Poll: Profession

My field of profession is/was I.T.

  • True

    Votes: 67 32.8%

  • False

    Votes: 137 67.2%
  • Total voters
    204
Electrical Engineer (retired)
 
I negotiated license agreements for supply chain software and led global deployments of same. I voted no, but was usually waist deep in the stuff.

Also bought some vapor-ware early on. That was a learning event.
 
33 years in IT as a programmer. Had a B.S. degree in Computer Science way back in 1983. First job was with the DoD for 10 years. Last job was for 17+ years with a large, well known investment company.

Ended up as a senior tech lead - for the last 14 years. Still have some regret that I never moved to a management position, but not sure I had the right "temperament" for that.
 
My BA was in the Social Sciences, so I didn’t know anything when I went to work for Megacorp. They tried to turn me into an engineer but they couldn’t so they made me a manager instead.
 
Industrial Engineer with an MBA in finance. Early part of my career I was in plant management (Engineering Manager, Plant Manager).

Later, with Big Oil, I was in the Merger and Acquisition Group analyzing potential companies/assets to buy.

After Big Oil, I was a partner in a consulting company doing M & A work for Energy and Petrochemical clients. I was involved in plant equipment assessments and financial risks associated with the target acquisition candidate.

No real IT work but built computers and messed around with networks as a hobby of sorts for 20+ years.

As another hobby, I have been restoring antique and classic cars with some collector friends.
 
MichaelB said:
My BA was in the Social Sciences, so I didn’t know anything when I went to work for Megacorp. They tried to turn me into an engineer but they couldn’t so they made me a manager instead.
Click to expand...

My experience with Megacorp is that they even turn engineers that can't "engineer" very well into managers.:D
 
I definitely was never IT but I did spend more than a thousand hours writing an application in Fortran and assembly language, just because somebody needed it and I wanted to learn. (Fortran was available for the PDP 11/73 I started with. Assembly language came after transitioning to a PC.)
 
Sales. Food manufacturer. Fun and was great to me financially. Lots of product development, ideation, traveling, eating, drinking and entertainment.
 
I worked my entire career in IT after obtaining my bachelor’s degree in Management of Information Systems. I started working as a dBase II programmer for a branch of the Federal Gov’t. I held a variety of positions in both software and hardware roles. I finished out my career as an IT Manager, responsible for supporting the technical needs of an 80 person office in San Francisco.
 
I had more different jobs than most people, but most of them were at least on the edges of IT.

One of the most enjoyable ones was when I was assigned to a place that had an IBM System/360 computer that was just sitting idle because nobody knew how to use it (this was the late 70s). The previous boss had bought it just before he left.

I had nearly a year without any specific assigned duties, so I taught myself to write programs in PL/1 and had a ball automating some of the reporting systems. Until then, everything was done by hand in ledger books and reports to upper management were nearly nonexistent.

When our VP saw the first printout I offered him he was delighted and I was given all the authority I needed to get more and more data.

The only sad part was when my year was up there was nobody interested in taking my place and everything reverted back to the way it had been.
 
DW thinks of me as her IT guy. But I don't get paid although I get regular feedings.

In a former life I was an EE working on semiconductor design, process design, software, and FPGA design.
 
I started out as a street police officer but ended up doing a job that didn't exist and no one envisioned when I was hired in 1973, a computer forensic examiner. Basically it's a knowledge of data recovery combined with a detailed knowledge of Fourth Amendment search and seizure issues, and rules of evidence and evidence handling as it related to electronic data storage devices.

Many of the legal issues were brand new and there were no precedents for the courts or anyone else to go by. I'm not sure which was the most fascinating, learning all the new-to-me technical issues of data storage or the application of those issues to the criminal justice system. Without boring everyone with a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo, it could get real complicated real fast and caused more than one attorney's eyes to glaze over. We were thrilled when one of the Assistant State's Attorneys went to a computer forensic training class so she'd have at least some idea of what questions to ask.

Edit to add: I didn't vote in the poll, not sure if that answer is "yes", "no" or it should be a "maybe".
 
Last edited:
Engineering. IT was a different department.

Hey, I match RobbieB again! - retired EE.
 
Geologist, geophysicist, project manager, environmental scientist, technical writer. Often, all at the same time.
 
I thought it was just IT or not, but apparently I was wrong.

So, for me: submariner, nuclear engineer, lawyer.
 
I've had people tell my I was IT - but I disagree... BSEE and all but thesis on an MSE (software engineering).... but my career was embedded software.... I think writing device drivers is kind of the opposite end of the programming spectrum from IT....

I didn't answer the question because I had more than one HR type tell me I was IT (even though I was never in an IT department and always had engineer in my title.)
 
Superintendent/Engineering for an electric company.
 
Last edited:
last 17-yrs of my working life was as a line supervisor, senior supervisor and then deputy director of a regional 9-1-1 center in suburban chicago. IT was a part of my duties (anyone recall Novell Netware??) for all but the last 6-7 years.
 
rodi said:
I've had people tell my I was IT - but I disagree... BSEE and all but thesis on an MSE (software engineering).... but my career was embedded software.... I think writing device drivers is kind of the opposite end of the programming spectrum from IT....

I didn't answer the question because I had more than one HR type tell me I was IT (even though I was never in an IT department and always had engineer in my title.)
Click to expand...

Right - and this is one of those layer things.

If you mean "did you work in Tech" that's very different to an IT person than "did you work in IT". In my MC, we had so many circles and layers of "tech" that only the real internal/centralized/infrastructure part was called IT. And those teams called the Dev/Ops side of Tech "the business." So you could be writing code your whole life but if you were making the user/business facing app/dev stuff, you weren't IT.

I started in business ops but finished in real deep central IT. But never wrote a line of code in my life.
 
I.T.?

Sort of, I guess.

I worked on mainframe computers, we navigate nuclear submarines by monitoring gravity vectors which is all done by computer. This is needed for accurate targeting of nuclear missiles.

I wrote a lot of code, but my code was entirely to troubleshoot the computers. At one time, we were 'System Analysts'.
 
Last edited:
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