I'm between jobs for the first time in my adult life at the moment. My last gig lasted nearly 10 years and it was a wild ride. I found it fulfilling for a time, but I eventually got promoted to a position I wasn't wholly satisfied with.
I started off at the very bottom rung, doing tech support for customers on the phone/chat/email. I was great at it and got promoted quickly to higher ranks of support, and eventually wound up managing the floor of tech support agents. Those were some of the best days of my life. Halcyon days.
Every day was like a really low-stakes episode of House, where in the course of helping agents solve technical issues for customers, eventually we'd encounter one really inexplicable, difficult, borderline impossible problem that nobody had ever seen before, so me and my team's brightest would walk and talk while hypothesizing and figuring out our next move.
After a year or two of managing the floor, I got promoted to a position where I was ultimately a code monkey. Then Covid happened, and my job became fully remote for 4 years straight. Which was great! It allowed me to do my work and also spend way, way more time with my infant son during his early formative years. I got incredibly lucky in spite of the pandemic. But over time, the burnout grew to the point where I knew I needed to find something else to do with my career.
I'm lucky enough to have enough in savings that I can take a bit of time to reflect and think about what I might want to do going forward with my admittedly limited credentials.
Yes, i love my job. I design substations. I feel like my work matters, and I get a thrill that I have a hand in bringing our electricity power grid to life.
We're building a data lake which is pretty boring. I try to keep myself inspired that maybe just maybe the optimizations gained from these data analytics will lead to a drop in our greenhouse gas emissions from this organization.
Can you give a practical example of what sort of data might be stored? And is all the data 'owned" by the company you work for, by one client, or by many clients?
It's all maintenance and parts data for an airline. Which is why if we do things right, there's a chance we could improve efficiency and lower carbon emissions. We own most the data as we're creating it, rest may be vendors