My Job Rocks
Subtitle: Why you should work for Rovisys
Throughout high school and college, I had one goal in mind when it came to academia: get a job. I realized that degree–>job, so I stuck with college. Now don’t get me wrong, I had a great time in college. I met some awesome people and often think back to some of the best fun I have ever had.
On the other hand, although I think about engineering pretty much 18 hours a day (it’s a disease), I only have to answer to someone 8-10 of those hours. When I get home, I don’t have to study or do homework–I do fun stuff!
Here comes the kicker–when I’m at work, I am having fun, too! Most of my friends and family have undoubtedly heard me complain about some aspect of my job (a customer, a coworker, etc.) but I really, really do like my job.
So now the few people that actually knew what I did for a living are scratching their heads…
I am a computer engineer and work primarily as a programmer. A customer gives me a problem and I give him/her a solution. It’s really that simple. The trick is coming up with a good, effective solution. For me, that’s the fun part.
I get a kick out of seeing things I did be actually useful to others. For example, when I was a coop for Rovisys in 2004, I rewrote their timesheet module. I only had a couple weeks or so to do it and I was pretty new to the development environment they were using but it turned out ok–I was happy with what came of it.
Then, I was hired as a full-timer a year later. They are still using it! Given, it has obviously received some major updates, bug fixes, etc., but the point is that people actually use this stuff! Of course looking back at my code causes me to chuckle at its poor design and convoluted ways of doing simple things. You live, you learn.
OK, OK, but why Rovisys? Rovisys is small company of about 150 people. For the most part this is a good thing. I know most people in the company, including the President/owner–and they actually know me, too! In fact, it’s the president of the company that took a bunch of us out on the Great Lakes in August.
Rovisys takes care of its employees pretty well. From what I understand, pay is pretty average, but it goes far beyond that. I don’t even want to know what the budget is for company events like parties, outings, etc. It’s huge.
The other big benefit I see in Rovisys is the incredibly low turnover. I’m talking like a couple people a year leaving to seek other opportunities. People tell me that the number of people that have been fired is countable on one hand (over 12 years). This is true even through the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s. Rovisys was hit hard like everyone else, but no one was laid off.
This gives me something that is very important in a job: security. So long as I don’t screw up big time, I’m confident that I’ll have a job.