Just curious, what do you guys actually do for a living?
Scrolling through comments here, you can tell there’s a huge mix of people, some clearly technical, some more creative, some who sound like they’ve been in the working world for decades, others who feel like students or early in their career.
No particular reason for asking, just genuinely curious what kind of professions make up this community. Feel free to keep it as vague or specific as you’re comfortable with.
Drop your profession below, and if you want, one thing about it people usually don’t expect.
Railway signal maintainer.
I take care of crossing warning devices, switch machines, signals, track circuits, and wayside hazard detectors.
That’s so cool. Cool job
Thanks.
Junior researcher in food microbiology, with a background in general food technology.
Figuring out cheaper ways to enrich foods using microbial producers.
Was a wage slave all my life until I retired. The best I could do in life is sell my time for money. I didn’t care who I sold it to.
I studied bioinformatics, got into IT, got pushed into sales, got out cause I hated that. Now I’m a barkeeper. Not yet sure what I’ll do next. Maybe IT again, if I find a company that sucks less.
Also the sysadmin for a small non-profit, which is a lot more fun than any corporate job I had.
CEO. Disaster/healthcare management consultant. Critical care paramedic.
Well. Technically I am a CEO. My company is smallish, but we are a proper joint stock company (who I am the sole owner)m I founded it in 2020 and we consult in disaster management and healthcare management so for the “hot end” of healthcare.
I am still qualified as a critical care paramedic but only work in that field part time now.
pretty good , keep goin sir
I am a master of the custodial arts.
Full stack developer. Our stack is soggy cheese.
Former machine learning researcher. Worked on image search, then language modeling for general search. But then VC started throwing money at it and the landscape just kinda’ changed. The research was still great in academia, but a bunch of dipshits took a useful technology and decided to use it as a way to funnel money from everyone into their own coffers.
Now I build stuff to monitor power lines and prevent wildfires.
One thing people don’t usually expect: machine learning isn’t magic. The computer doesn’t just “do the work for you”. There’s a lot of planning, theory, and experimentation around seeing if and why something works.
i assume AI, since its related.
But then VC started throwing money at it
I had no idea the Viet Cong was still active in 2026.
After the Kháng chiến chống Mỹ, I can’t say I blame them.
I don’t know what that is, but it looks like Vietnamese script so I’m inclined to agree that’s probably relevant.
I was just playing off your joke. It’s the term for the Vietnam War in Vietnamese. “Resistance War Against America.”
Ah okay. Barely related but I read recently that Vietnam is one of the countries that thinks highest about the US. Super strange, considering.
Marketing. Sorry about all the emails and texts.
Nice try, FBI.
I’m a professional pedant, but it’s only seasonal part time work.
911 call-taker
dispatcher?
Nah, he just says “wow that’s crazy…” If you want help you gotta call the new number
Yep, the new number of course being 0118999881999119725…3
Our center is big and we handle a lot of volume so dispatchers are separate.
I’ve been in the animation industry for 15yrs. Mostly in the commercial space, so nothing for movies.
automated machine design. mostly automotive crap.
sure does pay the bills what with the always available overtime, but it also has a shit effect on hobbies because (1) there’s only so many hours a week you can spend using a kb/m and at a desk, and more work cuts into gaming, (2) there’s only so many hours you can spend staring at a screen, so more work cuts into gaming or other media, and (3) when your day job is designing machines and solving problems, more of that cuts into playing Minecraft or Factorio or something because hey that’s like the exact same type of thinking.
there’s a reason so many engineers are into climbing, cycling, camping, woodworking etc
I was a special education teacher in an inner city school district for 11 years. I started in high school my first year and then went to elementary the last 10. It was to weird being 22 teaching 17 year olds.
Anyways, did 3-4 for a couple years, then 5-6 a couple years, finished in k-1. I was diagnosed with kidney failure a few years ago and retired early because I’m on dialysis. I invested very well so I’m good financially, but I miss working with kids, not so much getting fucked over by the school district, but that’s a wother thing.
i had a formr coworker that refused to work for district a while back, because the pay was so low, and its a district that is very sketchy. i dont blame her, she was doing the job im doing and part time at private school, which is equal or worst than public school. she went into tech, but i dont know if has programming/coding skills, right before AI was the craze.
