I've been promising/threatening for ages to do a post about what I actually do, since it's insanely complicated to describe. As I haven't been there since Friday lunchtime, I'm not feeling too much like 'ugh, work'. I hate talking about work outside of work, it makes me feel like I've never left.

First a bit of history. Back in the mists of time (ie it seems like forever ago now) I got employed by a company, which we'll call Company A. Which you'll never have heard of, even if I did say the name, but for the sake of a little anonymity, I won't. Anyway, Company A is a market research company. I won't bother telling you my job title at that point because it is both meaningless and confusing.

At that point how it all worked was as follows. Some client wants to reduce the cost of making their chocolate bar, but they still want people to buy it (ie they don't want it to taste horrible afterwards). So someone in Company A will come up with a questionnaire that asks people about various aspects of the taste of the original chocolate bar and the reduced cost one.

Then various people on the street try the chocolate bars and fill in the questionnaire. The people holding clipboards asking them if they want to do the survey? They're employed by lots of different market research companies. I've never done it and never will. But most people when I say I work for a market research company assume that's what I do.

We get all those questionnaires back, then the data in them needs to be entered into a database so it's easy to spot patterns. This is where my job comes in. I write the database. But when I say database, don't immediately think of Access or whatever. It's using some specialist software and basically consists of the same lists of questions and answers as on the survey and some other complicated stuff.

Once the data's all entered, I play around with it in excel then get it to spit out some tables that will tell the client what people thought of their chocolate bar. There's more of the playing around with excel part if the data's been entered abroad or it's been done online, then it comes to us in excel.

At some point, a few years ago, Company A became an umbrella company, with Company A within it (don't ask, I still don't quite get it, but don't need to, so don't worry about it). Slightly fewer years ago, within the umbrella company, Company B was created. Company B does online surveys only. Only a few months ago, I moved over to Company B. Although I still work for Company A too, the plan is to only work for Company B eventually. But because they're under the same umbrella company, I still work in the same office.

The reason I went through the background for my old job is that the new one isn't that different. This time, instead of writing databases, I write surveys online that people fill in. Which suddenly requires learning Javascript and Flash which are a bit of an arse because they use semi-colons and curly brackets, and I don't like either of those in programming, never mind both. But, this is the point in which I am actually using my degree, since I did programming in it.

The other thing I have to do in my new job is to monitor the numbers of people taking the surveys to make sure they finish when they should. Since people can do it any time, it means a lot of weekends there are some I have to go and monitor. Which annoyingly means using internet explorer, since the site we work in doesn't work with any other browser (for the back end stuff).

So that's pretty much a basic overview. Any questions?

One Response to “My job”

Angelic Paranoia - About me Says:
Sunday 30th November 2008 at 7:26 pm

[...] wrote a fairly long post about my job a while ago and since that’s not the most important thing about me, I won’t expand on [...]