I can exchange my PhD scholarship for that

Hahaha, I died x.x

I work as a support technician in a data center.
(We host stuff only for corporations, not for individuals.)

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 26 2021, 7:52 am by Zergy.

I actually tryid living from led lamps.. was not an succes for me tho.. today i live abit like an retired person pretty much likewise @ohh man.. i live in a country where poor handicapped individuals are paid monthly.

My old employer called it IT Consultant, the intermediate one Consultant and the new one Software Engineer. I personally use the term IT Consultant.

My job is to assist the customer to do whatever they want me to do. Usually, I program things and learn new tech on the fly.

My projects so far in chronological order:

• 6 months: upgrade Java application server (modified JBoss to newer modified WildFly and provide a similar updated configuration, update entire JavaEE Codebase (do all dependency updates / rewrite interceptor within the application server), document necessary changes and things of interest that changed); fix bugs; add small features; write prototype for an application in Angular to replace an old Apache Wicket one (pretty much an app with 50+ pages all containing tables; so navigation, search and filtering, easy configuration of tables were important and some small goodies like csv export/import. In the end they primarily write a new json that describes the entire table with names, data types, filters, etc). Luckily I left for another project, else I would have had to create 50+ pages in 3 months and maybe 5 new specialized elements. The prototype only had like 4 pages fully created to develop the tech for everything
  
• 21 months: This was an IT company in the German healthcare system. I had to learn another person's job within 2-3 months as half of their IT people quit at the same time after a merger a few years before leading to multiple failed attempts to merge two company's different IT structures. My job was to keep a few areas running and fix/develop things as required. They had all business logic in SQL and a few front-end applications that use C++ or C#. I had an external customer where I handled all of their things and added new features within days and fixed all of their input mistakes and helped them if their scanner had issues. I had to look for compliance changes and implement them in time. Else they would go out of business. Their front end app used C#. The primary customer had C++ programs that I maintained later on, too, and I added bigger features for compliance as other external consultants failed to implement it. They pretty much trusted me with being able to solve anything in the end. I was the fourth external consultant that did these C++ things. The ones before me were terrible or too arrogant. Also, I had the document generation software and printing facilities in my care. So I had to update licenses that suddenly expired, fix bugs in their C# software, update the logic to generate more types of documents, change texts or just update the list of CEOs every 6 months. Also, I had to export documents for legal reasons. It was a bit hell-ish because you always get unplanned tasks left and right that need to be done within a few days. But you learn a lot in that! I had a few colleagues that all they did in that project was fixing data in the DB. I would have died if I were not allowed to fix the bugs in my systems, I guess...
  
• 11 months: Azure cloud development in Java and a bit of typescript using GraphQL. Pretty much straight forward microservice job with GraphQL and a few external things to implement a chat, whiteboard, etc. We built a platform with a text/video chat, ticketing system and a simple app store. I mostly worked with Java and implemented only a few things in the frontend using React (mostly integrating external things or expanding them, e.g. saving before quitting the whiteboard, setting names in whiteboard, adding video chat). It was fun to research different technologies and try out a few ones before picking a solution. It was very cool to get experience with the cloud and a lot of different tech. I liked this project a lot
  
• 3 months: Creating a new Java Spring Boot REST service that communicates with a lot of other internal services using REST, OData and SOAP. This was a bit boring, so I ended up with 95% test coverage. I never had a project that had practically no time pressure. Stretching work and working less to not finish 3 weeks before the project ends hurt my psyche, I believe
  
• my next project in January will be at least 6 months long and I will work in the Azure Cloud with Java and Spring again
  

So, from my experience: how do tech companies even exist in the USA when "2 weeks notice" is a thing? Can your IT department just bring down the entire company if enough of them decide to quit at the same time?
My customer could have closed half the company if those were the deadlines (and had massive problems in future due to legal obligations to provide data on request for the next decade)

I don't know what you heard about me but I'm not a P I M P

None.