Bits & bobs, more to follow (sorryyyyyy appparently I am Spamlex at the moment)

[kaberett]

1. wyrdatlast has started writing a series about about coming to terms with diagnosis of chronic illnesses, viewed in a framing of grief, which I suspect a bunch of you will be interested in, and for which I personally am v grateful because it means I don't gotta get around to writing the wretched things. ;)

2. BECAUSE OF REASONS (do my housemate a favour by doing me a favour, folk?) if those of you in the tech/computer science industry felt like writing a couplefew paragraphs about what your job is actually like for someone with a very strong CS background but no industry experience, I'd be super grateful. Comments here or e-mail are great. Cheerssss xx

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

(anon in public, but Alex can privately give my name & email address to anyone who has questions)

I'm a developer at a ~100-person company. Their primary focus is software; everyone in the building has done some coding; my immediate manager is two desks away working from the same task list as me. My immediate team is small and uses pair programming on about 50% of tasks. The place is small and cohesive enough that we all have some idea what each other are doing, and I cannot overstate the awesomeness of having managers and colleagues in other departments who really understand what my job entails. They're also great on work-life balance. You do your hours and go home.

As a social group outside of the office... basically the developers are all great to hang out with, but there are a couple of unapologetic Tories further up whom I will very deliberately only ever talk to in work about work.

There's plenty that I find new and interesting, but I never end up doing anything that's novel in a CS theory sense. It's engineering with a gradually evolving set of tools, rather than research. Typical concerns include "how can we tweak our architecture to make the output efficiently include XYZ data? How can we properly test this at all relevant levels to prevent future regressions?" (This team is really into testing. It's great.) We also push our patches to open source software that we use, and try to engage with those projects rather than just throwing stuff over the wall.

Probably the least interesting part is the occasional ticket of the form "test with this new range of inputs, and see if the profiler shows any opportunities for optimisation". Lots of staring at progress bars. But even then, as soon as we find a problem, it rapidly gets interesting again.

I'm immensely lucky here; I basically made this career choice when I was 8, had an entirely straightforward path to get here, and have never once regretted it. But then, I'm not in any group that's ever been made to feel unwelcome in this field. Obviously it's not so easy for everyone.

[(Anonymous)]

everyone in the building has done some coding

Really? In a 100-person company you have no office administrator / accounts / HR - or you do and they all have coding experience as well? That would be exceptionally unusual.