Tim Ross, 29, technical manager, Sponge (pictured)

“Sponge is a technology company that makes SMS and mobile applications for advertising and marketing agencies. For example, at the moment we’re doing a promotion with Dr Pepper where people can text in from the pack and get a ringtone downloaded to their phone, and we did a competition with Birds Eye where people could text in for the chance to get their mortgage paid off.

“It’s my job to work with the other guys in the team and write the logic behind how this works. We have hundreds of promotions live at any one time, so our software processes the thousands of entries that come in every day and makes sure that they go to the right place.

“Generally it all works but sometimes there are connection issues with the phone networks; then it’s all hands on deck to get it back up and running. It can get a bit tense because if messages stop working it’s business-critical.

“My job is a mix of developing bespoke applications for our clients and maintaining the application platform, which is the system that underpins all the different competitions. We don’t always build things from scratch when we get new clients, but whatever we do I have to write a technical plan so that everyone in the company knows exactly what it is being done. Clearly I know what’s happening and how the program that I write for them works, but if I go on holiday and another developer needs to look at it he can refer to the plan.

“When I’m programming it’s simply me sitting at my desk crunching out code. I get in at 9am and get into the zone for as long as I can, although sometimes I have to break off to go to client meetings or consult with our commercial team, which can be distracting.

“I’m pretty good at estimating how long things will take, so I don’t often have to work long hours, but if there’s a problem I have to stay until it’s sorted out. I have stayed until midnight or 1am when it’s a campaign that needs to happen for a big client.

“Luckily our team is really laid-back and there’s a good atmosphere in the office so we like working together. We’re a really sociable bunch of people – we like to go to the pub for lunch on Friday when we can. “There’s this image of pasty people sitting in a dark room with the blinds drawn, but none of us are like that. We’re more likely to spend our weekends surfing in Cornwall.”

www.spongegroup.com

A SECOND OPINION

Nathan Cunningham, 36, data scientist, British Antarctic Survey

“My job is a mixture of fieldwork in Antarctica – I spend about three months a year aboard the Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross – and everyday office life in Cambridge.

“When I am on the ship I am part of a team of scientists collecting data about everything from the biomass in the ocean to the weather patterns. Because we can work only for a short while in the southern summer, we have to make the most of all the time available, which means working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Our monitoring equipment is always on and sends us 180 pieces of information every second. My role is to make sure that each person can find the exact data that they want among all this, so I write programs to help them to do this. Another one of my field responsibilities is getting the information that we collect back to Cambridge via satellite link so that other researchers can use the data.

“When I’m in Cambridge I work a normal 37-hour week and get to spend time focusing on programming problems, but there are always meetings to go to too. “A big part of my work is making information in databases available to scientists across the world. I write programs so that they can access the data that we collect via the web. Part of my job is also doing research in this area and looking at better ways of making this data publicly accessible. I also look at ways of putting it in context, for example, by using tools such as Google Earth.

“It’s interesting work because a lot of the stuff we do is bespoke – you just can’t get this sort of thing off the shelf. As a scientist you need to be able to synthesise multidisciplinary data across fields and the tools are not there, so I get to think about how we can make them and how I can make our information available to scientists in Japan without having to go there for two months.”

www.antarctica.ac.uk

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