Homer Simpson, when asked what he did for a living, once replied Oh, you know, I’m a guy at a place…
Seriously though, I was a pharmacy technician for over a decade, working in settings that varied from hospital inpatient to supply chain to closed door to purchasing. Now I am a “health center-controlled network coordinator,” whatever the hell one of those does. Hopefully I’ll have a clearer idea once the population health management tool my organization just purchased is implemented. Still, even though I’m at a weird place in my career, I am extremely fortunate to have a steady income and an employer that cares about me.
It seems that good spreadsheet skills are becoming less valued in the workplace these days. I miss working with Excel and listing/detailing/tracking prescription medications. If I could do that all day for decent money, I would be pretty well satisfied.
My dad refused to let what he did for a living define him. He called himself an old fart who loved cars and music and just happened to write computer programs to pay the bills. But it’s hard not to think of yourself as your job title when you spend so much time doing it. Working for a living suuuuuucks…
It’s the monotony that kills me. I mean, you’d think software is all custom work but in the end it’s the same stuff. APIs, DBs, UIs and, some shitty ass business logic because product development and sales want illogical things (no offense to any product dev or sales peeps lol). It’s like making marbles. Sure you can make each one a different color/pattern but in the end all you’re doing is making marbles.
Me too - 30+ year IT veteran… Started out building XT PCs in the 80s then went to retail, electronics retail management, IT Sales Management, Pre-Sales IT Sales Engineer, IT Consulting / Project Management, Consulting Management, Full on Sales BDM, Cloud Practice Management, back to Project Management for Cloud transformation and now working for Microsoft in Project Management for modern workplace digital transformation… Oh and I had a stint in a recording studio as trainee recording engineer and did live band work and DJ work on the side for 20 years.
This is really going to date me but my first professional gig was one of the “Major” telecoms (still exists today) They hired me because I knew Linux (before it was cool) and they had me administering NeXT machines - the entire development team used the old back turbo slabs. When x86 (Intel) became a thing we migrated the OpenStep (Mach) - anyway that turned into HP-UX administration and when I had to Solaris, Ha! Eventually as I got older (and tired of being a slave to pagers and on-call) I moved to more of an architect role and played that out. At this stage I sit behind a desk where by now I’ve forgotten more than I know… But, still can wrangle the kids (It’s like herding cats) and more importantly know when to call bull@#$% on them - ha!
Degreed and working as a mechanical engineer in automation, but I work as a general contractor and structural engineer on the weekends and just found out that not only do civil make way the fuck more money, but I also already qualify to take the PE due to my several years of work as a class A contractor, so we will see where I end up in the next year…
As a side note, pay asside (it is fine btw, civils in California just make stupid amounts), controls/automation/process engineering is a dope as fuck field for anyone thinking about it. I get to play with robotics all damn day, build what I design with my own hands, and program it to boot even working at a major company. Highly recomend.
Skilled labor? Long ass time. Composite layup is basicaly fucking impossible without millions per machine. For simple assembly labor? Honestly surprised it hasn’t happened yet.
Before the industrial revolution, 80% of humanity was employed in agriculture. Now it’s less than 5%. Did that massive revolution render most of the world unemployed?
So i shouldnt learn to code ? But seriously with the recent breakthrough in superconducting whats the time frame until robots become sentiant and proceed to self replicate turn us into batteries ?
Ive been to countries that have 5 people helping me pick out a pair of white socks.
Talks of AI are so exaggerated it’s beyond a fucking joke. AI is a marketing term for human created algorithms. AI in the proper context exists in a pre-embryo state at only a hanfull of institutions in the US and elsewhere. I’ll give you a clue about who they are: the top 5-ish richest tech companies and top 5-ish richest government labs.
Automation is real. Walk into any manufacturing, assembly, shipping, warehousing, etc. business of reasonable scale and you’ll see robots doing most of the work.
Btw, automation has nothing to do with AI. A simple device (the loom) automated the textile industry 200 years ago.
100% agree. Coding should be considered as fundamental of a skill as basic math or knowledge of history at this point. Language doesn’t even matter, just learn coding structure and yoy can figure the rest out pretty quickly. The fact that I can code in multiple automation languages and program HMIs (something I learned in under 6 mo in my previous position) litteraly gave me 2x the base salary as I would have gotten if I could not and I am a mechanical engineer. Everything requires code now. Be it simulation for structural analysis or full on developer, every STEM field will have a significant benefit if you have coding knowledge
Depends.
As a CS student, I would strongly advise against it.
Consider the following video:
But Code is just “real time math”. It is a way of thinking about problems. A way that will help you nothing in any hands-on situation (wood working for example).
