About Me
Name: Timothy Dreier
Occupation: Business Analyst
Education: Bachelor of Science in Economics, University of Oregon 2004.
Why One-Handed?
Was I crippled in some sort of horrible industrial accident? Was one arm mangled by a thresher growing up on the farm? Birth defect? Spelunking incident? Nay, none of these. In fact, both my manos are quite functional.
Nay, I picked the name due to a quotation attributed to He Who Did Not Actually Lose To Dewey and I promise to deliver nothing but lopsided opinions that vary in quality but aren’t nearly as whackaloon as, say, Veblen.
Not that my BS makes me eminently qualified, or anything, but hey, I know what an indifference curve is. Aren’t you terribly impressed?
Aren’t there already too many Econoblogs?
Yes. But I couldn’t care less really, I pay my hosting fees and I get to have a blog just like all of the real economists.
Why don’t you have comments?
I do sometimes, because nobody comments anyway and I can always turn them back off if I feel like it.
What do you do for a living?
I still work for an independent Texas bank, only now I’m in one of the subgroups in our IT area. I’m what’s called a Business Analyst. Essentially, I’m the middle man between business users and programming resources. I gather requirements, write test plans, write test scripts, perform testing to make sure the program outputs meet the defined business requirements, etc. You know Tom in Office Space? I have a job sort of like his. I currently support our call center application, our profitability system, and I will be supporting our new CRM implementation starting in April 2008. There’s also another incentives-related project that I’m on, actually, the project was my idea in my old role with the bank, so it’s kind of weird to be on this end of it.
What does your job have to do with your degree?
Other than having to do a lot of alternatives-based analysis to solve complex business problems, not a lot. I don’t really do any math, I don’t exactly have to have my International Trade books handy, and as many a real economist friend will tell you my stats are getting rustier by the minute. But that’s all right, I get to use the economic way of thinking every day and that’s way more interesting than calculus.
