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Friday Career Five
It seems like it's Career Day for the Friday Five....
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serenada last:
1. What do you do for a living?
My title is Senior Application Architect, which sounds really quite fancy, but what I actually do is create and support in-house Sales Support databases/programs for the Sales and Marketing departments of a Major Grade School Textbook Publisher. Textbook sales are rather specialized, one of the databases we support gives each representative a territory management suite of all the schools in their individualized district, so they can track things like per-student expenditures, special programs, new construction and so on. Our reps and consultants are nearly all ex-teachers (most of them have Masters, some have been principals) who can Speak Education Lingo in a way that makes sense to boards of ed. and so on, but they're not necessarily tech-savvy, so my department tries very hard to make our applications user-friendly and intuitive.
2. What do you like most about your job?
I get to be creative, I get the time to think out what I'm doing and figure out the best way to do it, I often get enough fallow time from actually being quite efficient that I can do some discreet internet surfing during the day which keeps my brain alive. I like my coworkers a lot, I like my company (which is warm and fuzzily liberal, and an old-line publishing house, so the workweek is officialy 37.5 hours), I like my users, and I get to talk to a couple of them a couple of times per week, when the "support" part of the job kicks in, so I get human/user contact and exercize my vocal/social skills. I've gotten to travel to interesting cities and stay at some really fabulous hotels once or twice a year, which is just enough travel to be fascinatingly exotic. Nobody expects me to stay 40-50 hours a week, except for very rare emergencies or sales conferences.
3. What do you like least about your job?
When there are too many support problems all at once, when there are intractable programming problems that I don't have a clue what is going wrong or why. I really don't like the feeling of being lost without a map or a compass. Occasionally there are users who are too pushy -- but they're salescreatures, so usually they're quite nice about it, if... persistent.
4. When you have a bad day at work it's usually because _____...
The intractable problems that have heavy VIP pressure on them, or many many smaller problems all demanding solutions ASAP. I start to get stressed out, but then I've got canary-in-a-coalmine tolerance for that sort of thing.
5. What other career(s) are you interested in?
I wanted to be a professional fiction writer since maybe 13 or 14, and I have somewhat fulfilled that desire, though being able to make a decent living as a pro writer is a horse of another color. I'd still very much like to sell some original novels, but I'm afraid I'm going to be the kind of writer who completes, and if she's lucky, sells a novel every ten years. I'd love to be an interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village, but I think I'd start fraying from the constant stress of 'performing' -- I admire greatly the retirees who make up a large percentage of the staff, they get to work ~20hrs/week so they're still fresh and enjoying themselves.
In some parallel universe, I've probably had a fabulous career as a cynical TV advertising copywriter.
Okay, enough typing. On to more Body Swap!
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serenada last:1. What do you do for a living?
My title is Senior Application Architect, which sounds really quite fancy, but what I actually do is create and support in-house Sales Support databases/programs for the Sales and Marketing departments of a Major Grade School Textbook Publisher. Textbook sales are rather specialized, one of the databases we support gives each representative a territory management suite of all the schools in their individualized district, so they can track things like per-student expenditures, special programs, new construction and so on. Our reps and consultants are nearly all ex-teachers (most of them have Masters, some have been principals) who can Speak Education Lingo in a way that makes sense to boards of ed. and so on, but they're not necessarily tech-savvy, so my department tries very hard to make our applications user-friendly and intuitive.
2. What do you like most about your job?
I get to be creative, I get the time to think out what I'm doing and figure out the best way to do it, I often get enough fallow time from actually being quite efficient that I can do some discreet internet surfing during the day which keeps my brain alive. I like my coworkers a lot, I like my company (which is warm and fuzzily liberal, and an old-line publishing house, so the workweek is officialy 37.5 hours), I like my users, and I get to talk to a couple of them a couple of times per week, when the "support" part of the job kicks in, so I get human/user contact and exercize my vocal/social skills. I've gotten to travel to interesting cities and stay at some really fabulous hotels once or twice a year, which is just enough travel to be fascinatingly exotic. Nobody expects me to stay 40-50 hours a week, except for very rare emergencies or sales conferences.
3. What do you like least about your job?
When there are too many support problems all at once, when there are intractable programming problems that I don't have a clue what is going wrong or why. I really don't like the feeling of being lost without a map or a compass. Occasionally there are users who are too pushy -- but they're salescreatures, so usually they're quite nice about it, if... persistent.
4. When you have a bad day at work it's usually because _____...
The intractable problems that have heavy VIP pressure on them, or many many smaller problems all demanding solutions ASAP. I start to get stressed out, but then I've got canary-in-a-coalmine tolerance for that sort of thing.
5. What other career(s) are you interested in?
I wanted to be a professional fiction writer since maybe 13 or 14, and I have somewhat fulfilled that desire, though being able to make a decent living as a pro writer is a horse of another color. I'd still very much like to sell some original novels, but I'm afraid I'm going to be the kind of writer who completes, and if she's lucky, sells a novel every ten years. I'd love to be an interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village, but I think I'd start fraying from the constant stress of 'performing' -- I admire greatly the retirees who make up a large percentage of the staff, they get to work ~20hrs/week so they're still fresh and enjoying themselves.
In some parallel universe, I've probably had a fabulous career as a cynical TV advertising copywriter.
Okay, enough typing. On to more Body Swap!