What do you do for work?

[ashParadise]

I was reading peoples' about me's and found myself curious to see what people with indie web as a hobby do for work!! Since it's a creative and technical hobby I imagine the demographic would skew to creative and technical careers as well, but you don't know what you don't know!

Personally, I moved from the tech industry (IT and tech support for like 10+ years) a few years ago to open/operate my own business. Now I do branding and merch design, as well as operate a retail store that sells retro-inspired apparel, physical media (movies & games,) art and more! So I'd say my current career is very tied in, and my time working with and learning about computers primed me for making my own site.

So, what's your job?? Does it have anything to do with your indie web interest? 

[sphinx]

I do greenhouse work. We grow ornamental plants for wholesale, so not open to the general public. Our clients are hotels, resorts, landscape companies, and large private estates. I care for the plants. Planting, watering, pest control applications, moving, up-potting, pruning, weeding, etc. It doesn't sound like much but on a mass scale it's pretty tiring.

Before that I worked in an office handling accounts for a webhosting company, so I have a little bit of a tech background but not very much. Even though I love web stuff I prefer working outdoors in nature.

[ValyceNegative]

I'm an artist! I work for both privates and companies, so I do regular commissions but also logos and mascots, textile patterns, art installations / window design for shops, covers, posters, dedicated fonts...

So yeah, exactly the kind of job generative AI is trying to destroy. ;w; while nothing has changed on the private commission side (believe me, privates that advocate that trash because "it's a cheap alternative" would have never bought any commission in any case) I've had the occasional shop saying "oh that's okay, this time I can make the poster myself". Luckily, they regret it soon after as audience comments on the uglyness and lack of readability/useful information on those tacky generated flyers.

[schlime9k]

I work at a small retro-game store. I used to work for a very large general retailer (will not say their name) but it was hell because of course it was: a whole bunch of customers, some very stupid, a manager that was simply against me all the time, and menial work that I was bored of the second I started.

Now at the store I work at, the work is awesome because I'm surrounded by old games that I need to care for (which I do :D) customers and coworkers that share the same interests as me, and a manager that DOESN'T suck !! 

[honeyontoast]

I do greenhouse work. We grow ornamental plants for wholesale, so not open to the general public. Our clients are hotels, resorts, landscape companies, and large private estates. I care for the plants. Planting, watering, pest control applications, moving, up-potting, pruning, weeding, etc. It doesn't sound like much but on a mass scale it's pretty tiring.

What a coincidence! I used to work on a plant nursery dealing with outdoor or greenhouse raised plants. Repotting, weeding, "lifting" (taking plants for orders), and pruning. It really is tough work, but it was also probably my favourite job. Sadly I had to leave because it didn't pay enough for us to survive.

Before and after my time at the plant nursery, I've been a software developer. It pays well enough, it's secure, and I get to work from home, but I don't know if I'd say I enjoy it. I often wish I was working outdoors.

However I have a sick cat that often needs medicine, and being able to work from home means I'm always here to do it.

[ashParadise]

So yeah, exactly the kind of job generative AI is trying to destroy. ;w;

FELT that... I've lost long-standing design clients to AI slop, people I thought valued art and thought of as friends. It's hard when my primary clientele are other small/local businesses... Thinking I'm going to have to pick up more national/international clients even though local is where my passion lies. I've felt like I'm chasing clients for the first time since opening the business.

I've seen similar things on the private side too though - if we stocked a print with an AI-generated image in our retail store (we would never) we'd lose the majority of our audience, like, instantaneously, because most of them are also young creatives who want real artwork made by real people.

[Noah_S]

Unofficially I'm apparently a healthcare and bureaucrazy manager now.

Okay, that's only partially a joke. Let's be clear, I have no medical education.

I'm on medical leave going towards medical retirement.

I'm also having to do the work that my care team is supposed to do for them. I have had one hell of a week with that because everything fell apart when they went on vacation and guess who had to clean up the mess. That's right, the patient who's supposed to be on medical leave.

They hadn't taken care of keeping things running during their little vacation, so I've been left with no income since the end of May. I had told them that I can't handle the applications myself, I've authorized both my social worker and a backup to handle that stuff on my behalf. But when my social worker went on vacation nothing had been done to get a back-up person running that kind of stuff, so if I wasn't staying with my dad I'd be homeless due to not having paid rent due to having been left with no income during their vacation. Since my medical issues were so rude as to not go on vacation when they did.

Then it turned out that the doctor who was in charge of my case had apparently half-assed the paperwork putting me on medical leave that was among his last paperwork before retirement so badly that the insurance people got the impression that someone who's physically incapable of getting a bag of trash out when their living situation depends on it is fit to be working full time. No one else on the team had even looked at what he wrote before I demanded to see it. So I had to write my own text about my situation, where I explained the stuff that he had glossed over, and referred to a lawyer representing the insurance people ruling me not fit for work a few days after he sent in his "paperwork". Because apparently they can't even keep their own decisions straight, they need someone who's supposed to be resting at home to do it for them.

And I'm one of the lucky ones. I didn't end up homeless starving in the streets due to them not doing their jobs.

To answer your question about relation to indie web interest.. no. If anything this situation has been sabotaging my ability to focus on web revival stuff during the past week. If I was fit for work, I'd want to be a guide at a historic museum. That's a bit related in the wanting information to be available kind of way.

[Dan Q]

I was reading peoples' about me's and found myself curious to see what people with indie web as a hobby do for work!! Since it's a creative and technical hobby I imagine the demographic would skew to creative and technical careers as well, but you don't know what you don't know!

Well it does in my case, but I'd like to imagine that I'd be in this kind of creative space even if I weren't a techie at my day job. In fact, I know that I would be because I was into the independent Web, back in the 90s before I got my first proper job.

So yeah: I'm a software engineer. I've worked across a variety of different disciplines and tech stacks but I've usually favoured the Web as a platform; people call folks like me "full-stack developers", I guess. More-specialised than that, my focus areas are security, performance, and accessibility.

I've worked freelance, I've worked for agencies, I've worked for big internationals you'll have heard of, I've worked for smaller companies you won't have. Oh, and I spent a decade or so working for the University of Oxford, mostly on digital exhibitions and other public-facing stuff. But it's all tech, right?

If you've ever brushed up in the wild against things I was paid to make, it's most-likely to be:

- That "red tractor" quality assurance mark on the bottles of milk you might see in British supermarkets? I wrote the original software that managed the assessments of the farms that made that possible.
- Use a touchscreen in a museum to learn more about the exhibit in front of you? If it was in the UK, there's about a 1-in-10 chance it was running code I wrote. Lower elsewhere in the world, but probably not a zero chance.
- You get charged VAT on your subscription to a plugin for a certain popular piece of open source eCommerce software? I probably wrote the code that works out what tax you owe, depending on where in the world you are etc.

Needless to say, I'm much more-proud of the things I've made for free over the decades.

[knifex]

Just as I love making website for myself, I am also a website designer for my job!
It's very different from indie web tough.

I'm lucky enough that I'm, like, the in house web designer for a business that doesn't know shit about tech, so they trust me a lot. They had their website built by an agency a while ago, but of course, because its an agency, they dont know the intricacies of the business and did a bad job lol. Its all bells and whistles.

So I've spent the last months rebuilding from the ground up with a better infrastructure on Wordpress (THEY USED TO USE WIX), working in tandem with the rest of the marketing team to integrate new solutions, etc etc. It's really annoying having to sit in a meeting having someone tell you how to make sure LLMs reads your website.

I really enjoy designing new pages, and playing with custom CSS to have striking visuals & coherent branding.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty much all done with the fun part, and now I have to enter 250+ products with 50 variations each now. I cant even re-use the old inventory from shopify because it wasnt well made lol.

It's my 4th job as the digital multimedia expert: I've had many roles, but I always end up working on the website, any visuals, printing, and helping the boss with their tech illiteracy. I do hope to stay at my current position for a while tough. My first boss was crazy, the second place deleted my position, the third moved unreasonably far. This one's the best so far, I hope it stays.

[Horsey Chobunso]

I do greenhouse work. We grow ornamental plants for wholesale, so not open to the general public. Our clients are hotels, resorts, landscape companies, and large private estates. I care for the plants. Planting, watering, pest control applications, moving, up-potting, pruning, weeding, etc.

This sounds really nice as far as jobs go. I once applied to work at an organic farm but they were trying to send me to their secondary farm which was 90 minutes away from me, so I sadly had to pass.

working in tandem with the rest of the marketing team to integrate new solutions, etc etc. It's really annoying having to sit in a meeting having someone tell you how to make sure LLMs reads your website.

This is very reminiscent of my time in SEO/content marketing. Part of why I got so jaded in burnt out was the constant pushing of LLMs to do EVERYTHING. I got so sick of trying to incorporate ways to make blog posts and images that were just significantly worse than having one of our very talented photographers and writers make something themselves. There was so much push back to doing anything the right way in favor of pumping out as much bullshit at possible that really got to me by the end.

Right now I work for a camera shop with a vintage focus. Most of my day-to-day is digitizing customers old slides, film negatives, prints, and tapes. It can be fulfilling but it's also a forward-facing retail job with it's own set of challenges. I'm definitely happier now than I was in any of my past marketing, factory, or warehousing jobs at the very least. It has me interacting with things I'm naturally interested in.

[sphinx]

I got so sick of trying to incorporate ways to make blog posts and images that were just significantly worse than having one of our very talented photographers and writers make something themselves.

I don't understand why they were clamoring for an inferior outcome. What was the justification? It makes no sense to me.

You talking about the camera shop takes me back to when I worked in the photo developing department at Walgreens. (Back when you were trained on and worked for a specific department.) I kind of miss some aspects of it. It was interesting developing film and doing slides. I can still smells the chemicals from the big machine. It always smelled like elephant poo to me. My coworker pointed it out one day, "it's like elephants...at the zoo or the circus. It smells just like that." And she was so right.

We now only have one location in the whole city that develops film. (1hr photo, not mail-away. that doesn't count) It's a mom & pop store. Places like that are so essential but sadly going the way of the dodo.

[CosmicAvelyn]

I'm a biller for an LTL shipping company! I take information from the bill of lading and transpose it into our system so our rating team can figure out who's getting charged, and how much. No, it has nothing to do with my interest in web design or art - my job is just something to pay the bills, lol.

You'd think my job would also be threatened by AI, being data entry, but... there's already an AI system in place, and it's really bad at what it does! To such a degree that there's a whole subset of my department dedicated to going in and fixing what the AI screwed up. It's a little faster overall, but the bot is constantly missing information, and it can't read handwritten bills for the life of it. Suffice to say I don't think my job here is in any danger. lol

As a side-hustle, I also occasionally take art commissions, and I'm currently working on trying to get my Patreon off the ground - I offer WIPs, doodles, and early access to the stuff I make. As things progress, I'll come up with other perks, too!