I work in 911 dispatch, I already had a pretty dim view of humanity coming into it and being prepared for the unexpected is basically the job description, so not too much has truly surprised me, caught me momentarily off-guard, sure, but not really surprised
Probably my biggest surprise is how few calls I get about foreign objects stuck in various orifices. I definitely thought that would be a bigger thing, but I guess most people choose to suck it up (phrasing?) and drive themselves to the ER out of embarrassment.
Also, overall, little kids tend to be pretty great 911 callers. I don’t particularly like kids in pretty much any other situation, so that was surprising to me, but kids listen to me, answer my questions, don’t beat around the bush and just blurt things out, and overall tend to be respectful. There’s outliers and exceptions of course, but overall some of my favorite callers are little kids.
Just how fucking garbage it is. Working for a non profit that can’t decide on what they want, refuse to let me create an app that’s actually useful, and just want me to spend days customizing a low code platform through hacks. Then they complain when things take time. I really need a new job.
That a multi-national medical device company has no spare parts program for it’s machines, and uses Excel sheets exclusively for performance tracking.
How much time I spend not actually doing any work. I’m in IT as a computer technician and I work public sector.
A lot of the time, I’m kinda just sitting at my desk wasting time. If things aren’t broken and no projects currently need me to work on them, then yeah. Not much to do but wait for something to break.
Firefighters do basically the same thing
I often describe large chunks of my job as “Fire duty”. If I’ve done the initial bit right, I’ve got nothing to do for a large chunk. If I’m running around looking busy, it likely means I’ve screwed up somehow.
Where’s the best place for a fireman (fire person?)? It’s not out putting out fires. It’s sat, bored, in the fire station because there’s nothing left to do, and no fires to put out.
.
And just like firefighters, IT needs to be in continuous training. Are you able to execute in an emergency? What do you need to know that’s new? Lithium battery fires or new malware vecors.
That my coworker gets paid more than me for just sitting on his ass looking at his phone all day while I do all the work and they don’t seem to give a shit.
How incredibly stupid the customers are.
I guess anybody who works in any sort of customer service gets this, but I swear to god, 90% of our customers can’t even fucking read - which is really bad when you work for an online retailer and most of your interactions with them are through email.
I work retail and honestly?
Just how clueless a lot of managers are when it comes to how the business works in general. These are the people responsible for that exact thing, and they just seem to be so out of touch with how it works.
That people (both the CTO and devs) eventually asking ME for suggestions. And acting on it even if on projects I’ve barely touched while working there. They been through multiple years of university and some have been through multiple jobs. I’m just a guy who knew a bit programming when I was hired as phone support 13 years ago.
I love the team though. It was just me and the CTO that did dev for many years, and now we are 7.
Something I heard a while back. A leader, when getting advice, should be the dumbest person in the room. Not because they are dumb, but because the surround themselves with people even more intelligent then themselves.
By the sound of it, your working with people confident in their own skillset. They also know when an outside voice might have a useful perspective. You also likely have a significantly different experience base to them. To you, something it obvious, to them, it’s really not.
I once saw a project (7 figure) that was being used regularly outside. It’s only when the field techs got to play with it, one asked how waterproof it was? It wasn’t; at all. The head engineer was so laser focused on the technical, he missed the woods for the trees.
You can still be the smartest person in the room, and play the dumbest. Ask questions, you might find new data points you needed to make a sounder decision.
It’s more intended as an aspiration. It can also be specialist intelligence. A salesman can know far more about what your customers will buy. An engineer can know your manufacturing chain inside and out. Both are weak in each other’s area of knowledge. You can be weak in both, but leverage your intelligence to combine them.
How toxic corporate environment is.
I had only worked for small businesses before. Obviously they had a lot of problems and I don’t miss a single thing. But now I’m in a huge IT company that outsourced part of its operation to the another huge IT company I’m actually in.
Both suck, but still I gotta learn to “play the game”.
