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• (January 12, 2023, 01:18:11 AM)

[Demosthenes]

To shitty jobs, I say "FEH!".

At least you're not working in a mall.  Not only was that possibly the worst job I've ever had, but it was also one of the lowest paying as well... even less than what you're making now, by what you've said about it.

[Revka]

Hey Demo... aren't you supposed to be working right now?

[Demosthenes]

Not much for me to do when nothing's broken.  I'm waiting for a copy of one client's system, and until I get that, I got nothin' if it's a slow day, which it is.  I've actually been busy outside of that... I've been in and out of seven or eight client systems just over the past week or so.

[Anonymous]

Demo, I'm disapointed. Sure, you have to fix the code. Sure, you need to correct the identified problem. But aren't we forgeting a little step in the process? You also need to break the code somewhere else once in a while. It's called "Job security".

[Demosthenes]

Nope.  No need.  Most of the systems our clients are running are so crappy and poorly set up that I rarely have any NEED to "break" anything.

As a running gag around here goes, "what's the best way to break the program our company sells?  Let the clients use it for a while!".

[Anonymous]

Are you guys building those systems in the 1st place?

[Dark Shade]

Tough work Demo. But I'm sure it pays good...

[Demosthenes]

Are you guys building those systems in the 1st place?

[/i]We are a reseller of a mid-range accounting package that we also write a major manufacturaing add-on product to.

By "mid-range" I mean that it costs our clients in the ballpark of $10,000 to $25,000 just for the program... that doesn't include any modifications or additional programming they decide they need/want.

Some accounting packages (for really big, complicated companies) can run in the realm of $500,000... so our product is pretty cheap when compared to some of those.  It's more than most people would buy to run a business out of their garage, however, for instance.

[Demosthenes]

Tough work Demo. But I'm sure it pays good...

[/i]It is kind of tough sometimes, but that's why I like it.  Pretty much all I do is seek problems with client systems (primarily data-related and environmental, occasionally coding problems, which end up affecting data anyway), so after a few years of doing nothing but this, I've gotten to be what I consider to be "pretty good" at it.

Besides, nobody else will touch this job with a ten foot pole.  They admitted as much when they hired me back ("We had a hard time finding people with your particular skills... we had an even harder time finding people who were willing to do what you do...").  Works for me.  It's actually something I enjoy doing, and I'm reasonably good at it, so I don't mind it when I don't have an evil supervisor plotting against me.

And they fired her right before hiring me back, so that's no longer an issue.  

As for the pay, it's less than comparable jobs in larget metropolitan areas would pay (if I could find a job exactly like this, but in Minneapolis instead of Bumfuck, Central Minnesota, I could probably make around $10,000-$15,000 more a year, pretty much from the start), but it's okay for the area I'm in, especially when taking the local cost of living into account.  I make more than most of my friends do, and marginally more than my wife (she's a graphic designer and web designer for a publishing company), but less than some with more experience than me (I have been doing this kind of thing for around six years now)... so I'm satisfied with the money for the moment.  When inflation is taken into account, I'm making considerably more than my dad was when he was my age, so by that standard I'm doing okay too, I think.

I don't know.... money isn't as large an issue with me as it is for some.  My education is in Nuclear Science; I'd need to re-sit and my NRC boards all over again to get my licensing up to date again, so if I wanted to make lots of money I could get a job with a local nuclear plant making almost twice what I make now... but I would detest it.

Life's too short to do something you hate 12 hours a day.

[Dark Shade]

Why would ya detest it? If it would pay double, plus it's in your "field of interest", so to speak, would it really be that bad?

[Demosthenes]

I also am interested in music, and I'm not a half-bad guitarist.... that doesn't necessarily mean I'd enjoy a career as a musician though...

Nuclear Science is something I discovered that I have a real passion for, and that I'm actually quite good at.

HOWEVER...

One must still make a living.  In that field, this is only done in a few ways:

1) Do research for a major corporation (like GE, for instance)

Yeah right.  Anything I invent I will not have credit for.  Chances are I won't even be allowed to tell anyone that I actually invented it, or even worked on it.  Plus, guaranteed many, many, MANY long hours of hard work, primarily for corporate whip-crackers.  Here's the breakdown of the main criteria:

Money:  Pretty damned good.  Corporate researchers in any nuclear field generally start higher than most other careers top out.

Politics:  Depending on the company, moderate to heavy.  Must kiss ass for good projects, must put up with ass-kissing to get decent staffing.

Working Conditions:  Good to Excellent.  Typically the best money can buy, but if you work for a cheapskate company, it can be substandard.

Recognition/Advancement:  Damn-near-nothing.

My overall rating for this career path (for me) is 2 stars out of five:  "Dismal", mostly because I'd be a corporate tool.  There is also the added bonus of something I invent or work on ending up killing people.  Yay.  That'll really help me sleep at night....


2) Do research on my own

This can be done with private investors/grants/venture capital, etc.  I could build a facility of my own, do my own research, form my own company, own my own patents, license/sell the ones I don't want to produce.

Money:  If successful, excellent.  Chances are I wouldn't be successful, however.  There is a lot of competition, and very little venture capital to be had nowadays for such things.  I'd likely be quite poor, and be kissing ass for grants and research money on a pretty constant basis

Politics:  Extremely heavy.  See "kissing ass for grants", above.  Must also deal with headaches dished out by the government for not only owning/operating own business, but one involving nuclear materials.  Would need full-time legal staff to deal with said headaches.

Working Conditions:  Considering I wouldn't be getting much for investment money, probably piss-poor.

Recognition/Advancement:  Excellent, if I actually manage to invent anything anyone would want.  The only people who would likely know my name are others in my field, so peer recognition factor is decent, but again, at what cost?

My overall rating for this career path (for me) is 1 stars out of five:  "Absolutely intolerable", mostly because I'd be a teeny tiny fish in a massive pond.


3) Do research for the government

Work in a government nuclear lab, likely with pretty good benefits, and job security.  

Money:  Pretty good.  Uncle Sam pays research scientists well.  With taxpayer money.  Lots of it.

Politics:  Extremely heavy.  By definition, any job where the US Federal Government is your employer, the "politics" meter goes all the way to the top of the scale.  As the saying goes, "it's not about where you go, it's about who you blow".  As an ex-military type, I have witnessed firsthand what it's like to be a cog in a government machine, and I don't care to repeat the experience.

Working Conditions:  Generally good.

Recognition/Advancement:  Depending on the security clearances involved, most likely absolutely none, even among peers.  Will most likely be scoffed at by other, non-government members of the scientific community as a "government tool" or "beaurocrat puppet".  Will also receive shame from friends and family.

My overall rating for this career path (for me) is 1 star out of five:  "Absolutely intolerable", primarily because of the political manuevering involved in day-to-day survival, funding, and security.  Added bonus is the firm, absolute knowledge that things I invent will likely lead to many deaths if used or misused.  I also have ethical problems with this job, primarily because my employer is an entity that I firmly believe should not be using taxpayer money to do scientific research; my own job would be a violation of my own political core beliefs.


4) Work for a college or university, doing research

Money:  99% probability that it would be pretty awful.  Lots of competition for jobs, research grants, and constant pressure to publish.

Politics:  Extremely heavy.  See "kissing ass for grants", above.  Would also be required to teach, frequency of which would be dependent on how successful I am at being a yes-man researcher, which also raises the politics meter nearly to the top of the scale.  Plus, if not working for a private school, must deal with government types and budgetary types, which pegs this category out as high as it can go.

Working Conditions:  Varies greatly depending on location

Recognition/Advancement:  Excellent to poor, depending again on location and facilities.  I'm probably no Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking or Max Planck, so my recognition would be likely overshadowed by others greater than myself.  While I can live with that, it's not worth the price exacted by the vampires running the show.

My overall rating for this career path (for me) is 1 star out of five:  "Absolutely intolerable", because of the politics and the people in this area that I despise more than even government types.


And, lastly...

5) Work for a nuclear power plant as an engineer

Money:  Very good.  Even with only my military nuclear experience as my only professional quals, salary out of the gate is in the $45,000 - $60,000 a year range, depending on location.  That increases to six figures with a few years of experience under one's belt.  Because I actually have some college education in the field in addition to my professional experience in actual, working reactor plants and experience handling and working with radiological materials and equipment, I'd probably be making another $15,000 - $20,000 a year to start on top of that, making it pretty lucrative.

Politics:  Moderate to heavy.  Nuclear plant engineers and worker bees are almost universally unionized, so one must deal with union bullshit on a daily, if not hourly basis.  Also, nuclear power plants are some of the most heavily regulated and monitored facilities on the planet, so numerous government hoops must be jumped through and all of the appropriate forms and paperwork must be filled out in triplicate before one can even take a bathroom break.  I worked primarily on nuclear plants on things like submarines and aircraft carriers, and the politics there was pretty stifling; in civilian nuke plants it is easily twice that level.

Working Conditions:  Average to awful.  Temperatures in an operating nuclear power plant's turbine room are usually in the 90 degrees F and up range during normal ops.  The control rooms are usually a bit more comfortable, but one isn't always in a comfy, air-conditioned control room, in particular if one is one of the people who knows how everything works in the plant.  Typically one will be working a minimum of 60 hours a week (mostly because it's hard for power plants to keep engineers happy; most of them are smart enough to know when they are being mistreated, and most of them hate fucking with politics).  Oh yeah, most of the time it's not just long hours... it's usually rotating shift work (1st shift one week, 2nd shift next week, 3rd shift the week after that, 1st shift after that, et cetera, for the entire time you work for them).

Recognition/Advancement:  Low to Good.  Depends greatly on location and for what company one works

My overall rating for this career path (for me) is 2 stars out of five:  "Dismal", primarily because while the money is good, the combination of working for/with people I despise and crappy working conditions/long hours.  Those two things cause high burnout, making this one not a very long-term career path.



Anyway, sorry for the long post.  Suffice it to say that I prefer doing something I enjoy for less money than to do something I hate, just to make my education worthwhile.  I don't consider my interest and education in the nuclear field to be a mistake, and I certainly don't consider my time in the military in the field to be a waste of time either; as long as one learns from one's occasional bad choices or missteps, one doesn't ever truly "make mistakes".

It does, after all, also qualify me to be a "know it all" when people are arguing with me on any number of related subjects.

[Banshee]

I have an interest in that sort of thing, and being a corporate researcher definitely appeals to me. Huh.....

Well, it means I'd have had to take a lot more college physics/chemistry classes, and by God, I hate them with a passion. If I invented a time machine, I'd use it to kill Newton with a brick.

[Anonymous]

I find web site administration to be a rather "fun" thing to do. Yet, I don't know if they have an entire profession dedicated to that. I still have a long way to go yet with such languages as Perl, PHP, XML, and Java Script. I've also got a good interest in the field of science (just science in general, Astronomy, for instance.), but like Demo mentioned, there is not much of a pay off in such fields of work.

Say Demo, do you actually have a degree of some sort in Computer Science, IE: went back to school for a few years for the degree. Or did you just pick up some books and start teaching what you needed to know, and went from there?

[Demosthenes]

Say Demo, do you actually have a degree of some sort in Computer Science, IE: went back to school for a few years for the degree. Or did you just pick up some books and start teaching what you needed to know, and went from there?

I started programming in BASIC when I was 12 and I started learning a couple of assemblers a little while after that.  Things computer-related have always come pretty easily to me, so when I moved back to Minnesota after I got out of the Navy, and having no real clue what I wanted to do for a living -- but knowing for certain that I didn't want to do anything nuclear-related anymore -- I got a job at a local company as a computer Jack-Of-All-Trades, pretty much by BSing my way into it (since I didn't have any actual professional experience).  While there I got paid very little but I learned a lot about a bunch of things...

• DOS batch programming
• Programming and data processing in foxBASE, dBASE, and FoxPro 2.6, 3.0
• three different flavors of Unix, including one real bastard called "UNOS"
• LANtastic, NT Server, basic networking and hardware
• shell scripting in Unix for autodialers[/list:u]
  
  Among other things.  A little BS and a large capacity for learning lots of things really fast can take one a long way in tech-related fields.  Once I understood that my low-paying job wasn't ever going to take me any further, and once I was satisfied with my knowledge and experience level (after three years of experience in just about anything one can get a better paying job elsewhere, usually), I left and got a different job with a different employer whose pay scale was a bit more in line with my skills.
  
  Incidentally, Revka got a job with that same company (the first one that I worked for) as more-or-less an intern while he was still in school, and he used them pretty much the same way I did -- he learned as much as he possibly could about as many things as he could there while getting paid squat, only to leave about a year later to get a "real" job elsewhere now that he had some real-world programming experience.
  
  And that company continues to lose quality, hard-working people because they don't seem to understand that even one of us (people like myself or Revka) paid well is worth ten newbies that will only use your company as a stepping-stone, so as a result, they have a pretty constant turnover in the Data Processing/Programming department.  They don't seem to understand that programmers that are actually any good usually command salaries of $30,000 a year and up around this area... not $20,000 and down....
  
  They're pretty stupid that way, but that's why they can't keep any decent people.  Sooner or later they'll figure it out.  They already sort of have... one guy that Revka and I used to work with over there recently threatened to quit (and he was getting paid like $11 an hour to do some pretty heavy-programming and data work) so they handed him a job title of "applications programmer" (before he was just a 'Data Processing Associate') and a significant raise.
  
  He's so tired of the place now though that I think if any other company made him an offer right now he'd probably take it in a heartbeat.