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What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:33 pm
by Beebs52
We were discussing this evening.
Mine was working for the cfo of Split Rock Services, internet services provider bought by McCleod in 2000. Went through the ipo, dealt with Bear Sterns before they crashed. It was very very fun.

Re: What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:35 pm
by Bob78164
I'm doing it right now. --Bob

Re: What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:36 pm
by Beebs52
Bob78164 wrote:
Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:35 pm
I'm doing it right now. --Bob
That is very cool!

Re: What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:44 pm
by Beebs52
It's interesting, I had a lot of control at times in the job I had for 15 years. Fun, but annoying at the end. Felt like throwing a laptop at or cussing at board members. So, actual fun was what I described. Control or fun? Hmmm

Re: What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 8:11 pm
by BackInTex
My last job at PepsiCo. They had just consolidated the restaurants (Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, & KFC) underneath a parent company in preparation for the spinoff that is now YUM! Brands. I was in charge of moving all three companies off their independent financial systems onto a common system. I had a lot of authority and my boss gave me a long leash. I had no budget, just a deadline.

Re: What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 8:21 pm
by Spock
1) Well, there is the farm thing which I have done my whole life and the most fun part of that is combining corn.

However-

2) I really enjoyed a couple of part-time image and map processing gigs that I had when I went back to school in the mid 2000's

but realistically

3) The part-time appraisal gig that I had from 2006 to 2015 was probably my favorite of all time. It catered to my strengths and interests in a way that nothing else has.

Re: What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 8:21 pm
by Beebs52
BackInTex wrote:
Fri Apr 30, 2021 8:11 pm
My last job at PepsiCo. They had just consolidated the restaurants (Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, & KFC) underneath a parent company in preparation for the spinoff that is now YUM! Brands. I was in charge of moving all three companies off their independent financial systems onto a common system. I had a lot of authority and my boss gave me a long leash. I had no budget, just a deadline.
Dang. I worked for Pizza Hut in mktg research til 1980, right before all that happened.

Re: What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:16 pm
by Bob Juch
It sure as hell isn't what I'm doing for my newest client. Everyone I work with is in India, and I'm having constant problems with access security.

My favorite was when I was writing commercial utility software. Thirty years later, the last thing I wrote is bringing in a steady income of over $10 million a year. It was the most creative thing I've ever done.

Re: What was your favorite job ever

Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 9:20 am
by mikehardware
My favorite is my current job, testing software with a team that actually believes in putting out a quality product. Some places I've worked did not like being told about software issues, to put it mildly.

I think the best code I ever wrote was years ago. I got assigned to write the documentation for a project that was starting to close down. (And I was jokingly asked if I could make it run a couple of orders of magnitude quicker.) The project involved solving an interesting, but a bit complex math problem. They had spent a year making their version that took about 19 days for a full run through the data, much too slow for the customer.

I couldn't make sense of their method. It was correct, but too complex. The more I looked at it, the more I thought there must be an easier way. I kept the input and output routines, and replaced all the guts with a simple recursive routine. (It was the second thing I'd ever written in Ada, and only about 1000 lines of code for the entire thing.) With a little tweaking, I had it working in about a week. Total time for a full run, about 35 minutes. The group couldn't 't believe the improvement. I had to run it through all the data we had and compare it to the original results - all perfectly matched. The customer was happy, and the project continued.

I asked my boss about the possibility of a bonus, and the reply was that I was lucky I still had a job. Apparently, they felt I'd made everyone look bad. A short time later, I was transferred to a different project that was going away, and I got laid off.