• Question: Whats the hardest part of your job?

    Asked by anon-257616 to Will on 23 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Will Furnell

      Will Furnell answered on 23 Jun 2020:

      That’s an interesting question! I think the answer to this changes all the time too, as I’m constantly learning new things, so every time I do that particular thing would be the hardest as I don’t know much about it yet. In general I’d probably say the problem solving is the hardest part of my job – but it’s also the thing I enjoy the most – because it’s hard! It’s so rewarding when you take some time to solve or find why a problem you are facing has occoured – but often it can be really hard to do, especially if nobody else has had the same problem before!

Comments

  • Photo: Rachel

    Rachel commented on :

    Sometimes science can be pretty frustrating – if you spend many months doing an experiment (often with late nights in the lab!), and then it doesn’t show any interesting results or it doesn’t work for some technical reason – then you have to go back to the drawing board. Even if experiments do show interesting results, you still have to repeat them lots of times to be sure, so that can be quite tedious too. All of that is balanced out by when you DO get nice results though, or discover something new and exciting!

  • Photo: Nigel

    Nigel commented on :

    Solving problems is fun, but can be challenging. We all aspire to be brilliant and deliver good code all the time, but sometimes we get things wrong. Perhaps we misinterpreted what was required (making some bad assumptions), perhaps the problem was more complex than we anticipated.(taking six months rather than three to deliver it) Sometime the people asking for the solution think they have the right idea, but it isn’t successful and not what users wanted at all. What is important is that we always learn from our mistakes (and in some sense be prepared to make them, we don’t want a blame culture). Collaboration and communication is so important, writing some code in isolation isn’t likely to be the answer!

  • stevethomas commented on :

    I think this is a very personal thing: what some people hate, others relish. For me the hardest part of my job is when I’ve had to deal with security incidents. It calls for very quick decision-making, often without all the facts and sometimes in the absence of people who might know them or be able to provide advice. I can stay calm in a crisis but I do like to think things through, and sometimes that can lead to “paralysis through analysis”. So if it happens I have a few people I know who *do* enjoy these situations (or at least are good at them!) I rely on to help out. The important thing then is to make sure everyone knows who *really* solved the problem – and it usually wasn’t me!

  • Photo: Hannah

    Hannah commented on :

    Honestly, the hardest part of my job is scheduling calls across distant time zones. Trying to get the same people from Alaska and Azerbaijan on the same call is impossible without inconveniencing someone in some part of the world. The other hard part is that because I work in a global company (and I am a big people person), it’s hard not being with people or meeting them in person. This was a problem even before COVID. It’s just not practical to travel to every office for every meeting. We are encouraged to use video, but pre-COVID, I’d say less than 5% of my calls were on video. Now, it’s become more normal, which I am so grateful for!, but only on calls with lots of people. On my one-on-one calls, I’m usually the only one showing my face. So not being able to connect with people physically or visually is very hard for me.

  • Photo: Obi

    Obi commented on :

    Great question!
    I will say that the hardest part of my job happens to be the most interesting part too. The search for the unknown from huge amount of data/information that sometimes come back with an unimaginable but very useful answers.
    The difficult part is trying to put the data in a way that the computer can read it, then apply the right type of code to drive insights that can change lives or save billions in cash or resources. It can be frustrating to get it right initially but always fulfilling at the end