When I was on Jeopardy I tried to explain my field to the APs, and got nowhere.
My daughter was confused also, until I gave her some logic design books when we started collaborating. After listening to me talk about it for three tutorials we taught together, she has a vague idea.
I don’t even try for most people, and say something vague about computer design.
I’ve worked in GIS since the late 80’s.
Spatial analysis anybody? Most people are getting it now with MapQuest and Google and such, but I used to just have to say “I make maps on computers”.
I’m a Transpondster.
I try to make sure nothing is wrong with the WENUS
Linux/AIX sysadmin here. Things like “I built a server” or “we had a storage failure” are pretty easily understood, but I know better than to start going into detail about runlevels, kernel tuning, etc.
My assumption is that he meant tiny even for a fruit fly. I imagine it’s frustrating enough to do science on little bitty bug parts but to have to do it on bug parts that are small compared to the normal size is probably an extra layer of suck.
Aside: One of my professors once dressed up for Halloween as a CFD junkie. He wore a signboard that said “Will work for supercomputer time”.
And Crotalus, I know that COBOL programmers still exist, but I hope and pray for your sake and for ours that you’re not writing new code in COBOL.
The University where I work still teaches COBOL (COSC 220 on this page) and I understand are able to place a surprising number into COBOL jobs. I believe you exist.
Why do you hope that? Would you prefer that the back-end processing for that spiffy new app that lets you deposit checks by taking a picture of them with your smartphone be written in FORTRAN or maybe Visual Basic? :eek:
I was a college prof. for years. The main misconceptions wasn’t so much what I did but how much I did. People have this idea that I sat around all day thinking of Ways to Destroy America.
I worked. 8 hours was a short day. I taught, graded, prepared coursework, met with students, did research, wrote papers and grants, went to way too many meetings, etc. And I wasn’t getting paid any 6 figure salary either, not by a long shot.
It was hard, wearying work for little reward. (And things have only gotten worse since I left the “business”.)
I manage a data analytics team and project managers for a 3rd party outsourcer that monitors mortgage insureance for large lenders.
Even though I deal with very little actual paper - the vast majority is in computer files - it’s just easier to tell people “I push paper”.
Stuff.
I know how to set that up!
It’s easy in Project and SAP.
It sucks in Primavera.
It’s dull to explain in all three.
Yes, but after being fattened for a day or two, they’re supposed to be BIGGER. Stupid flies.
When I used to work in a clinical molecular biology lab, my standard response was “I mix together tiny drops of very expensive liquids and then load them into machines.”
Pretty much everything. No one cares for the gory (literally) details.
Twenty-seven years of experience gets boiled down to “I work in a hospital lab. No I don’t draw blood.”
For my day job as administrative assistant, I probably do stuff that most people would understand.
In my musical endeavours, things can get more esoteric. I can work with things like whole-tone scales and chord inversions that I imagine most people wouldn’t understand.
Have yourself cryogenically frozen until the year 9999. You’ll be in HIGH demand for your skills at fixing the Y10K bug!
Do room-filling mainframe computer systems still have live human computer operators, or is it pretty much all automated now? If so, what do computer operators do these days?
I was a room-filling mainframe computer operator back in the day – 1974 - 1978. A big part of the job was hanging tapes on tape drives (and fetching tapes from the vault). And we ran big production jobs sort of manually, with a certain amount of hand-written paperwork. I don’t picture computer operators doing those sorts of things today.
It was the only job I ever had where I really felt like I was in the “right” job for me. Where could I find a job like that these days?
Srsly.
I tell people that I spend my days moving colorless liquids from one tube to another. All the “science” pictures show beakers of brightly colored liquids, so people picture things happening at each step, like color changes and puffs of smoke. In reality, it mostly all looks the same and you are hoping that the right things are happening at each steps. It can be days or weeks before you know if all the tiny tubes of colorless liquid actually did anything.
AFAIK, our datacenters aren’t “lights-out” operations with no humans needed for normal daily work, but it gets close. The big tape drives now have been replaced with even larger tape silos that automatically fetch cartridges and mount them. We still have tape operators, but they mainly go to the shelves to find archived stuff and put the tapes into the silos, then re-file the tapes after they’re not needed.
There’s also a bit of activity in swapping out failed disks. With nearly 4 petabytes of online DASD, that’s tens of thousands of physical drives in RAID configurations, and spinning drives will eventually fail.