What do you do for a living?

snowball said:

I'll keep mine shorter than most.
I'm a railroader, I drive choo choo's.

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ADVAW8S said:

Growing up as a kid, my mom would ask me what I wanted to do with my life. I said wax surf boards and chill. She said well I didn't go college so you will go to college and then wax surf boards. Got into the family bike shop biz and was planning on being a bike mechanic my life and riding/racing bicycles. We closed the shop.

Went to college, started getting a exercise physiology degree. My life took a amazing turn one day in the fall of 1996. Well, I was in a class called study of movement and the teacher said, I want everyone to act like you are a tree gently moving in the breeze. I turn to person next to me and said, I'm paying for this bull$hit. I'm out here. Walked to the registration department and dropped all my classes in excerise physiology. The office was kind enough to remind me that I needed a full course load for financial aid to assist. Since I was using financial aid for school and life, I tracked down my friend Mo and asked him what he was taking. He replied economics. I asked is it hard, he said I guess. I sleep through the class. That sold me, I signed up for econ classes and proceeded to get straight A across the board. It just clicked for me and I was hooked.

Graduated and started as a mutual fund account but knew selling was what I wanted to do. Left the mutual fund account gig, became a service rep. Where I saw a guy showing up driving a M5 wearing shorts and flip flops. He would walk into a office close his door and emerge 5 hours later to head home. I asked what did he do because that is as close as you can get to waxing surf boards and chilling in financial industry. He was a wholesaler selling products to other asset managers. Well that is what I wanted to become. It took me 6 years but I became a wholesaler and have done it for 17 years. Do I wear flip flops and shorts everyday? No not everyday but I get control my own schedule. Get to learn about people and have fun.

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parb said:

I'm in the automotive space in the past few years. We design software to provide autonomous driving for consumer cars. Im the head of product. We use a combination of many small specialized ai models as well as large language models for complex scene processing. I live in silicon valley but frequently travel to Detroit and other locations where oems reside. Our company is pretty small but I think we punch above our weight.

Prior to that I ran product for a company in the enterprise infrastructure space for 7 years. I joined at the startup phase, went through ipo and the company became very large before I left for the tiny automotive company.

Before that I spent 7 years the chief technology officer for a major tech company. It was a huge company with close to 100,000 employees. I spent loads of time in China and elsewhere in Asia when I was there, both with suppliers and customers as this was the big growth market in those years.

I did 7 years in my first product role in consumer sw company, midway through I spent 2 years building a very, very, large system for a single federal customer who had a very specific problem that I at the time had a very specific skill for.

And I worked for a server company called sun microsystems in the 90s for about 7 years. I worked on virtual memory in Unix and compilers and dev tools. Mostly C and C++. I sat next to Goslinger, Kim and team when they developed Java and once it became mainstream I worked a bit on that. Spent a few years in systems research and performance.

In the late 80s I worked on Unix kernels for one of the early Unix pioneers outside of Berkeley. Did that for 8 years.

Gosh, writing this I realized I change jobs about every 7 or 8 years.
I'm a techie, through and through, but I don't code much anymore. I'm definitely mostly management, still technical but management.

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emax said:

OMG, that's a long story.

It took me a while to get my high school diploma because I had to sit out three times: I was a lazy bastard. I was only interested in motorcycles and girls. Mathematics and physics were really easy because I didn't have to learn it by heart but only understand it. There I belonged to the best. But Latin and ... English ... () broke my neck.

Nevertheless I made my Abitur and started to study mechanical engineering at the university in Darmstadt. There I learned a lot, but when they started to torture us with iron/carbon diagrams, I quit after three semesters.

So I changed to another study: geology. And that was really interesting, I was enthusiastic. But as life goes, my girlfriend got pregnant, overnight, so to say (she is my wife today). With four brothers and sisters my parents couldn't afford to support me financially. So I had to make some money and cancelled my studies and drove a cab in Darmstadt. During this time I met the boss of a software company, who appreciated me. I got a job there as an office clerk. I fed the printers with paper, sorted lists and took out the garbage.

After a while I helped a little bit in changing programs - after I was told exactly what I had to type and where. I learned quickly, and after a while I could write programs on my own. I enthusiastically worked 12, 14, 16 hours a day on systems /34, /36 and AS400 (aka i5) - on which I am still active today and became a specialist on IBM midrange computers.

After two and a half years I was the head of programming. That was exactly my thing!

Privately I extended my knowledge to Unix systems, I learned C and C++.

I stayed there for four years, but then I couldn't develop further. I started in a new company as a software developer, and almost doubled my income. But in the fourth year there, the boss decided to become a Sanjassin, and I thought "let's go!".

With the portfolio AS400 and Unix I could start my own business as a freelancer in 1993. The first customer went bankrupt and I lost 60'000 DM. After that I worked for Deutsche Bank (seven years), Deutsche Post AG, Danone, Fujifilm and especially for IBM in large software projects on AS400 and RS6000 (AIX) as well as Solaris.

When 9/11 came, Deutsche Bank terminated the contract of 4000 freelancers, I was unemployed. There were no projects, the market was flooded with freelancers. Money was getting tight, because I had to service my home loans and of course live. So I prepared to sell our beautiful house. That was quite a terrible, and really hard time full of hopelessness.

But then, four weeks before it got really serious, I got another project, it was salvation. I was overjoyed.

In the year and a half without a project I had privately started, out of curiosity, to develop a compiler that automatically converts AS400 programs from RPG to C++. In the AS400 forums I was laughed at "what took IBM 200 man-years, you want to redevelop at home on your living room table? Absolutely insane, ridiculous, impossible. Forget it!"

But I just did it. After two years I had a prototype as a proof of concept, and it worked, was modular and delivered excellent results.

But as it is with me, I wasn't interested in it anymore, because the problem was solved and then came exactly the part that wasn't called "playing" anymore, but was hard work. And the prototype was far from being complete as it only knew a handful of operators. So I published the whole thing as open source on the internet and turned to my new projects.

A few months later, because of my publication, I got a request if I could help a company in Czechia to develop a similar project with the target language Java. I accepted, it was only a few weeks. Again some time later I got a mail from Italy asking if I was developing software professionally. Then everything went fast: I flew to Italy, presented the concept of my compiler and was there for three days. Four weeks later I had to come again, and finally, shortly before Christmas, I had to fly there for the third time. I was told that they wanted me to lead a project to develop such a compiler to product maturity for the data center applications there.

But I declined: "Gentlemen, I am very honored. But I have a very interesting project on my doorstep at IBM. This is like an Italian car mechanic having to change from Ferrari to Volkswagen, so I ask for your understanding".

But they did not let go. Until my wise wife advised "Think about what conditions you would do it for and offer them that." Genius.

So I wrote down completely crazy conditions, hourly rate, expenses, flight home every weekend at the expense of the customer, hotel, crediting of travel time with 50%. I sent this off on Friday afternoon and thought to myself "now there is peace".

Monday morning the phone rang "Ciao Edgar, come stai? Va bene, accettiamo, quando iniziamo?"

I was speechless. To make a long story short: I accepted the project and remained the technical director of the project for 12 years. It was my design and my baby, the most beautiful job of my life. The company is a joint stock company that serves 20% of the Italian banking market with its data center applications. The AS400 serves 10'000 users simultaneously.

In total 32 million lines of code in RPG, 10000 lines of code in CL. The compiler was able to translate 99.9% of this code, as well as the CL programs. The result ran on Linux machines and was performant.

Unfortunately, in 2018 a bank had bought into the company with over 50%. They kicked out the CEO (who was very sympathetic to me) and put a Banker there. While the former CEO was a technician (he came from Intel) and saw our work, the new one saw only the costs - so the project was terminated.

It is still the only compiler in the world that can convert AS400 programs to C++ and thus makes them portable to Linux machines. But it is not used.

And so my project in Italy ended on January 31st, 2019. It was a wonderful time with many ups and downs, and professionally the best time of my life.

This was followed by another year at the German Air Traffic Control (C++ development for the air traffic controller workstations). On July 1st, 2023 I will reach my retirement age. But I'll keep doing projects, only I definitely won't be flying to Italy or anywhere else every week anymore.

And that's the good part.

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Krabby said:

I’m not sure if this thread will interest anyone, but I find peoples‘ careers and life’s professional journeys interesting. I’m not interested in your salary, corporate perks, bragging rights, or you simply trying to plug your own business, but what do you currently “do?” Or retired from? Or have done? I know @Stu_Barnes has lead an interesting life!

My Land Rover club is rather small but we’ve come from all different directions. We’ve helped one another out by sharing our various vocations and careers.

My path is a bit crooked. Made it through half an engineering degree but fell in love with journalism. Graduated with from Uni with a camera in hand and entered the newspaper and magazine business as a photojournalist. Shot for a few years, became an editor and department head and … burnt out by working too hard, for too little in a thankless, dying industry.

I managed to put all those math and engineering credits to use though, earning my teaching certificate and becoming a middle school (grades 6&7 so 12-13 YO) math teacher. I ultimately (and thankfully) escaped math and came full circle - I now teach photography and digital design to high school kids. I’m in my 20th year and can’t wait for summer!

So what about you?

Again, if you guys think this is lame, I’ll just can the thread. But we’re a true global community who’s diversity makes it great.

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grenexplorer said:

I'm thinking relatively young to most folks here. Graduated college in 2006 and when into retail technology sales (fancy wording for selling cell phones). Did well with that and went to the business sales side of things with the same company. After two years, I jumped into medical device sales and have been there for the last 13 years. Have the pleasure of working in an OR watching surgeons put people back together with my products.

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TomE said:

After leaving high school, gpa so bad that I couldn’t get into college without family favors … so I didn’t like that due to all the strings attached. Opt’d to enlist and attend Embry Riddle in FL with hope to be a military pilot. Continued making poor decisions and it caused a hearing loss that kept me from getting a slot. All worked out and went to a major university and found mathematics was simple and started tutoring algebra and trig… funny thinking I barely got out of high school with “d” average!!! Didn’t know what trig, algebra or even a foot note was!! Hahaha

First career (hobby!) being involved with start-up and starting wireless phone companies (national and regional) back in late 80’s through late 90’s. After last wireless deal I went into finance (second hobby that compensated me!) and my business partner and I have a team that manages an equity and fixed income fund with a global financial firm on the private client side.

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