do you work/study in the tech field?

[psionic storm]

how many people who have been in the programming, tech support, sys admin field for more than 1 year, or is a cs student, still like their field?

share likes/dislikes/typical day.

[RedRover]

degree in CS, lasted about a year as a code monkey. still in the tech field but will never be a code monkey again.

[kerowo]

Mainframe production support for 6 years or 7 years, writing documentation and testing for 2. Coding is better.

[psionic storm]

redrover, why never again? i used to love programming, wrote lines for years before going into university but all of a sudden i got sick of it, anything related to cs seems to tedious now. what are you doing now anyways?

kerowo, did you used to code or are you just assuming its more interesting? my friend did support and doc/testing for his co-op and it didnt seem all that interesting.

[nuclear500]

Wintel Systems Admin for large Healthcare company for 3 years now, first real job out of school amazingly. Apparently I know what I'm doing or something...

Dislikes:
Dealing with people. I'd much rather tinker and toodle with servers and server technologies then deal with peoples problems. Comes with the job though and in lots of cases is rewarding, but if I could eliminate it entirely woot, dream job. Its not as bad as I make it sound.

Likes:
I get to make decisions on technologies for tens of thousands of dollars, build and maintain servers that have direct patient impact and are extremely vital to the operation of the clinical system. Ego Trip Woot. Oh and I'm not the Exchange admin thank god.

Typical day, well, I have no typical day. But I usually spend at least 2-3 hours a day doing general overall monitoring and some basic maintenance of the 90ish physical servers and 80 virtual servers. 2-3 hours of general project work on whatever and the rest is a mix of side pet projects, side scripting/coding jobs (the companies user creation application for our active directory was written by me) and techie "upkeep".

And of course spread throughout the day I hit 2+2 and other time waster sites like fark, digg and /.

This morning I watched last nights Heroes episode because I missed it. Thank god for extremely high speed 'net and NBC posting the full episode without commercials and being an admin thats not locked down [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[erbbysam]

Freshman in Electrical and Computer Engineering and currently really like it.
Dislikes:
General Education courses
Likes:
finally learning about something that interest me
Typical Day:
wake up at 8, go to all my classes, only one of which involves engineering... It's still a lot of fun though [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[TheIrishThug]

erbbysam,
It gets much more interesting once you get thru the core stuff. Good job going to all your classes, I know more than a couple of people that messed up their GPA before they even go to the hard engineering classes.

Came into school as EE and then moved to CE w/ CS minor. Circuits wasn't too bad. But Electronics was a different story, not being interested didn't help.

I will likely end up being a code monkey but would be able to handle processor design if that was available. About to go on my last COOP in Jan (anyone in Boston hiring?) to make sure I stand coding every day. But I don't foresee a problem.

[kerowo]

[ QUOTE ]
kerowo, did you used to code or are you just assuming its more interesting? my friend did support and doc/testing for his co-op and it didnt seem all that interesting.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yea, I wrote code for several years. Mostly break fix or enhancements to existing code but the occasional new program from user requirements through design to code, test, and code deploy. Much more enjoyable than what I'm doing now.

I've been at work for 12 hours trying to test code that can best be described as "[censored] don't work" and am catching crap because the developers aren't closing "my" defects fast enough. I'm waiting for an offshore call to end so I can go home and get some sleep before being back in 9 or 10 hours. Variance: I get paid for overtime.

[psionic storm]

haha, thats awesome nuclear. sounds like you get a lot of freedom with your job which is really refreshing. im assuming you get paid on salary without OT pay? what operating systems are these machines running? are decisions like this up to you?

erbbysam, im glad you're liking it. wake up at 8am and go to all your classes? wow, model student. good luck with everything. what school do you attend btw?

TheIrishThug, which places have you had co-op at? are they actually getting challenging projects to do or busy work?

kerowo, getting paid for OT sure lessens the pain but staying late at the office sounds like a bitch, how does that beat doing support? what were you getting paid/hr for coding? and for support?

[TheIrishThug]

The experience you get at a coop is dependent on a lot of things. Some people work better by themselves others work well in small groups. A position may be great, but if it's not the way you work it will seem bad. This is the hidden advantage of coops, you get to learn things you don't like just as much as you learn things you like.

My first coop was doing electrical planning in buildings. Within two months I had decided that this was not what I wanted as a career. Then they started to give me busy work, if they gave me work at all. This was not a normal coop, this office didn't seem to differentiate between random summer interns and a 6 month coop position.

My second was for a group that did work with asic and fpga layouts. They had just switched the position from fpga work to asic, so they were still working out the kinks while I was there. However, I did do a lot of work programming scripts to help the engineers with their work and one program that recorded and displayed how their new server was running.

So my advice is:
If you know how you work, make sure your coop will be like that. A good manager will know that the purpose of a coop is to teach you just as much as it is to get them cheap labor.
Don't be scared to ask for more work. Reading 2p2 is fun, but taking the extra step will get you a better reference letter.
Ask questions. They will know you don't know everything and people like talking about things that interest them. If you ask the right person the right questions you can learn a lot.