A general question that happens to be my predicament at current. I’m a general safety admin/manager that has automated most of my tasks(emails/excel sheets)
Most days I doomscroll fediverse and lurk irc/matrix channels on the work desktop but am curious about more practical or useful things I should be doing instead. It’s looking like this will be my life for a good while since job market is abysmal and promotions are hyperstagnate(have also hit a wall in improving my scripts). If anyone has any similar experiences, please share and advise, as I feel quite lost and trapped :/
I read books on algorithms and data structures and typed out the examples. The work computer was locked down for installers but I could download open source programs and compile Java. One of the more interesting chapters I remember was parsing basic math operations for a calculator into a tree structure, evaluating it, and converting it between infix and postfix notation.
My boss probably noticed I had automated things because sometimes they would send new data requiring an urgent redo of everything, and I would send results back in a minute instead of the 8 hours it used to take. He didn’t seem upset, more like pleasantly surprised that a temp-to-hire pulled it off. I even got a compliment at one point, which never happened before.
One day I applied for another job that was a lot of what I already did and some of what I wanted to do more of. I called in sick to do the interview and got the position. It was good timing because the place I was at got acquired, and that never goes well if you’re in a group that overlaps what the parent company already has.