Since we now have a bit of an audience again, let's have an update.

What are we all doing for a living these days?

I'll start
I now work for a food manufacturer in a procurement role, been doing this for around 3 years now.
My main responsibility is to buy cardboard boxes, sticky labels and plastic pots.

 

For the last 13(!) years, I've been working for a company doing software for the financial services sector. As the years have passed, I've ended up writing less code, and more time asking customers what they want and asking my colleagues to give customers what they (actually) want, but am desperately trying to avoid any kind of project management role, and somehow still seem to be getting away with doing a bit of everything. The work itself isn't always the most interesting (unless you have a deep passion for financial regulations and the data requirements needed to meet them), but the company continues to be an extremely good (and fun) place to work.

Good question... :/

In the non-global-pandemic timeline, I'm basically at the end of a six month sabbatical and considering various options of what I want to do going forward.

With everything in limbo, those choices are massively reduced, so I'll probably soon be finding out whether I can break even through online freelance, like Fiverr.

I am on disability benefits due to being mentalheaded.

 

What were you doing before the sabbatical?

I'm guessing not the best time to freelance, but what types of contracts are you potentially looking for?

Initially read that as metalheaded. I hope you're okay Drew. I have often wondered whether you are and checked you still had an online presence somewhere.

I'm fine! Not depressive or anything. Just incapable of leaving the house or really doing anything economically useful.

I'm on mastodon :|

 

I'm in my 10th (!) year at a small marcom company that formerly specialized in heavy industry/engineering clients, now with a more varied portfolio, but our main client that has supplied us with 70-80% of our billings is a huge fossil fuels support company (erk). I do some web design and development, server admin, odd jobs, and the go-to IT support person in the office.

I retired nearly 4 years ago after 30 years working first for The Inland Revenue as was, now HMRC, as a COBOL developer, then EDS (same but also setting up a change management team), then Fujitsu as an ISPF, TSO, MVS specialist with some DB2 support, then Capgemini as a DB2 DBA finally managing a DB2/Oracle/SQL Server/IDMS team which meant doing really interesting stuff for a while and then totally boring shit after that. I do stuff now, but not for money. Got a pension.

I'm a lead engineer in a service IT department working for a large (~1500 employees) charity, been there nearly two years now and enjoying it. It's a nice place to work, anyone can bring ideas to the fore and the IT department is around 80 people strong, so always others to bounce those ideas off. The past 4 weeks have been pretty hellish though. We been tasked with renting 800+ laptops and getting them configured for end users to be able to work from home. That in itself has been ok, but we've been supporting those end users through setting up VPN connections and have never been busier. Our job would be made a lot easier if people could read manuals.

When I'm not doing the above, the work is a bit of everything, 2nd and 3rd line support, projects, mentoring and coaching.

I would drop it all tomorrow though if drawing portraits paid the mortgage.  :J

 

 (hug)

I work in the Cultural Institute of University of Leeds, mostly matching up artists with academics and giving them space and resources to play out together. I also still make my own art sometimes with Greyhair (Shanaz Gulzar).

Have you had a chance to play with the new toy yet?

My word, we’ve all returned at the same time?

I’m currently a detective in a rather violent and busy part of the world. It’s varied, interesting and generally agreeable.

No such thing as working from home for us, I’m currently sat in work monitoring the carnage going all around our area to see if there’s any trade for CID.

I work for an international IT sales and services company and am currently a Service Manager. Currently working on two large accounts managing all of the services we deliver to these two customers across UK, Ireland, Belgium and Netherlands. Keeps me busy, although the regular travelling I used to do is somewhat on hold at the moment.

Been at this firm for 6 1/2 years now, worked my way up from being a lead IT engineer, senior analyst, team leader and now service manager.

I had been wasting time at a SaaS company, where I was filling the roles of senior developer & team lead, but without the recognition, respect or pay.

I'd most like to do sponsored open source work - fixing bugs, adding features, producing small/focused libraries/tools, etc - but I'm potentially open to any software contracts that are either short-term or sufficiently rewarding/interesting.

Unsurprisingly a lot of IT related jobs.

I probably deliberately underplayed my role, for some reason I find it amusing to say I buy cardboard boxes for a living.

Anyway, the main part of my job is to manage the packaging buying for a food manufacturer, we specialise in packing olives and antipasti products going to most of the major retailers in the UK, and a bit of export. Someone else covers the ingredients, but I do dabble a bit on that side. I'm also quite involved in a new project that launched in Jan where we are producing a ready to eat chicken mimick vegan protein (Squeaky Bean in Sainsbury's, go buy some. It is genuinely very good).
Another aspect is that I'm our on site "systems coordinator" and part of our IT Steering Group for the wider group of businesses. We've got two primary systems for running a lot of things, a financial system and an MRP for, you guessed it, Material Requirement Planning. Both have their quirks and challenges and I'm the go to person at my site, I work a lot on the MRP system and it was pretty much setup by someone who doesn't do my day to day so never really cared about how badly it functioned. I've gone in with a mindset of automating out as many manual tasks as possible to vastly improve data accuracy. More accurate data usually results in a couple of things, less shortages, less waste.

I've been experimenting with overlaying successive photos with me in different parts of the room (works fine), but of course we're in lock down, and there's no way I can carry out my masterplan of getting the town council to agree for me to site it on the back of the town hall, overlooking the square to get my Rush Hour For Urban animals shots.

I'll let you know when we go ahead.

Glad to hear it works! Interesting concept, looking forward to seeing its eventual realization.

I listen to customers telling me they want their logo to bounce around next to a football match, then I tell my team of motion graphics artists to make the logo bounce around, then I send the result to the football match and tell our field ops guys when to play the logo bouncing around. 

Not really sure how this fills as much time as it does, but it do. 

Since there is currently no football or rugby or cricket I am now mainly doing parenting and wondering if we’ll survive long enough to be there when the sport happens again. Which I think we will, just about. We also do some cool stuff with VR and AR but that’s not been much to do with me yet and that also is all on hold since it tended to be in the kinds of places that are now closed.