I do both lathing and milling! The past few jobs I did were water spindles for fire departments, a few small electronic pieces for some local science department. I did firearms, mostly pistol barrels but also rifle barrels, pistol slides, gas blocks, and baffles. Currently I and doing airplane engine bits! Very fun, very regulated lol
Oh man, that's a wide variety of things to make. That's cool.
I used to work in a shop with CNC machinists. I remember asking one of them one day what they liked about it. And I got an interesting reply from one of them. He said, "I like how I can make just about everything you would ever need. I just need the raw materials, my machine, and a few tools to measure. And a trusty hammer for when you need to... encourage something."
I think it was the dude next to him, who made the point that there are so many different metal pieces that you don't realize are around you when you walk into a building in general. All of them had to be made somehow and a lot of them are small or tiny pieces of components for something larger.
That really opened my eyes to the world around me. I started to look at things differently from then on.
So hats off to all of the machinists out there. We sure as hell couldn't have the world like we do without you.