever we actually manage to help people, some of them really show gratitude. Such as baking stuff for us, purchase cake and such. One time, a woman even cried out of gratitude and another time told me his life story which was wild (as in nearly died but stayed alive).
It was an stressful but very interesting internship.
well, I'm still in the training process, but I'll be drawing blood. I think that's interesting as hell!
Sounds cool but I draw like a preschooler.
Professional vampire. Noice
Seeing how the banking industry runs on the inside. I work in ATM rigging. Banks operate in a state of complete chaos if you were wondering. I've never seen an industry where money wasted/lost just doesnt matter to them. Join a credit union. Seriously.
I used to be a senior system analyst at a major financial institution. You are so right.
The wiring money system is so rickety it's amazing it functions at all. Zero accountability.
Can you elaborate? Any links you can point to that explains more? I've always wondered how that all worked. Seems like there way more human involvement than there probably should be for something which seems like it should be as simple as sending an RPC...
At least at our institution, the code to track and manage incoming and outgoing wires was so old that it ran on at least 4 layers of emulation. Of course, not a single person knew how to maintain it (and this is a billion dollar financial institution).
But after a wire is sent, especially to smaller, non-us banks, it can literally be received via teletype or fax with relevant account information and recorded by hand at the receiving bank.
If you send to the wrong route or account in that instance, it basically disappears for you and you need to contact the receiving bank, which sometimes uses and intermediary bank,. If that's the case, you need to find the intermediary bank and find the exact person who wrote it down, who then can find, hopefully, what account the money went to and fix the problem. This does not work 100% of the time.
It's ludicrously analog and prone to errors and it's amazing it works at all.
Just how ungodly unstable almost every towns infrastructure is. Water mains failing at alarming rates, massive sewer backups, people in charge of this shit have no idea what they're doing and the ones who do, won't spend the money until something catastrophic happens.
So it's not just the tech industry
Definitely not haha. I won't name the town sauce I don't wanna doxx myself or upset said town but, they had 39 main breaks last month just due to old failing mains and bad valves. You'd think maybe as you're turning those mains off and hit find that those valves are leaking, you'd wanna maybe note that so you can replace them later? Naaaah why do that? They mostly shut the main off. It's fiiiiiiiiiiiine.
For people at large, nothing. I'm a data engineer. Eyes immediately gloss over when I tell them. I do have a tool that is a one stop shop potential violation of PII rules.
What's PII?
Personally identifying information.
The online training videos at my workplace use the same artificial lady voice as the tutorial lady voice in the game Hypnospace Outlaw.
That i get to travel Australia to all these remote places.
And i get to go on container ships sometimes and always get lost
Mine is that I don't have it.
I get to have perks cuz no one can get any work done nowadays withough an IT department.
From an outsider's perspective it would be the places that I work - which I am not going to reveal in any detail to avoid doxing myself, but include nationally and internationally important historical and archaeological sites.
From my perspective, although they are certainly interesting and I love working at them, it doesn't play a particularly prominent role in what I do day-to-day, so it would be the wide range of problem solving involved: I lead a team dealing with maintenance, compliance and health & safety for a national charity.
My efforts reduce time spent in incidents for on call engineers. I actively allow them to work less, and they usually fight me on it, hahaha.
I'm an automation engineer working for a large cloud operator.
I'm a software engineer on a team that is known around the org to have the worst on-call load out of anyone else. You are definitely underappreciated if your work saves them lots of time!
Keep fighting the good fight. In my experience with SRE/automation work, people tend to fight change just because it's change and not realize just how much time they're spending on toil and similar tasks.
Oh there's lots of buy in from the top. We can't continue to scale without automation.
It's either happening with the current operators, or without them. :)
That we ingest several petabyte of data from our customers every month.
I design lots of things that go to space
I get to pet a lot of dogs
I'm a software dev, but I also do all the design architecture and infrastructure work. I like that there are new problems to aolve every day so it doesnt get so boring.
I get to play with pills
I work for a bank, so it’s interesting meeting all kinda of people and understanding how they do their banking and what they do with their money
Do I need one or two of my ADD pills to make this shit bearable
I film blind people for a living. Hearing their stories is always so inspiring.
I also film puppies, so could be worse!
Professional vampire. Noice
I get to invoke and tease people about one of thier biggest fears that terrify them and they pay me to do it.
I've only had two people back out on me. After they make it through they are always so happy they conquered it, it's awesome watching the process from start to finish.
I also sometimes remember that my job feels routine to me and I do it without thinking most it the time but it's a crippling fear for most people and I do it 5 to 15 times a day on a tropical island without a second thought.