Currently doing an SLT apprenticeship. Most toxic fumes I’ll be inhaling in the future will be the stench of poop in nursing homes lol
HELP
Jokes on you, I’m an engineer, I do both
inheriting a genetic disease because my lungfish grandsire wouldn’t put on a fucking respirator around airborne hazards
Haha I work in a laboratory so I do both regularly.
I hate excel so much I almost wanna consider the toxic fumes.
For years I assumed it was as simple as making large tables, and that was it. It was truly humbling when I had to use it for the first time and learned how much shit you can do with that software.
And I still have no idea how to use it.
I have the privilege of doing both 😎😵💫
Even programming jobs are like excel sheets with extra steps.
Either way your back is fucked
If you get a standing desk, your knees can be fucked as well.
I am a secret third thing.
Fucking excel. Lemmy lemme tell you. At a former position my boss wanted me to make an economic model in excel. I begged to do it in R but no dice. Annoyingly VBA was the skill all other employers were interested in (in my brief foray into industry). I had a million sads.
VBA is horrid and incredibly outdated. I’ve written c# code that ran identical calculations on data being run through excel at literally over a million times the speed.
They just added native support for Python in excel
Don’t get me.wrong I really love excel and enjoy spending my days playing with it; but sometimes I’ll look at my work in a big picture context and don’t understand how I make so much money doing a totally made up thing that serves no practical purpose.
I felt the same thing watching my partner working this morning. I’ve been with him 10 years and I still can’t explain his job beyond its title because as far as I understand he oversees people as well as works on software that’s developed, deployed and managed by another company, but they don’t manage software or services or develop anything but they deploy it, but that’s not not his team, and it’s this one specific program, but it’s actually 12 integrated programs, and he’s working on one that’s in development but he’s not a developer, but is not part of anything they’re actually doing yet, and that’s not his main role.
Everytime he explains it, I get more lost…
What is this job? It’s obviously stressful, a lot of other companies rely on on whatever this service is, and my partner, as of this year, makes 8x my income, so it must be important… Right!?
Right!? He’s not making 8x my income pushing pencils…right!?
I teach General Education at a community centre for people who missed out on formal schooling.
My job is 3 words “I teach SOSE”, and you know almost exactly what I do you can picture the main tasks and also picture my output (educated graduates)
His job did not exist 15 years ago, the concept of a job like his in software for the masses did not exist 50 years ago, a desk job to this degree of pencil pushing did not exist 100 years ago.
Sometimes I think about how my job is technically one of the oldest in the world, but never a well paid one.
Sometimes I consider a pencil pushing job for a few years, to just get my retirement fund sorted, but if I don’t even understand what the job is how can I expect myself to do it?
Humans have a complexity fetish I’ll never understand. Nothing is ever as complex as it seems (in the way it seems, anyway).
I feel like it’s just the opposite.
Try designing something without instructions or a template. You’ll run into a thousand little issues you didn’t realize needed to be considered.
That’s true of software, sure. But it’s also true if you want to make a wooden dresser without plans or build an rc airplane from scratch.
In my experience, things are rarely as simple as they first seem.
You’re so right. You should be mindlessly using an ERP!
If you tried working at your company for a week with no paperwork or spreadsheets you’d realize their necessity pretty quick. You are a bureaucromancer. Very little gets done, and none of it on budget, without you playing with spreadsheets all day.
Soldiers might fight a war, but logistics wins one. It’s no different for business.
And in the precise moment I saw this, I realized both of my monitors were displaying Excel on full screen. Sigh.
Office Space 2 plot revealed
Just leave my stapler alone this time.
I used to do the inhale thing while I was a student. Gave me the motivation to pull through and be able to do the Excel thing now.
That makes you a well rounded person. Getting the full human experience. It’s not always fun, but it makes life more complete.
