Can be both!
I was just coming to say that! I get the "best" of both worlds, Excel sheets to track production while I sit in this shitty factory and breathe God only knows what!
Bonus: I can't even afford a home after it all! Yay America!
Yeah, I live in a area of the country where (only since 2020) we can expect long stretches of days where the sky is orange and the AQI is 300+. Climate change has made sure the toxic fumes are for everyone!
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.
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.
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!
_
There's a third one, too, it's a funny one: you stare at countless (mostly fake) job vacancies expecting to be hired so to "deserve to survive", while bills can't stop arriving. You resign from your 10-yr IT career and try to apply for a simpler, factory vacancy, just to hear from HRs that your CV is "too good to be applied for our simpler jobs". In the meantime, you catch yourself selling your soul and autonomy (constantly forced to accept the circumstances) to these people that share the same blood lineage as yours (some call them "familiars") because you can't see another option, except for going homeless, where you'll be constantly assaulted by cops and people saying "go get a job" to you because you got nothing. By the way, you also inhale toxic fumes from air pollution from cities. And you stare at a Word document, your own CV, thinking "what did I do wrong?".
Is your experience IT exclusively, or do you also have (even rudimentary) programming experience? Industrial automation is a great option. I feel blessed, having started from below the bottom (not all people are fit to be parents!) working as a metal carpenter while still underage, to have managed to get into this field, through hard work and, most importantly, a good amount of luck.
It's likely you did nothing "wrong" our system just sucks.
Haha I work in a laboratory so I do both regularly.
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
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.
Have you seen the FMWC?
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.
I would do that too if my government didn't decide I need to breathe toxic fumes to keep me from "turning gay" (that wasn't the reason I'm bi).
IDK if you're familiar with the Anime, but in this scene the 5 year old green hair kid is pointing at his favorite super hero and crying because he just got the news he'll never have a super power.
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.
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
I'm doing both at the same time.
Production level fumes leak in to the office. Employer informed that it's just a harmless smell.
inheriting a genetic disease because my lungfish grandsire wouldn’t put on a fucking respirator around airborne hazards
Jokes on you, I’m an engineer, I do both
I'd rather inhale toxic sheets at work or stare at excel fumes all day
My body releases some toxic sheets sometimes.
I know someone who excels at making Excel fumes.
And in the precise moment I saw this, I realized both of my monitors were displaying Excel on full screen. Sigh.
This meme is verstörend.
Office Space 2 plot revealed
Just leave my stapler alone this time.
I have the privilege of doing both 😎😵💫
Dang... Went from being around running cars all day to spending my days looking at excels sheets...
