Just curious, what do you guys actually do for a living?
Scrolling through comments here, you can tell there’s a huge mix of people, some clearly technical, some more creative, some who sound like they’ve been in the working world for decades, others who feel like students or early in their career.
No particular reason for asking, just genuinely curious what kind of professions make up this community. Feel free to keep it as vague or specific as you’re comfortable with.
Drop your profession below, and if you want, one thing about it people usually don’t expect.
Former machine learning researcher. Worked on image search, then language modeling for general search. But then VC started throwing money at it and the landscape just kinda’ changed. The research was still great in academia, but a bunch of dipshits took a useful technology and decided to use it as a way to funnel money from everyone into their own coffers.
Now I build stuff to monitor power lines and prevent wildfires.
One thing people don’t usually expect: machine learning isn’t magic. The computer doesn’t just “do the work for you”. There’s a lot of planning, theory, and experimentation around seeing if and why something works.
i assume AI, since its related.
Was a wage slave all my life until I retired. The best I could do in life is sell my time for money. I didn’t care who I sold it to.
I studied bioinformatics, got into IT, got pushed into sales, got out cause I hated that. Now I’m a barkeeper. Not yet sure what I’ll do next. Maybe IT again, if I find a company that sucks less.
Also the sysadmin for a small non-profit, which is a lot more fun than any corporate job I had.
I was a special education teacher in an inner city school district for 11 years. I started in high school my first year and then went to elementary the last 10. It was to weird being 22 teaching 17 year olds.
Anyways, did 3-4 for a couple years, then 5-6 a couple years, finished in k-1. I was diagnosed with kidney failure a few years ago and retired early because I’m on dialysis. I invested very well so I’m good financially, but I miss working with kids, not so much getting fucked over by the school district, but that’s a wother thing.
i had a formr coworker that refused to work for district a while back, because the pay was so low, and its a district that is very sketchy. i dont blame her, she was doing the job im doing and part time at private school, which is equal or worst than public school. she went into tech, but i dont know if has programming/coding skills, right before AI was the craze.
IT, did a lot of work in a high traffic (big scale & high redundancy) environments.
Im ‘always’ right of course but I don’t give fucks enough to discuss with everyone.
Since I’ve died once I’m clearly now technically undead.
Stay at home dad 😊
Junior researcher in food microbiology, with a background in general food technology.
Figuring out cheaper ways to enrich foods using microbial producers.
Cybersecurity (AppSec), was a software engineer for many years before that.
One day there was an incident and I tended to the recovery…
Nice try, FBI.
I’m a professional pedant, but it’s only seasonal part time work.
Railway signal maintainer.
I take care of crossing warning devices, switch machines, signals, track circuits, and wayside hazard detectors.
That’s so cool. Cool job
I’m in education. It’s pretty alright. The kids aren’t alright, though.
City bus driver. It’s not the most exciting job I’ve ever had, but it’s a union shop(which really kicks ass!!!), has steady hours, pension, vacation/sick days, and healthcare.
It can be infuriating dealing with people who definitely do not have their shit in a pile. But it also feels really good being there for the community. I’ll probably stick with it for a bit.
I am a master of the custodial arts.
I’m a CNC laser operator. Basically I cut metal with lasers.
