> What about all the 7 figure peeps?? Talk about discrimination sheesh!

Indeed - what a miserable and underprivileged life we lead. At least I love my work

FWIW, my company is hiring, but you'd better be at the top of your game in C/C++ or UNIX/networking. PM me if you want to try a couple sample questions.

 

As far as travel, like I said I specialize in testers, I travel to all of our offsite plants some owned, some we own the testers but they do the testing and own the plant, and ever since the tech crash everyone has to fly coach which blows pole. We have a plant in Malaysia which I don't mind going to it's pretty decent, but 20+ hours on a plane on an asian airline being a 6' 225lb guy really sucks although Singapore and Cathay Pacific are ok. We have testers at two different places in PI, one near Cebu and one right outside of Manila, no offense to anyone, but both places SUCK. We also do business in Shanghai which I like and a place just north of Tel Aviv that's decent. I'm leaving for Malaysia next month for a one month stay which I'm not too keen on. I used to love travel, but I have an 8 year old son and love being home and playing with him.

The on call isn't too bad most of the time, it is 24/7 but I'm rigged up pretty well at home to take care of most problems from home and my company pays for 768k x 6M dsl for my house. One of my home boxes sits on a hardware vpn all the time with some sort of remote control on every system I oversee. I use TCP/IP KVM with remote bounce switches on all the stuff in the cage that matters. I have it rigged from hell for the bounce switches using a USB 32 channel ttl card on two different systems(in case one dies I can use the other to do my magic reset) and have a line going to a normally open relay in each box sitting on the reset button, I can telnet in and command line bounce any of my boxes or use terminal services and use a little gui I wrote to do the deed.

It's taken me a while to get myself set up so I don't really have much work to do, I just detest getting the 3am calls for "we can't load this program, there must be something wrong with the server"....... "did you double check the name with the setup card?"..... "yeah something is wrong you need to come in"......."hmmmm I see it on the server and I just loaded it on the tester"....... "oh that was a L and not an I, ok bye" even though it's all uppercase and we intentionally leave certain letters out of the programs just to make sure this doesn't happen. I get that one at least twice a week. My other fun one is that I'm on call for our offshore plants as well, thankfully they usually have real problems and the company pays for my cell for the offshore support which I can handle.

Overall I enjoy my job I suppose, I like the hard stuff like my next project doing some automation, going to 3d code scanners and complete integration for the testers, and real time process monitoring. I get excited with the big tasks, I just get annoyed with the day to day stuff though. I'm a double trouble, I'm EE and CS and like both so it takes a bit to keep me interested. I was a programmer at Borland for a stint, a test engineer for a while(wrote programs and designed hardware to test chips), and finally fell into my own little niche.


Pardon my run on sentances. I just got home after a little 15 hour day pushing an update to the testers... BLECK! you know one of those "Oh I'll come in early so I can get it done before the majority of the people are in" then you realize you just kicked yourself in the nuts and 15 hours later you're done lol

 

my mom makes half way between 6 and 7 figs.... does that count?

 

EE - telecom....Sometimes my job is really cool and rewarding (great sense of accomplishment when a good design comes off well) but since last November or so it's just been beating down on me, 70-100 hrs a week, no OT, two consecutive years with 1% raises and reduced bonuses...now my company is talking about outsourcing my whole dept...AND I'm THE LOWEST PAID!

Notes:
Company stock has increased 400 percent over the last 3 years.
Company debt/asset value is 50%.
$20 billion in plant - equipment, land and buildings.
Stock vaulation (P/E ratio) is at 9:1 (11%) plus dividend - historically we are around 20:1

But we still don't get the bonuses or raises that we used to.
The company has us fighting each other for position so the corporate atmostphere is very negative.
My level is 5 below the CEO - it's bad here - but at the level 3 below the CEO they are reducing staffing by 50% so the managers at that level are doing crazy things to keep their jobs and be recoginized.
$100,000K isn't enough to buy a home in a neighborhood that you'd want to live in around the bay area.
Work here just isn't the same.
Have you seen how fast the new Corvette is?

/vent off

 

A bit off topic. Man, if I had a job I absolutely loved, I'd be a music producer. I'm about to graduate as a new media designer, so in the meantime my life is heading there. However, my true love is with music. I love playing with beats and thinking of new music ideas even when I'm nowhere near a keyboard or any equipment. I have to climb my way up the ladder in that field though. Then learn more fundementals to build on because I feel I have some kind of ear for the business someday. Then I can someday start breaking musical barriers. *sigh*

 

Whatcha do in hawaii that kicks those kinda coconuts to your bank account?
__________________
Best Car Insurance | Auto Protection Today | FREE Trade-In Quote

 

Hahahha...

 

Only if she supports you =).

 

Actually, that's totally on-topic. I think the most important thing is to do what you love. If you can't figure it out, go after the dollars $$=).

 

Only if you marry her.

 

School teacher or administrator? If so, some pay scales eventually get you up near 6 figures for 9 months of work, depending on which district you work in!

 

46 feet? man that's a big boat too bad it's not a two mast monster.