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. 

I am working in the technology department of a finance company. Think lots of transparency and audits by the likes of the SEC, ESMA and FCA in The UK.

The UK used to come under the jurisdiction of ESMA, but then Brexit happened.

I draw pipe fittings to help multinational megacorps rape the earth and poison the air.

Almost 1 year in, it's as boring as it sounds, but hopefully will lead to something better.

Official title is 'mechanical design engineer', but that's rather overstated for what I actually do. We're essentially one level up from blacksmiths. 

I work as a network engineer for a.. Christ, what do we do these days? We used to have our own ISP, but then the other ISP that owns us got arsey about it so our ISP team split off into their own company and effectively became the opposition. We do a lot of cloud hosting and integration with public clouds. I spend a lot of time buried in comms racks wondering where that cable is going and why is it there and how is this network even functioning without it catching fire? I look at some of the hosted firewalls that we run and occasionally make small changes very carefully. I try to persuade my customers to spend more money than they want to spend because their switches are 11 years old and we're all going to have some really bad days when the switch fails.

We do anything for the cash, basically.

I sit at a desk twiddling my thumbs all day until something breaks.

That is dangerously close to um... never mind.

I bought an old job centre building and turned it into a music shop / music teaching studio / music venue. Just coming to the realisation doing all that on my own was a fucking stupid idea so taking in like minded tenants. Got a guy who's built a recording studio so far and was just on the cusp of signing up a guy who produces electronic music but then some shit hit a fan.

After about two decades of umming and ahhing about it I've got all my teaching now working remotely and am currently scrambling with the difference between marketing music lessons to T h e W o r l d as opposed to a 15 mile radius of my building.

I work for a well known exam board that does both academic and vocational qualifications.  My role is basic customer services; phone calls, emails etc about pretty much anything we do.  It's either a basic question/request that I answer/deal with or something more complicated that I pass on.

I take care of the computer plumbing for a big bank so that they can talk to other big banks and exchanges and customers about buying high and selling low (is that the right way?) really quickly. Basically, I work for The Man.

Also, I spend a little bit of time every now and then reminiscing and wondering what Drew (and IxiPete and lots of others) are up to, so I'm both  (bounce) and  :C that you're around but not totally awesome  (hugleft)

I think he's probably still totally awesome. Just totally awesome on disability benefits.

This is indeed true, I meant totally awesome situation. My dirty forner bad English  :'C 

(hug)

GAFR

Rooms are all I know :'S

Worked in IT for a few businesses - last one was being the IT department for a small, private secondary school. Was given loads of extra duties like helping the students produce a 2-hour weekly live radio show.

For the last 3 and-a-bit years I've been at Halfords. Worked my way to bike mechanic - although not had a full head of department so was pretty much doing some of that too for the last 6 months. Wanted the break from IT but not sure if I want to stay where I am, go back to IT, or try something different.