Also, how did you get into it, and what sort of education or certifications (if any) did you need?
And if you were to get into the same niche today, would you? (And in some cases–COULD you, or has the door closed?)
I work in the surgical pathology department in a hospital.
Anything you get removed from surgery comes to me to be examined. Then I describe what I have and what sort of pathology I can see with the naked eye. I select and cut out pieces of tissue that are important to the case. The tissue undergoes further processing and eventually reaches the desk of a pathologist (a type of physician) who examines the tissue microscopically, forms a diagnosis, and ultimately signs out the case.
My job can assist with several things depending on the case…
- To help the clinician confirm or determine what type of lesion or disease process the patient has
- To document and confirm that a surgery was necessary
- To stage cancer cases
- To determine whether or not a cancer or lesion has been completely removed from the patient and there is none left inside their body
- To make sure the patient does not have an unsuspected cancer
I see everything from tiny boring specks of tissue they biopsy during a colonoscopy to large cancer resection cases.
The other day, I got an almost entirely necrotic above the knee amputation with maggots. A few days before that I got a 9 lb spleen. It’s fun in the lab.
In the US, my job generally requires a very specialized 2 year master’s degree (on top of a bachelor’s degree in any subject). In other countries, the role of my job can be fulfilled by different types of people depending on the country and education will be different.
I found out about the job on Google lol. I was looking for something hands on in healthcare or anatomy related, but I didn’t like patient contact. I would probably select this career again if I had a second go around. It pays pretty well and is interesting. But grad school in the US is very expensive.
How many lbs is a spleen supposed to be?
Fucking not 9lbs that’s for sure. Around 1/2lb usually.
From 2005 to 2008 in South Florida I created and ran a permit expediting company. It came from my mom managing a construction company, them having too many contracts, and not enough contractors to run their own permits. I saw a need and got together with a couple of friends to incorporate.
We pitched it to the owner of the company my mom managed and got a contract from them. We eventually picked up other companies as well.
So the job went like this: one of us be assigned to a specific geographic area or company for the day, we would stop by the office, pick up the paperwork for whatever permits had to be filed, retrieved, delivered.
We would visit the city building department and depending on the city (each ran things in drastically different ways with no consistency) we would be there for 15 minutes or all day. Some permits would be a quick, single day turnaround or could be in bureaucratic hell for a month or two. We’d charge based on the complexity and time involved in getting permits approved. Then we would either deliver the permits to the contractor or the job site. On occasion we would deliver liens to customers who didn’t pay their bills which could sometimes get dangerous.
The only people I’ve ever met that did this exact type of work were people I met within city building departments. It’s a relatively boring, but uncommon profession.
The job came with all kinds of weird knowledge that I’ve never had to use again, like how many palm trees on the property equal a shade tree for the purpose of landscaping requirements. Than answer back then was 3.
The company was born out of a construction boom after Hurricane Katrina and died during the housing market crash of 2008.
Edited for spelling and sentence structure.
Also edit: sometimes getting permits approved would involve meeting with city engineers, making corrections on engineering documents, and just having a good rapport with the city.
Also, currently I am a change control analyst for a telecom company. My job description literally says “protect the network”. Essentially network engineers submit projects to me, I check the projects for accuracy, impact risk, importance, etc. A lot of the time, I reject work because of errors, cutting corners, not enough preparation, etc.
My job is to balance the projects being done VS how many customers I want to piss off because their services get taken down. My engineers either absolutely love me, or would like to have the opportunity to stab me in a dark alley, there really is no in between. Generally the ones I reject often for crap work are the ones that also want to stab me.
I work in disaster planning - so if you want a really good disaster to happen then give me a call.
To be more serious:
I write disaster response plans mostly for the medical field, e.g. hospitals, nursing homes. That starts with ordinary fires and flooding, but also includes things like “IT outtakes”(which kill far more people than fire each year), “supply line collaps”, etc.
We also train staff, mostly management, and conduct full scale exercises. Additionally I write medical intelligence and evacuation reports. These are basically “plans” for aid workers, expats. that go to risky places: “Oh, I broke my leg in bumfuck nowhere South Sudan! What now? Is there a hospital? Which one do I go to? Which one has actual doctors? Is there a chance that a medical evacuation plane can reach me?”
Originally I am a critical care paramedic and I am currently studying towards (another) master degree in healthcare management. Before I founded my current company I worked as a consultant for various healthcare related firms, before that as an ambulance service director.
But mass casualty situations always were “my thing” and the multi-stakeholder approach I take during planning talking to basically all roles in a hospital, from the higher ups to the guy in charge of waste disposal, is something I enjoy immensely.
I bet Covid got you a lot of fun data to play with re: “supply line collapse”.
I’ve always been interested in work like this–I took a class that covered lean manufacturing and kept thinking about how “just in time” inventory seemed like it’d be awful for a hospital, as the hospital would be MOST needed if supply lines collapsed, and JIT stuff seemed a dumb move. But I was only spitballing on the surface as an outsider.
What if I tell you that even most ambulance services work with JIT?
And mass casualty events are generally centred around population centres. If a train hits that bus in bumfuck, it’s six hours before triage and transport
Yeah, thankfully in central Europe our “bumfuck nowhere” still means that some infrastructure is reachable within 120min usually - and as long as the weather permits we throw dozens of helicopters at it.
Personally I am far more afraid of other scenarios therefore.
This is an absolutely boring one, but did you know part of your seatbelt, right now, could just be colored in?
How about your seat cover? Your steering wheel? Some poor bastard had to go get that out of stock, bring it into repair, go over the entire lot, and take a special pencil to color in those little scratches, or mark it as unrepairable.
I was that bastard for awhile. It sucked. 10 hours going over whatever needed checking that day. An “exciting” day meant a defect hit the line and we needed to hunt it down, hopefully without stopping production.
“Repair” can cover a lot of things, and that was the worst repair work I’ve ever done.
Some poor bastard had to go get that out of stock, bring it into repair, go over the entire lot, and take a special pencil to color in those little scratches, or mark it as unrepairable.
…This is so simple it’s making me ask to be sure…This specific repair gig was…Coloring in scratches?
For the most part, all for customer-visible auto parts.
Other team got anything mechanical. We were purely visual.
Huh, that does seem like it could get pretty mindnumbing. Thanks for the reply, hope you’re at something better these days!
Now I work in landmine production.
I’m a kiln operator. I run a giant oven to dry red and white pine.
Dropped out of uni. Various retail and tech jobs for about 12 years. 4 years disability. Took an interview at a lumber mill because ‘cool tour’, took a job because ‘paycheck for a little while anyway’. Ran a planer for about 6 weeks and then offered kiln operator when their previous was poached.
On the job learning for me with the caveat that it was not a reasonable expectation to set. Typically one works under a senior operator for about two years not ‘you’re on your own but you’re good at google right?’
Certified by my work for government heat treatment programs, front loader/forklift operation and working at heights. One of those jobs where mindset is more important than education.
Would I do it again? Yes? I’d want more money for the work. There’s not a lot of people who will write an algorithm to interpret the data they gather in a 50c box. It’s a really intense combination of intellectual and manual labor and the compromise seems to be to plop the pay in the middle. Good pay for a lumber mill but shit pay for developing processes, an inventory system and an entire goddamned iOS app(that my boss didn’t even understand much less appreciate).
I wouldn’t expect the door to be open again in the future. There’s not a lot of kilns to run, they are increasingly automated and it’s a job people hold til retirement. The manager who hired me took a massive gamble on a physically disabled but intelligent person so that’s not easy to find either. Owner runs under the ‘warm body is better than no body’ premise. There’s not even any other mills close enough with kilns that I have other employment opportunities. I’ve got a very specific and reasonably lucrative skill set for a rare job.
Ok are you the guy to blame for this dripping wet, warped shit I’m paying through the nose for?
Someone like me…sort of.
Warp is more about the piling and stickering of the packs going into the kiln. Wet you can mitigate at home but once a warp is set you’re pretty much screwed.
The mill should have some sort of quality control in place to communicate these issues between the kilns and stacker crew. Find a different mill to buy from. Anything warped is pulled out before the planer at my mill and then sold as rough outs or goes to the chipper.
Ever seen 20 feet high of stacked lumber sway in the wind? Stickering can be a huge safety issue alongside quality.
I imagine if you took two seconds to contemplate how too many small businesses are run, you could figure out it’s shit management from your local companies and not this particular kiln operator.
Yeah that was kinda the joke
It’s becoming more common, but I work in the cannabis industry. People don’t tend to know much about exactly what I do and how weed sales works. The education and certification side of this is actually super unique. You do have to get a basic agent ID, but it’s really more of a background check than anything. But, because the rec market is so very new here, you are basically required to have broken the law extensively to have the knowledge and experience needed to sell weed. Everyone I work with has a criminal past, even if they never got busted. I talked about buying psychedelics on the darkweb in my interview, and my HR person knew exactly what the fuck I was talking about. It’s just one of the many wonderful things about working in cannabis <3
You’re basically Seth Rodgen
I have a typical job, but just today I was reading an article about different types of potatoes, and they quoted a post harvest potato physiologist.
I work in a museum adapting internationally touring exhibitions to align with their host communities. It’s a great career - there’s travel, I get to see behind the scenes of museum collections, and I get to study other cultures as a job. I do get paid to match the fact that I work for a charity.
My background is in the museum sector, which you can get into either through a PhD in study of a relevant field to the specific museum, or through a graduate program in museum/ conservation studies (which is what I did).
So far as I can tell, there are only a handful of people that do this job globally, which I suppose makes it lesser known!
I’m a geologist, but not the fun kind that gets to look at actual rocks.
I do environmental and some geotechnical work, which pretty much boils down to “Is the dirt poisoned?” and “How hard do I have to squish the dirt to make the future building not fall down?” There’s few things to get excited about, but it’s steady work and pays the bills.
For me it’s “is there a possibility the dirt is poisoned?” (Phase Is) and “is the dirt poisoned enough that you have to do something about it?”
I’m an environmental chamber technician. I fix and test the equipment that does all of the temperature and humidity testing for most electronics from consumer grade stuff to stuff that is literally going into space. Basically an environmental chamber is just a programable box that is refrigerated and/or heated that you put stuff into to see how it performs at different temperatures. The ones I work on also often have programable humidity levels for testing equipment under basically any normal atmospheric conditions. The ones I work with are anywhere between the size of a household microwave and slightly larger than Volkswagen Beetle. The ones that don’t use liquid nitrogen can manage temperatures anywhere between 200C and -75C. The liquid nitrogen ones can of course manage temps as low as liquid nitrogen gets.
As far as education and certifications go, there isn’t much. In the US you do need an EPA 608 certification to work with refrigerants but that only cost like $100 (my employer covered it) and it’s a lifetime certification. Everything else was just on the job training. I just got mentored by some coworkers, did some independant study, and practiced. The biggest thing is just haveing a technical mindset. Troubleshooting is troubleshooting so basically if you’re someone who can usually figure out how to fix things on their own then odds are you could do my job with minimal refrigeration training.
As far as getting into the same niche today, I definitely would if I could find the job (it’s not all that common). I love working with refrigeration and troubleshooting these machines scratches tha puzzle solving itch in my brain. It’s fun to see the unique options that certain customers get like water cooled systems or liquid nitrogen boost units. Also seeing as how these machines need to be benchmarked at a known ambient temp, it is one the very few refrigeration related jobs that you get to do from a strictly climate controlled building. It is always exactly 23C in my work area because that’s exactly what our testing spec calls for. To top it all off the pay isn’t bad. I could be making a bit more in normal HVAC but not much more and, unlike HVAC, my equipment comes to me in my climate controlled shop. I don’t have to climb up on a roof when it’s 40C outside to fix someone’s AC.
I create control systems, currently in the automotive industry but the same principles apply to any control system, which is the thing I love about this subject. The skillset is about trimming down a problem to it’s absolute bare essentials. I always wondered what makes machines tick and control theory is the systematic expression of that pursuit. We model the system or phenomena in question and then develop the control in simulation. Once we have the desired result, it is usually realised as a software object that is embedded in a computer.
I started on this path as an unemployed and disillusioned 32 year old engineer, retrained over a period of 2 years and it turned out to be a huge source of fulfillment.
Antenna engineer. It’s a subset of electrical engineering. It’s often referred to as black magic by other electrical engineers but I don’t agree with that. That would be an engineer specializing in PIM testing. Anyway, it was a great career and I was able to command a higher salary at first, because if you need an antenna engineer, you need an antenna engineer. Unfortunately very few companies need an antenna engineer so, no, I wouldn’t choose it again. Changing companies is too limited. Plus, due to lack of antenna engineers and the high cost of the resources needed to do the job, more companies are moving away from it, preferring to buy off-the-shelf antennas. This means there are fewer and fewer companies doing the real design work.
I got into it, because it was the first professional job I got. Sticking with it was easier than starting over.
I promise this isn’t a “OMG, AI!” question. But it involves kinda that thing.
A long time ago–probably over 15 years–I once read an article about some sort of…“evolved”?..method of generating novel antenna designs. Basically, the article said that the researchers said they had an algorithm or computer “evolve” some potential designs, and it spat out this really weird unintuitive design that was nothing like the human made designs. But it ended up working fantastically well or something when they actually prototyped it and tried it?
Any knowledge/thoughts on that sort of thing?
Not the person you were responding to, but I’m knowledgeable on the topic. What you’re describing is simulated evolution, and it can (and has!) been used to make anything from antennas to spray nozzles to mixer blades. Basically, you start with one or multiple base designs, then slowly alter parameters about the design (for antennas, this could be length, number of loops, loop direction, etc., or it could be more granular, like starting from a stump and extending or branching in random directions).
You generally have a group of candidate designs, called a “generation”, then randomly select from these designs, weighted towards the ones which perform better, and “kill” the underperforming ones. Then you make random mutations on the remaining members of the old generation to create a new generation. Continue until you have generations that are performing better than your current manual designs, if the evolution manages to reach that point.
There are additional things you can do to solve certain issues the evolutionary process might run into, like taking the parameters for your new generation from two parents instead of one (essentially, this goes from single-celled mitosis to sexual reproduction, and can allow two different evolutionary lines to share their progress).
Also not the person you’re asking, but I was reading about this yesterday so: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
I work at a ski place, partially with making snow.
No certs needed, mostly learn on the job type stuff.
A snowmobile license is very useful but hardly required.
I think given the choice I’d pick this again.
Is there a license requires for driving a snowmobile in your country? Is it a government issued licence or an insurance thing? I have driven them, but I think here a normal driver’s license is enough and even that is only needed when driving on streets (which is often not permitted and even more often impractical).
Yep, license rewired by law. Therefore it also becomes an insurance thing as driving w/o it will count the same as driving a car without one.
Is that your only job? And is it career viable or just the current plan. Because, man, that sounds badass. Working outdoors and being Jack Frost? Fun.
It’s seasonal. I do gardening in the summer. I definitely see myself coming back to this and the more experience you have the more “valuable” you are for returning!
I used to work as a line stander on Capitol Hill in DC. You get paid to stand in line for lobbyists for hearings and committees. Many times your there a day before and camping out overnight with all the other line standers. It’s like an old school concert ticket environment, if you ever camped out for concert tickets back in the day.
I feel like that shouldn’t be legal…
Just like lobbying!
Actually the lobbyist are the ones that do most of the hiring for that position. I worked for the Dutko group at the time, before that I was a bike messenger and they get those jobs all the time.
My main job is pretty commonplace but I moonlight as a fire performer. I got into it kinda by chance but it has consumed my life. I actually have to carry insurance and do have certifications to do fire. In fact, I’m licensed to write letters of recommendation for new performers. I also have to pull permits for it in my city.
I also do burlesque and sideshow, but there isn’t really a formal process other than deciding you want to try hammering a 5" nail into your head. Sideshow is best described as putting things where they DON’T belong. Being a social outcast and knowing people helps.
