Working situation?
jjames
Posts: 2,908
Out of curiosity - what is your working situation?
Do you work in a cubicle / office? Or do you work from home?
Are you on job sites very often or very rarely?
What are your hours (not including those at home working on projects)?
Is your place of work full of "fun" or is it shirt & tie every day and people don't quite mingle?
Do you have a dress code for the days your in office?
I personally live literally right above the office. (Boss has a few apartments above the shop/office.) My day typically starts anywhere between 8-9AM, and will usually work until 6-7PM, but that'll range really ranges between 5-8PM depending on how busy and the urgency of the projects. The majority of our work is in Kansas City, and we live about 3 hours from KC, so I typically don't go out to those jobsites until the last few weeks. As far as we go, we're an extremely fun, home-grown good 'ol boy group. (C'mon - they're all from Missouri - I'm from Metro-Detroit originally. LOL) I'll occasionally wear my "I shouldn't have to press 1 for English" and other political / novelty shirts to work without anyone caring. (Of course - NOT to a client's house though.)
Anyway, I'm just curious how it is for everyone.
Do you work in a cubicle / office? Or do you work from home?
Are you on job sites very often or very rarely?
What are your hours (not including those at home working on projects)?
Is your place of work full of "fun" or is it shirt & tie every day and people don't quite mingle?
Do you have a dress code for the days your in office?
I personally live literally right above the office. (Boss has a few apartments above the shop/office.) My day typically starts anywhere between 8-9AM, and will usually work until 6-7PM, but that'll range really ranges between 5-8PM depending on how busy and the urgency of the projects. The majority of our work is in Kansas City, and we live about 3 hours from KC, so I typically don't go out to those jobsites until the last few weeks. As far as we go, we're an extremely fun, home-grown good 'ol boy group. (C'mon - they're all from Missouri - I'm from Metro-Detroit originally. LOL) I'll occasionally wear my "I shouldn't have to press 1 for English" and other political / novelty shirts to work without anyone caring. (Of course - NOT to a client's house though.)
Anyway, I'm just curious how it is for everyone.
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Not that it's any of my business, but just to let you know. I came from the same area you're from. I was born n raised in the KCMO area. I first started doing AMX from Lincoln, NE and now live in Charleston, SC.
My work situation is:
I have an office to myself. I pretty much just program all the time. I commute 30 minutes one way. I work from 8-6 and take time off for my other job...
My other job is I'm a semi-retired music producer/recording engineer. (music biz since 1982) I no longer do the tracking and only mix records. I have a studio in a building behind my home. It is set up mainly for mixdown. I do have a small area for tracking if need be. I still sometimes will work with the vocalists to get lead vox tracks and whatnot.
I loved the music business but the hours and travel were killing me. I went into semi retirement for the following reason:
I'm also the geeky dad of a 6 year old daughter.
Sometimes I work from home, if it's a pure coding situation, but I have my test NI-700 and panels in the office; if I want to load and test code, I like to be there, so I don't work from home all that often. Mostly, it's if I was at a customer's site early in the day, and it doesn't make sense for me to go all the way back to the office again.
My time is divided about 60/40 between the office and on site. This suits me; I get a bit of cabin fever if I'm in the office too much, and I appreciate the break to get on site now and then. Also, since most of our sales staff isn't completely familiar with what can and can't be done in programming, I am the one to go over finer points of detail with the end user, and tweak the programming to their liking.
I commute about 20 minutes each way when not going to a customer site, but those can be up to three hours away sometimes. My hours are flexible ... 5-8 hours a day, sometime but not frequently more. I have a chronic fatigue problem, so flexibility has been a must for me and those hours are not by any means contiguous each day.
There is no dress code that applies to me (the installers have a uniform of a sort - company logo polo shirts). I wear jeans and polo shirts typically.
I have some test equipment here in my office, and some in the lab at the head office. Occasionally they'll send a device out to me for testing, but usually it just gets hooked up in the lab for me. I do mostly programming, a little bit of system drawings, and a little bit of project management.
Only visited a couple of job sites so far, just the biggest ones. Dress code applies. I've been fortunate to work with some very skilled installers who can troubleshoot and debug software problems over the phone when I don't have remote access to the site. Worst case, they use a mobile broadband card in their laptop to get me temporary remote access.
My hours are pretty much fixed... I thought it might turn out to be more flexible, but I generally need to be available during predictable times for our installers. It makes things a little more predictable at home to have fixed working hours as well. 40 hours a week barring emergencies, as opposed to some of our installers who seem to enjoy their 60+ hour weeks.
My work hours are usually 7am to 3pm. A non-AMX colleague covers midday to 8pm. The idea is so we can service classrooms outside of class hours. Some rooms are occupied until 10:30pm, so the theory doesn't always work. During semester breaks I try to get into our major venues and work on upgrades then. Work hours are a bit more flexable during the breaks - we tend to work longer hours due to limited access to venues... I'm based at our largest campus but go to our other four campuses to do upgrade work. I try to get the local campus tech to understand the system so they can support it themselves.
We have a uniform which I try to wear when seeing the big bosses or on meeting days. Two shirts for the whole week gets a bit stinky, so we aren't particularly strict with the policy.
Having previously lived 12 minutes from work, I really enjoy living 1 hour away. It lets me leave work at work, and allows me to get rest. Otherwise I would probably work 14 hour days. I travel to work on our lovely public transport system - two trains each way. Much cheaper than petrol, and the trains break down a little less than my car!
(The only problem with the back room is I can't hear the doorbell!)
The desk is a door attached 100mm from the wall on four very sturdy brackets - the gap allows for cables and PSUs and the fatarse CRTs. All the junk is strewn along a plank hung from the brackets under the table.
The chair cost me $300. It is adjusted perfectly to let me sit here for hours without tiring. (Bad idea of course.) I wanted to buy an Aeron on eBay recently 8^(
Shelves above the desk hold reference books, an Anglepoise (adjustable) lamp and the sound system. The old DVD player that won't read DVDs any more, plus a Creek CAS4040 amplifier (a little beauty from the UK about 20 years ago) driving Boston Acoustics for immersive sound just above ear level.
An old dressing table under the window on the right with all the useful junk in the drawers and space on top for any number of VCRs, DVDs and switchers.
A huge shelved builtin cupboard on the left filled with boxes of cables and old gear.
Two 2nd hand 21" monitors attached to a fully loaded desktop and an unloaded laptop with two identical keyboards. The desktop is on the desk (d'oh) front to the wall so that I can get to the rear ports easily.
Cable broadband, wireless for the printer in the corner and the laptop in the front room.
AC on the back wall and insulation in the ceiling.
On the desk, a steaming cup of coffee made from the best beans that money can buy.
At the low gate across the doorway, a 2 year old boy with jam on his face, demanding his 3rd breakfast (Oast! Oast! Oast!) and holding something valuable, fragile and very sticky.
Work from home 4/5, with site visits usually on the other side of the country (3hours on train each way)...
The usual freelance mix of PM, Design, CAD & Programming work occupies the days.
Cheers
Got the Aeron 8^)
I strongly suspect my office chairs (home and work), but I am loathe to drop a few K $$ on a pair of Aerons, only to find they don't help my problem. Sitting is definitely an issue, it flairs up dramatically when sitting (though standing for a long period of time is bad as well), and of course I spend most of my day doing that. Overstuffed chairs and couches are completely out, though most "hard" chairs I can tolerate. Funny thing, sitting on a Spackle bucket in a customer's basement doesn't really bother me much, but on their couch leaning over a coffee table is sheer torture.
I'm curious about that $300 chair mentioned. What brand and type was it? If I am going to experiment, I'd prefer not to break the bank straight off ... I've gotten some progress with add-on lumbar supports and gel cushions to pad the coccyx, so it may be I don't need to go all the way with this.
I heard there were a lot of them available online for peanuts after the dot.com bust.
Dave, you might find some interesting stuff here:
http://www.relaxtheback.com/
And yoiks, that stuff on www.relaxtheback.com is very dear ... $1600 for a chair, I'll need to be able to lease it when not in use ...
Eos Spectrum 3, which Google tells me is available only in Auckland NZ 8^(
I'm on one of the last sites with my old R32 Thinkpad
Aeron chairs cheeper... But I still couldn't pry the 700 out of my wallet to get one.
My corporate workspace is like 20 steps from my bedroom, and 10 from the can. The kitchen is downstairs.
I try to stumble into the office by 7-7:30 and work till I can't take it any more. 10, 11, noon. ( actually I work until 5-6 everday). That or I schlep to the local coffee house and sit in there for a while.
The neighbors are really glad I put in the new blinds, dress code is definately relaxed!
Window overlooking the street I now know more of my neighbors by site than I have in 15 years of living here.
I do go out on jobsites whenever I can, just so I can talk to somebody else. (I have heard all my jokes before and tend not to laugh at them anymore) Most of my projects have me onsite for a couple of days depending on the job. I have been doing a lot of out of state work recently and driving to Wiconsin every week. ( I pass a great cheese store, a winery, and a microbrew so the car tends to fill up on the way back.
It's a good thing that spelling isn't that important for programming. Not only did you spell Wisconsin wrong but also your own last name is spelled wrong.