Ask Lemmy

I work in 911 dispatch, I already had a pretty dim view of humanity coming into it and being prepared for the unexpected is basically the job description, so not too much has truly surprised me, caught me momentarily off-guard, sure, but not really surprised

Probably my biggest surprise is how few calls I get about foreign objects stuck in various orifices. I definitely thought that would be a bigger thing, but I guess most people choose to suck it up (phrasing?) and drive themselves to the ER out of embarrassment.

Also, overall, little kids tend to be pretty great 911 callers. I don't particularly like kids in pretty much any other situation, so that was surprising to me, but kids listen to me, answer my questions, don't beat around the bush and just blurt things out, and overall tend to be respectful. There's outliers and exceptions of course, but overall some of my favorite callers are little kids.

Just how fucking garbage it is. Working for a non profit that can't decide on what they want, refuse to let me create an app that's actually useful, and just want me to spend days customizing a low code platform through hacks. Then they complain when things take time. I really need a new job.

That a multi-national medical device company has no spare parts program for it's machines, and uses Excel sheets exclusively for performance tracking.

How much old tech they actually have... like rooms of it... most of it is kept for spare parts.

That my coworker gets paid more than me for just sitting on his ass looking at his phone all day while I do all the work and they don't seem to give a shit.

1. Honestly, the most surprising thing is that most people hate it. I'm an accountant because I love numbers and organization, but didn't want to go into engineering. Every company I've worked for has an accounting department of very sad people. They talk about how they wasted their lives going into this career, "but at least it's a stable paycheck, y'know?".
2. The pay! I had a few different careers I was considering, but went with accounting because at the time it was one of the only careers with legitimate online degrees. I've been in the field 4 years now and make $100k. That puts me at the top 5% of household incomes where I live.
3. The lack of actual work. I'm here for opening the books at the beginning of the month, closing at the end, and not much else. 75% of my days are a whole lotta nothing. At my current job we bring in video games on Fridays and play at the office.

How much time I spend not actually doing any work. I'm in IT as a computer technician and I work public sector.

A lot of the time, I'm kinda just sitting at my desk wasting time. If things aren't broken and no projects currently need me to work on them, then yeah. Not much to do but wait for something to break.

How incredibly stupid the customers are.

I guess anybody who works in any sort of customer service gets this, but I swear to god, 90% of our customers can't even fucking read - which is really bad when you work for an online retailer and most of your interactions with them are through email.

How much time it takes to fill reimbursement forms. And how few professors/researchers discuss about teaching. (you got it, I work at a university).

Just how little it seems people in my role seem to actually do or know about their role.

Also how it seems that every time I try to make requests based on facts, figures and numbers it always ends up being more of a we'll do things based on the vibe because they don't need to see the data as they already " know " the data.

Basically, I make a request for more budget, but I get pushed back your budget should be like Y budget as we have looked at the numbers and deem it so. I have data that proves our budget can't be like Y budget due to 2 to 3x the workload. Surprised Pikachu face.

It's happened to me 3-4 times now and it makes me think maybe I take my job too seriously.

When they found out that a contractor was using prison slave labor after looking into a significant number of defects, they were cool with it, business as usual.

I work retail and honestly?

Just how clueless a lot of managers are when it comes to how the business works in general. These are the people responsible for that exact thing, and they just seem to be so out of touch with how it works.

That people (both the CTO and devs) eventually asking ME for suggestions. And acting on it even if on projects I've barely touched while working there. They been through multiple years of university and some have been through multiple jobs. I'm just a guy who knew a bit programming when I was hired as phone support 13 years ago.

I love the team though. It was just me and the CTO that did dev for many years, and now we are 7.

How toxic corporate environment is.

I had only worked for small businesses before. Obviously they had a lot of problems and I don't miss a single thing. But now I'm in a huge IT company that outsourced part of its operation to the another huge IT company I'm actually in.

Both suck, but still I gotta learn to "play the game".