Job Responsibilities
Keeping the experience feeds to State Insurance commissioner
accurate and up to date (15%). Making sure the G/L, A/R and A/P
feeds are successful, in balance and complete (20%). Any special
extracts and feeds to auditors, The Federal Government (1099's)
and anyone else with the proper authority to make that request
(35%). Production support (30%).
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Job Requirements
My particular programming language is cobol, JCL and Eztrieve.
My Masters and LOMA (insurance degree) only help with
understanding what is going on but most of my career path has
been a function of what I have learned on the job. Psycology and
group behavior classes never hurt but I got as much from courses
like "Covey's 7 laws" as I did from any collage course.
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Uppers
It can be challenging and sometimes almost impossible to achieve what they are
asking for. It is possible to save alot of time by just programming for the goal
with good documentation and history. The trick has been to look for ways to
improve the system and achieve the same(or better) results with less key strokes.
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Downers
There are always politics of who likes who. You find it almost
more important who you work for rather than which company. The
company atmosphere will enter into the satisfaction with your job
but there are good jobs at bad companies and bad jobs at good
companies. Always look busy. Quite often the person deciding who
will be cut doesn't know your work but might have an opinion of
how busy they have seen you.
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Lifestyle
The saleried job is supposed to 8 hour days. Some work from 6 - 3 and some from
9 - 6 but in our company that is entirely up to your manager. Then there is on
call and when the president of the company wants to know some specific count and
amount, it could be your weekend that just went up in smoke. Many a night has
been spent fixing something in the batch job that failed due to some user having
discoverd a new and exciting way to blow up the system to say nothing of off-site
disaster recovery.
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Compensation
New programmers seem to start out around $30K/yr around here but
with a little experience moving to another better job is quite
often at the $70K to $100K level. That is in large part to what
systems you learned and how badly the new company needs your
specific skills. Our company matches what you put aside for
retirement 2 to 1 up to 3% of your income. Then there are
medical plans (including HSAs) and stock options that help
provide nicely for your retirement.
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Advice to Jobseekers
The outlook is good for those kinds of security, communication
and trans-banking careers like secure network cellphone financial
transactions and identification of individuals who pose a risk
either financialy or physically.
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