Does anyone here work in "tech"? What the hell do you actually do?

And you’re the person that I try to ignore because I don’t want to close my 20 open windows, project space, and anything else that I have running at any given moment.


As stated above, tech is a very broad category. Anything involving computers or technology really. I do software but I can’t do my job without others in tech such as hardware people. Even in software there’s a handful of different categories. I can’t tell you the first thing about building a website or writing an app for a smart phone. But I can tell you about safety critical flight software - that’s my bubble at the moment.

 

I used to work for a company as a scientist developing a non-invasive glucose monitor. I used to stick a sensor on people and measure blood glucose.

Currently as a hobby I review tech for a consumer electronics retailer .

 

I work in IT, and all I do is answer tickets, usually user error, repair broken things and R&D other things. I hardly ever code, most of it is found online and I copy paste it. The less "tech" people explain what they do the less interesting their job is.

 

Same. Any day I get to put on the steel toes and go debug something in the field is a great day. Usually learn a lot from the folks out there while I’m at it too.

 

Ohh, I see.

 

I've worked in "tech" my whole life. Out of, mummble years (probably more than you've even been alive), I only worked as a programmer for 2 of them. I liked coding but I get bored easily so I kept trying new things. After a while, I had worked with a lot of different parts of tech, programming, hardware repair, networking, telephones, system admin, construction, management etc. All of those different jobs ended up qualifying me for my favorite task, complex trouble shooting. That's where there are multiple suppliers all blaming the other guy as to why things don't work. I don't get to do that very much though. Mostly I'm the IT director making sure my people have the tools, training, and bullshit protection from Karens to do their job.

 

this should explain everything...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucto-eAmTVs

 

I'm a CAD designer. I work for a company that makes reflective products, among others. I spend at least half my time making drawings of things I want to make in my home shop.

I'm nearing retirement age, but I'll probably keep working, because my job is easy and brings in money to fund my hobbies.

 

I find myself doing similarly once the maintenance season (summer) is over, I get to spend a good chunk of time on smaller tasks while researching various topics or projects of my own.

 

Honestly,

I'm assuming this is program speak?

 

Tech jargon. Java is a programming language, the rest would be infrastructure related.

 

I always think of the meme where the guy goes over to his mothers house because her phone is running slow and she's got like 180 chrome tabs open

I used to think i was terrible at computers until I realized I knew more than anybody else at work about how to keep our desktop computer and shop management program running.

I still struggle with basic shit like backing up photos on my phone and trying to figure out why the printer won't print

If the computer is bolted onto a car I know exactly what to do. If it's sitting on a desk I'm usually clueless

 

My phone has 81 tabs open. Maybe I am old now

 

I stopped tech-ing hardcore around junior year of college, but I still do IT admin backup duty at my engineering job (very small company <15 employees). I have indeed asked people to restart and see what happens lol... I still do a fair bit of scripting for my actual job though.

 

I work with speech recognition for hospitals and other healthcare organizations. Used to travel a lot - as in my expense checks at the end of the month for mileage and per diem were more than two weeks pay sometimes. Now, almost everything I do is VPN remote access and Teams/Zoom/Go To Meeting collaboration. Do a little VBScript and SQL scripting when the need arises. Not horribly exciting, but it let me raise a family quite comfortably and I am semi-retired in my 50's.

 

The technology industry is infinitely broad. As almost everything used on a daily basis by most humans on the planet is in some way a "tech" item, you can understand how big the scope of the technology industry is.

I can give a summary of my work experience in the Information Technology arena, which itself is almost infinite in scope. Almost any employer with more than maybe 30 employees has an I.T. department, regardless of what field the comp[any itself is actually in.

After I got out of the Army as an electronics repair technician, I used my GI Bill to go to college and earn a BS in Computer Engineering. I ended up with a job in the I.T. field working for a very large computer chip company. During that 18 year period of employment, I was a Unix computer systems administrator (install new computers, upgrade/replace hardware, upgrade operating systems, diagnose and work with the vendor to repair bugs/parts, etc.), a data storage systems administrator (where applications and data is stored - today think of "the cloud", but back in the 90's and 2000's everyone kept everything local to their employees locations), backup/restore operations, data center manager.

I got laid off, and went to work for a large banking institution, where I did vendor management/oversight for a year, where I was responsible for making sure a vendor performed various support tasks that we were paying them for, in accordance with the terms of our support contract.

I got laid off again. I found a different job, back at the same bank, doing what is called Major Incident Management. This means something really, really bad happened, that could have a hugely negative impact on the entire company. For example, I was working on the bank's Mortgage division. Suppose we had a total power outage at the data center where the computer systems that are used to generate new mortgages, store information about all the existing mortgages was kept, and now the bank could not do anything at all related to any of the hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of loans/mortgages they held. That is a major incident. So my team was responsible for coordinating the right support teams (both internal to the bank, and external to it) to fix the problem as fast as possible and minimize the financial/other harm to the bank.

I then left that job and ended up doing Major Incident Management for a very large insurance company. During that 5 years, the Covid lockdown hit. After the all-clear, my employer mandated we all return to the office. My wife and I wanted to finally escape the mess that was/is California, so I started job hunting, and found another company that offered permanent work from home positions. Once again, in Major Incident Management. We were then able to move out of CA. I am still with this employer.

 

I do Software Quality Assurance, mostly on the 'manual' side, not much coding involved. Degree in Aerospace Engineering (way more than needed), did Test Engineering for a defense contractor for 5 years, moved over to SW QA for security monitoring software company ~6 years ago. Job has mostly been attention to detail, catching typos and off-by-1's (and the crazy symptoms of them), and using various tools to break the software before the customer can. Have seen a number of folks come in to the business on the 'soft' side (support, sales, even reception) and move over in to the engineering department (developers, devops, scrum masters), so definitely see what skills you have that can translate in to the business, then once you're in start moving sideways towards what you want.

 

I run a regulatory lab at a very large company where we test our products for safety. Basically I break stuff. If you remember all those lithium batteries catching fire on those hover boards? I make sure that doesn't happen on our products.

 

I'm no techie, but I can do extremely basic computer functions, so my coworkers have designated me IT. I can do basic excel functions, so I'm basically a programmer in their eyes. My most complicated task as of late was wire management, using velcro cable keepers. My coworkers and their filthy hanging cords thought I was a genius to be unplugging and plugging back in USB mouse/keyboard cables...

 

I work in tech and have no idea how to explain what I do now. It changes constantly, but basically I look broadly across everything in the IT landscape and provide direction on how to solve certain problems, sometimes getting projects kick-started before moving on the the next thing. Basically it's whack-a-mole, but less deep technically.

Early in my career I was a developer, writing software that controlled robotic systems used in semiconductor manufacturing. Kind of funny, writing software that controls robots and machines that manufacture computer chips. I avoided web development like the plague -- it was a huge space, but with a lot of hacks, and I found it quite boring. Eventually I moved into leadership, sometimes in charge of large teams, now as a kind of free agent going where I am needed (within the company). I likely worked at the same company as our poor CFD guy @crashnburn80 that has to work with PhD's. Tech people in general are hard to manage, but PhD tech people are some of the most difficult people to manage and keep focused on the task at hand, in my experience. Ooo shiny . . .

The tech field is vast, with roles in support, administration, development, etc. There's specialty areas in infrastructure, network, data platforms, security, application development (front end to back end and everything in between), and the growing area of data science, each with their own sub-specialties. Everybody's losing their shit over ChatGPT, AI/ML, and LLMs these days, it's wearing me out. Kind of like blockchain, but worse.