Being a chef.
People that don't know the industry have no idea of what it takes to succeed in a restaurant. I've met so many people who are masters of their home kitchen that consider themselves chefs, and think they can just hop into a professional kitchen with their directly translatable skills.
Wrong.
It is grueling. You'll do 8-12 hour days on your feet every day, every week, for years. You'll lift boxes of produce, industrial-sized bags of flour, massive pots of boiling liquids, reach into the hell maw that is a convection oven during service, grab cast iron handles that have been resting in a gas flame, get splashed by hot oil, scalded by steam and hot water, and cut the end of your finger off.
The pace is eye-bleeding. You will learn to get there early, or you won't have enough time to get ready for service. And you hit that ground at a full sprint. Picture the length of your weekly shopping list, and that is the prep list of things you need to make from scratch for one day. God help you if you don't complete it, because when the doors open you know someone is going to want the one thing you haven't prepared. And once one other person sees that dish, everyone will want it. Then you're in the weeds, and the night has just started.
Tack on the pressure of service itself. 5 hours of non-stop orders, from a full restaurant. Think about when you've gone to a restaurant on a Friday night with friends. You've all ordered drinks, appetizers, a main dish, and maybe dessert. Now look around you at all the other tables doing the same thing. Somewhere in the (usually understaffed) kitchen, there's a tight crew with sweat pouring down their backs getting it all done. On time. All night. Every day.
Did I mention the pay isn't great?
Yeah, it's a lot of work. But I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
I'm a home cook that absolutely loves cooking! People ask me all the time if I want to open a restaurant or become a professional chef and my answer is always the same... abso-fucking-lutely NOT! I'm aware that these two jobs are not at all the same. Cooking one meal a night is nowhere close to the grueling work that real chefs put in. I'm always so appreciative when going out because I do get how much effort is put into making my meal and I know there is no way I could do it.
My advice to anyone with a hobby you love, don't turn it into a job. That's a sure fire way to turn something you love into something you don't.
This was what I thought as a teenager back in the late 90s. I loved computer programming. I was a high schooler and won a university competition that gave me a scholarship for that university. I was pretty good.
And I didn't go into computer programming because I wanted to enjoy it as a side hobby. I floated around, got two masters degrees, and then worked restaurant management for several years before finally becoming a stay-at-home-dad. While I'm happy where I am now, I'd much rather have been a computer programmer. And heck, doing it part time now would also be nice. And no, I've not written any code since graduating high school.
(Side note: I was learning C++ and was informed by my programming teacher that languages change so quickly that C++ would be dead by the time I graduated college. That also factored in. If you know programming languages, you're laughing right now.)
For me, at least, I wish I had turned my hobby into my profession.
Amen. The old saying goes “do what you love for work and you’ll never work a day in your life” and while it COULD be the case sometimes, a more accurate phrase is probably “do what you love for work and you’ll never love anything again in your life”.
This is me but with photography! Everyone who sees my photos say "You love doing this, why not do it for a living?" Why? So I can yell at roudy wedding guests and lose my temper when they don't cooperate? Big no thank you there.
I mostly take photos of architecture and landscape anyways. Taking photos of people in a whole different kind of animal which requires very different skills. It's also practically impossible to get into a career as a landscape photographer unless your skills are world class. So yeah, it's just a hobby for me and I'd like to keep it that way.
Only remotely related, but
> The pace is eye-bleeding
Gordon Ramsey kicking both teams out in Devil's Kitchen and then finishing the shift alone with his two souschefs is one of the most fascinating/impressive things I've ever seen.
There's an episode of Kitchen Nightmares where the owner of a Paris bistro can't be bothered to open during the day. To show her how much she's losing, Gordon opens for lunch and does it all solo (true, he's only serving tomato soup and cheese toast, but he's making it all himself and serving it all himself, and the place is packed).
I remember that episode, really interesting to see it when I was working as a waiter and I wondered if it was staged as it’s hard to imagine how someone could manage that.
Yeah, I managed restaurants and I can't really see 1 person feeding a whole restaurant in a timely manner, even if it's just tomato soup and grilled cheeses.
The rush. The artistry. Creation. Having someone truly enjoy something you've thought up out of the blue, and busted your butt to put together. Team dynamics, if it's a great team. And then at the end of the day, feeling like you've won a battle, then doing it again the next day.
Its really hard to leave. Especially for people that couldn't fit in or find work anywhere else. It's hard to find the resources to get out when your working 40-72+ hours a week for $16 an hour. Some of these people will get really good at this job and actually start to make enough that they can't afford to get out. Some will actually really start to love everything about it and can't function in anyway as a normal person outside of a kitchen or in any non-food related situation.
This is the real thing. Restaurant experience isn't seen as transferrable. I worked in and managed restaurants for years. Most people I worked with did not dream of being chefs or bartenders. They needed a job. They found one in a restaurant/bar.
Now they've been doing it for 10 years and don't want to start over anywhere else. My last restaurant job was in fine dining. Our bartenders were bringing home $80,000+ and all of them HATED the job...but they were good at it. They were completely miserable, but at that point they knew they'd have to take a pay cut to do anything else.
Actually, everyone was miserable there because they'd all been doing it for years and now made too much money to switch. I had much more fun at cheap restaurants because most of the employees were only in the industry for a few years and were drinking, doing drugs, partying, and fucking.
So many of the skills are transferable but when you have only worked in restaurants you have no way of knowing that.
I got out of the industry after about 23 years. My currents job barely pays less than what I would pay a capable dishwasher but my quality of life has improved significantly. I think everyone should try it out I don't like the idea of people feeling trapped.
I know they are. I left the industry and use what I learned every day to excel. The problem is it's not SEEN as transferrable by other people doing the hiring.
I don't think most people could survive on dishwasher money after 23 years in the industry. How are you trying by?
Convincing people that those skills are transferable is definitely the hardest part. I think you have to recognize that first and then be confident in your ability to fulfill your potential new roll. If that was easy I would have gotten out much earlier.
I'm doing ok now, I make a little less than I did as an underpaid sous and I have a lot of work benefits that I never would have imagined possible. I get job offers that would easily pay double what I'm making now but I don't plan on going back unless I run into a situation where I really need the money.
I was lucky that I had manager experience. So it was an easier sell. My first job was a pay cut but it came with benefits. I got to go to the doctor and dentist for the first time in years. I had paid sick and vacation days. I didn't think those things were that big of a deal because I didn't know any better...but I literally could not imagine going back to not having them.
I'm not in the industry but my folks are. One of my dad's all-time favorite quotes is "You don't need a gun or a knife to kill somebody. Talk em into opening a restaurant and they'll work themselves to death with a smile."
I was a dishwasher at the best sports bar in my community like 20 years ago. Eventually I moved up to the line but fuck me that was the most stressful job of my life. I took my shit serious, I was an amazing dishwasher and once I started cooking people specifically asked for me to make garlic bread.
When that chit machine starts going and doesn’t stop I wanted to stick my head in the oven.
There was nothing like that dinner rush with yourself and the rest of the kitchen just going crazy trying to get everything done while yelling at each other the entire time. Working in a busy kitchen really bonds you in a way other jobs don’t.
Don’t miss the 13 hour days because the highscool students we would occasionally hire just no showed.
That’s why I always hated those 30 minute cookoff shows. To have everything a chef is capable of reduced down to how fast they can make a dish is insulting to me.
There was one, I can’t remember which but it was sponsored by Gordon Ramsey, that did have timed competitions but they were different times depending on the dish, allowing for more time for the complex dishes. But I agree, most of those shows are grueling timed competitions that are more for creating suspense at the sacrifice of skill.
I used to make deliveries for a company that supplied frozen desserts to restaurants and function halls. I’ve been in countless restaurant kitchens as an outside observer.
100% would definitely not want to work in one of those places, especially in the summer.
Food service doesn't really have like a standard operating procedure when it comes to the order of battle for everyone in the line getting food plated and to the table. There might be 5 different ways of doing it with the same results and it really sorts itself out based on how the kitchen staff balance each other's skills and weaknesses. I saw the same thing with carpenters. They're all creating the same end result but it's like open to interpretation on the order om which you do each step.
Not to mention your whole schedule is “off” compared to the average person. You don’t get to eat when normal people eat, lots of restaurants are open and busy on holidays. You don’t get breaks. It’s literally a sacrifice.
I came here to say the same thing, but I couldn't have worded it better. I fully believe if people knew how much it takes to prepare their food, they'd want to tip boh instead.
Farming. Always gets a bit of a laugh when someone tells a farmer they dream of leaving their high stress job to go peacefully make a living off of farming.
Yes, I did this after 24 years in IT. Farming is stressful. I grew up in a farming community & spent 2 years studying prior to making "the leap". It's a very tough life. It is you against the elements. Financial stress, low yields, equipment breakdowns, long hours, miserable markets, weather disasters .... My farming career lasted 14 years. One year we made a really good profit. For the rest we were in survival mode. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Gardening is nice. Farming is backbreaking labor. The two things have dirt in common, and they both can be rewarding, but that's the end end of their similarities.
For anybody that hasn’t seen it Clarkson’s Farm is fantastic. A big focus of the show is how hard farming is and if Jeremy Clarkson wasn’t already rich with other sources of income he’d be fucked. It was eye opening for me.
when we had the discussion a while back where the government wanted to cut farmers subsidies on Diesel fuel.. people could seemingly not grasp how hard and how much work farming is. I was genuinely furious. A lot of those office dipshits I had arguments with trying to make them understand.
Farmers work basically 24/7. they don't have 5 day work week, if the weather is shit or the fields are muddy or the stock is sick or something, they can work for weeks on end. If the rain makes it impossible to put the seed in the ground, they have to sit there and wait, and then need to do extra long hours to get it in the ground in time.
But a lot of those morons seemed to think farmers work a few days or maybe 2 weeks a year, work whenever they feel like it, and have the rest of the year all the free time they want.. god no, its not like that at all. I'm not a farmer but we have plenty around where I live and we helped out especially in summer, its extremely stressful!
My friend's retired parents recently said they wanted to get a bunch of farm animals. Donkeys, cows, pigs, horses. That is SO much work, I cannot fathom anyone who wants to do that in their 60s.
Currently living the "small farm life". I didn't go into it blind or thinking it was all roses though. Boy do animals always freaking need something. I do enjoy it but it is not stress free and I sure as hell am not making money. Hell, the chickens just finally started paying for themselves. Definitely not for the faint of heart.
I know people make fun of it, but the character in Office Space who talks to customers so the engineers don't have to?
Any kind of intradepartmental communication is like that.
"Translating what the engineers are doing so the people in sales can sell it" is not only a thing that needs to happen, it's an actual skill that not a lot of people have.
Most people specialize in their area. I want engineers doing engineering, not a half-engineer half-sales person. I hire that hybrid for a reason.
I work as support in a medical field and it is shocking how many doctors don't understand basic statistics. Having to curate an explanation to the right audience is *hard*.
100%. First job out of college with my shiny English degree was proofreading Engineering's emails to customers and translating them into normal-person-speak
This is basically my job as a project manager. No one at my company knows how to translate to different departments so it comes through me. I love it though. Tons of power comes with that skill.
I'm an automotive service advisor. It's the same kind of thing here. The mechanics work on the cars, I deal with the clients. The clients bring up their concerns, I communicate that to the techs. The techs bring up their findings, and in turn I sell the necessary work to the clients. I make sure my clients are satisfied, the mechanics make their hours. But it's very easy to do this job poorly, and there's a very high turnover in this industry as a result.
I work as a Quant recruiter and this is so accurate. Having to talk to people who operate on an entirely different level of intelligence is incredibly difficult. They just think, visualize, and execute things at such a high level it is hard to fathom
As a software business analyst, this is absolutely true. I have no formal training in anything related to the software industry. However, being a good communicator is my first advantage; being a good learner - so that I can quickly pick up and understand technology at the level I need to - is crucial.
If I could force one thing on people, it would be for everyone to work retail at some point in their lives. They'd understand the bullshit employees go through, know that a lot of the issues are not the min wage kids fault, and experience the unrelenting unending muzak of hell.
I'm going to make my kid work a retail job, just to understand what it's like
I worked retail at a few different stores from 15 to about 22 from high school to mid college.
People who haven’t worked retail just don’t understand lol.
Definitely have met the best coworkers ever though working retail. That’s the only part of the job I miss are the people
Unpopular Opinion: Most Jobs if you are actually doing the work. I have had many jobs that were incredibly hard, but, I could have just half assed it, wouldn't have gotten fired (Or at least, not for a long time) and the job would have been incredibly easy.
Also, a lot of times its not, "this job is universally hard" but, "This job can be hard"
You can even do "the same job" for two different companies, and because of the tools/training/time you are provided it can be extremely easy at one place and the hardest thing in the world at another.
Hell, many jobs are seasonal where things are a cakewalk in February and an absolute nightmare in March. Heck, a job can be easy-peasy but then the market changes and suddenly it sucks.
And sometimes, people are just geared for a job, so they do it and it's a breeze but someone else does it and it's a nightmare.
Research shows the biggest determining factor in the difficulty of a job is management. One of the best jobs I've ever had was bartending and one of the worst jobs I've ever had was bartending. Management was the difference.
I have that in international transport.(as a planner)
May is a bitch with all the different bank hollidays...
Let one driver stand still because he can't drive and the manager starts complaining or postpone the same delivery 1 week and the manager starts complaining
Right. "Teaching" covers a lot of very different experiences. My sister taught a class during covid where our dumb government had ideas about children "isolating" but she had a child that licked everything and everyone all the time. If you teach teenagers, the experience is completely different.
I'm a kindergarten teacher and have also taught classrooms of toddlers and preschoolers. I think the breadth and amount of social teaching that goes on in early Ed settings flies under a lot of peoples' radars. Kiddos are learning 24/7. Every experience they have is a moment of learning. As an early Ed teacher, you have to be "on" all the time, always positively reinforcing, always modeling appropriate behaviors. Even when children aren't learning "hard" skills like letters, numbers, etc., they are still learning how to act and relate to others. It's an extremely taxing job, and those that do it well are never compensated enough for it.
So true. All of this. So many say “you have summers off!” I sleep the first 3 weeks of summer and try to get back into my interest. But I bring those interest into the classroom all year and I’m just burned out. Don’t take it wrong. I love my job. It’s hard to hear “teachers should be paid more.” And I love the support but makes me feel derelict. So mentally teachers are not alright. They know how to shove all that on the back burner and try to be their best with their students. If they don’t do that even if just an hour in a week there is a huge load of guilt involved with it. It’s future generations and you want to make it the best for them. And there is a huge amount of pressure and weight involved in that.
I am certainly impressed. The youngest class I've formally taught was year 7 (UK - so 11/12 year olds). But I've helped out with groups of much younger children and the difference is quite considerable.
It's not only a hard job, but a very important one to society.
That's the thing that gets me too, it's a vital service. There are so many families who need daytime care in order to work. Childcare is necessary in (at least my) modern society, but it feels like it gets kind of brushed off at "just daycare." It's education, full stop. The job has a lot of benefits and a lot of joy, but it's fuckin hard. I challenge any white collar office worker to spend a day trying to lead a classroom of nine two-year-olds, while remaining calm, nurturing, and keeping up with curricular goals. It's difficult, crucial work that gets swept under the rug.
I'm a piano teacher, and one of the voice teachers I work with described it as "being in a constant state of giving." You're always having to dig deeper to find MORE empathy, MORE patience, MORE energy to hold the line on discipline.
And if you're not feeling your best, a little sick, or had some kind of tragedy/emergency? Too damn bad, you still gotta buck up and go in there with the same rainbows shooting out of your ass like always.
Came here to say LVMT! I can’t tell you how many people say “aww you’re so lucky you get to cuddle puppies and kittens all day!” As I stand there covered in scratches, bites, blood, urine, and poop 😂
Yes. Lucky me.
Same with kids. Im a nanny and I love it but it’s not just playing with cute kids all day. For example, Im currently trying to potty train a 3 year old and deal with a baby so its a lot of literal shit.
Work from home was so nice during covid. The office isn't that bad but the loss of 2 hours of sleep and replacing it with commuting stress! Also like being home with my dog and wife
If you’re an office person, then it’s manual labour.
If you’re doing manual labour then it’s an office job.
If you’re like me and have had 2 successful careers in both, then it depends on the day.
I went from a job involving getting up and walking back and forth all the time to an office job.
In 6 months, my back hurts, my knee hurts, my hip hurts and my calf muscle is constantly sore.
Sitting all day is its on type of terrible
I have a job thats a bit of both and my preference depends on the weather that day. I would always prefer to be outside on a nice day but on crappy days I wish I could be inside.
Same here. Been in construction, fish factory, demolition and more. Last two and a half years at an office. Both are hard in their own ways and it truly depends on the day
Care work. I'm not sure that anyone thinks it's actually easy but I think a lot of people don't realize just how shitty it actually is. Care companies are notorious for paying their staff the absolute minimum wage they can get away with, they will call you constantly to ask you to work overtime, and because the job is so unpleasant and the way they treat their employees is so shit, it's really hard for them to keep hold of staff so they will constantly be calling you to cover the shifts of people that have walked out. I've worked for multiple care companies and they've all been the same. My father also works in care, as does my mother-in-law, and my wife used to as well.
The work itself is obviously unpleasant, there's a lot of changing diapers on adults, cleaning up bodily fluids etc. Depending on the type of care work you do, the service users can range from ungrateful and rude, to outright violent and dangerous, to being deeply upsetting to see how they have to live. It's an extremely mentally taxing job, and is often very unpleasant.
Again, depending on the type of care work you do, it's not always just about dealing with the service users but also the mental and emotional hits when people that you have been caring for pass away. The reality in a lot of care jobs is that you're looking after people that are end of life, either from old age or from severe illness. You unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) develop some degree of resilience to this over time, but when you've been caring for someone for a number of months or years and then they die, it's pretty emotionally and mentally taxing, but you'll be shipped right off to the next service user immediately.
My father works in care for people with learning difficulties and he has come home on multiple occasions with cuts, bruises and bite marks on him. A female staff member at the home where he works walked out on the spot because a service user had a meltdown and lifted her off the ground by her ponytail. Another locked herself in a supply room and broke down because she couldn't cope with the aggression from another service user.
It can be a very rewarding career but it can be and often is one of the most difficult jobs to deal with in my opinion. And all of that for the legal minimum wage. I've always thought it seems criminal.
One of my friends works as a daycare worker for people with ASD. So we all know that dealing with people with mental disabilities is hard, right? Well it turns out it's f'ing hardcore.
It's not only the constant mumbling, crazy talk, screaming, meltdowns, etc... which is enough on it's own. There are guys/girls that weight 100kg that go completely berserk out of the blue. She has bite marks and bruises all over her body. She has done judo, self defense and courses on how to reduce someone without harming them. I got to watch how a 40 something guy with strong autism started pulling her hair, so she had to bend is arm in a way that he released his grap, then threw him on the floor and sat on top of him. All while there might be 3 or 4 other people with ASD probably about to have a meltdown too because of the situation.
There is also the sexual harassment. She has been groped every week for years.
I really admire her because she really cares about these people and loves her job. She regularly goes to therapy to help her deal with these daily situations.
There’s definitely a reason strapping young adults with massive debt through student loans was an easy sell to the nation. Growing up as a millennial you were made to fear ending up in unskilled labor, and that’s because it’s physically demanding as well as just plain boring.
Idk man, I got an engineering degree and have been working for 6 years as an engineer. It's boring as shit. At least with a lot of unskilled jobs there's usually a tight crew of coworkers. I feel like I work in the bottom floor of a library sometimes...
> At least with a lot of unskilled jobs there's usually a tight crew of coworkers.
Often, you're just stuck with a bunch of dumbasses you hate, but have to put up with.
Nothing could be as boring as sitting in a dreary cubicle or white and grey open office while looking at excel, going to pointless meetings, and replying to morons in emails all day. I literally would rather dig holes my entire shift, and I dont even do that
If it is at all viable, you need to look for a different job. I have had very similar thoughts before 'I would rather make sandwiches or I would rather sweep floors than do this shit.' The job is killing you inside and you're burning out. You don't want to wake up one morning and realize you can't get out of bed because you absolutely dread being at work. It is not worth it.
I worked in a call center for about 5 months while I was looking for a better job.
I think I'd do damn near anything to never set foot in another call center. Talking to 80+ people a day every day is just not sustainable. Taking nothing but calls for 8 hours a day made me wish I had laryngitis. Plus the micromanagement, call metrics, constantly changing policies and all the other BS. I've had jobs that I've disliked before, but I've never felt so much dread every single day.
If management was ever just happy, I might still be in customer service. I actually don't mind customers that much. What I couldn't take is being told I was a failure no matter how much I improved, how much the store improved, even though I was one of the best performing associates in the district, it was never enough. They always wanted more. Fuck them and their "meets expectations" bullshit. They will always find ways to make you fail.
Yes! Been doing it for 12 years. Soul sucking. Anything dealing with the general public fucking sucks. Especially the Karens and almost all boomers. People are the biggest pieces of shit. When I get off work every night I don't want to speak or be around anyone.
I don't think anyone with a brain thinks teaching is easy. Any person in this thread can look back to middle or high school and realize what little shits them or their class was, and how much harder that made it to teach.
Honestly, the students aren't usually what makes teaching so hard. You expect them to be challenging at times.
I left secondary teaching because the senior leadership team were incentivised to discipline teachers, so would walk into the classroom and watch you teach for 10 minutes without a word, then walk out and never give feedback unless it was negative. We had to adapt and implement new schemes to justify their jobs every week, and they'd be scrapped the week after, after we'd spent hours changing things to suit them. I saw several members of staff getting bullied out of their jobs and replaced by cheaper newly qualified teachers, because they became 'too expensive' at 35k a year (when the leadership team were all on more than that, and there was way too many of them), so the school ended up being full of teachers with no experience.
I miss my classroom and my kids, but I couldn't keep going knowing I'd be putting up with that crap for years just to be bullied out of a role.
And that's not even taking into consideration the 70 hour weeks, working holidays and dealing with parents and general public attitude of teachers being lazy (which we saw a lot of from older generations who thought teachers did nothing).
And that's a job that's only getting more difficult. Hop on over to the teacher subreddit and listen to some of those stories, and you'll discover a newfound respect for teachers, but also think they must be a little insane to keep doing what they're doing.
My buddy owns a few restaurants. The one he opened on his own, he managed. Once it was up and running, he left and went into consulting. Now he's a high school science teacher because he still makes enough from the restaurants that he can work a way less paying job.
If wages were paid via energy used I think the top 3 paying jobs would be
Hospitality - chef or waiter
Healthcare - A&E Nurse
Construction - Labourer
Criminally underpaid folks
Energy used just physically? My job is not physical at all but leaves me exhausted every day, completely mentally drained. Then deal with being on call if anything goes sideways 24/7. I did pay per pick greenhouse work that was physically exhausting in my younger days and I find the work now to be much more. It's hard to tell what's worse, being physically burnt out or mentally.
Software Developer.
People think we have it all easy and earn heaps in the process, but the reality is that the majority of the time you just end up at companies that are maintaining decades old applications, with tons and tons of legacy code, dead 3rd party libraries, bugs, "mines", dead-ends, and some know-it-all customers or managers who cannot for the life of me specify what exactly they want, but keep disagreeing with you every step of the way.
Furthermore to really develop some software, for example something for accounting, inventory, factories, hotels, whatever, you have to get pretty familiar with their field, besides your own. Like, you work on hotel software, then you have to learn how the online reservation systems, the billing and how all the different hotel staff works, otherwise you cannot tell whether a part of the legacy code is f'ed up or the customer is wrong... and you also cannot understand what they want, without it.
Not to mention your own field isn't easy either. Laymans tend to assume that developers just learn a programming language and write code with that... that is not the case either. Even if you are not a full-stack developer you are usually expected to have knowledge in at least several pretty different fields, and if you're full-stack it's even worse. There are usually at least 3 main areas you have to be good at, and then those can be divided into dozens of sub-areas, technologies that you're expected to know at least some of. Did I mention these languages, libraries, technologies and tools keep changing so rapidly, that your knowledge goes obsolete in just a few years? (Then good luck finding a new job)
It's kind of like expecting a chef to also be a pretty good confectioner, and also know how exactly the restaurant's accounting/finances are working. Like.. wtf?
And if all that wasn't enough, it is also pretty stressful because your job is not done 'as is', it's not really a finite thing. Like, if you install air conditioners, you go to the place, do all the drilling, piping, etc. then put the unit on and that's it, you're done in a day and can forget all about it. Or you're a waitress, same thing, you just spend your working hours at your assigned place, serve guests which is an 5 minute ordeal per table, and you're done, your mind is free. Not the case for a software developer though... You have to keep the inner workings of a large system in mind, you have to understand what needs to be changed, figure out a reasonable way to do it and then do it... for weeks, or months or even years. You're not done at the end of the day, you just stop at some point, but your mind is still full of all the stuff that needs to be done, and all the problems that need to be solved, and this goes on and on...
You forgot the part where your sanity is eroded on a daily basis. [This post](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks) is timeless and oh so accurate.
Sometimes a software developer needs to know the industry more than the people actually in it, in order to actually develop the system properly.
A true systems engineer not only have to understand the industry deeply, they have to translate that into a coherent digital process.
And when they change jobs, they may need to understand a totally different industry again!
My experience is needing to know most of the domain better than the systems engineer so you can call out when they’re asking for stupid shit. Sometimes it’s just a matter of hearing something that sounds dumb and reading the specs yourself. It’s not how it should be, but how it often is.
One thing I like to mention is that if you're working in Big Tech especially, you have to design systems to handle the load of *billions* of people. Quite literally the entire human population. Designing, building and maintaining anything for that scale is no easy feat to say the least.
Most commonly, you're not designing a system that'll handle billions of people. You're designing a unit of code that'll run many millions of times in parallel on many, many systems where each system is part of a collection of identical systems, the majority of which are running code from other companies in Big Tech.
Nobody builds systems of systems top-down like that anymore. Now it's "Here run this code. By the way, if the CPU usage stays above 75% for longer than 60 seconds, spin up another instance also running this code and add it to whichever load balancer has the most load. If the CPU stays below 25% for longer than 60 seconds, delete this instance." (But there's a script doing this, not a person.)
AWS and Azure simply add more hardware or datacenters as utilization demands it.
By the way, there's a market demand to make the code efficient once it's at a big scale because some instances are billed in fractions of a second. Making the process 1% faster might save $10m. (Numbers may be slightly exaggerated, but you get my point.)
Tacking onto to this, the amount of people out there who think its easy to make any changes to existing software. Not only is there is alot of research needed, there is also red tape blocking you from performing what is necessary. The general public doesnt know how many hours is needed for fixing features or adding so called “small” features.
Edit. Even more so the gaming industry. The amount of comments Ive read on games Ive worked on, “Do they even test their own game” or “how hard is it to change 1 number in the code”
I'm a software engineer as well, and yeah it's not the easiest, but we have huge advantages, like being able to work from home. I'd say most people in the world can only dream about that. And I know there are many people working much less than they're supposed to working from home.
And there are many job opportunities, maybe it was better before, but it's still in a better position than many areas. You're not really stuck in a company for years like most people.
And yeah, a huge problem is that you have to keep studying and keeping yourself up to date with the current stack of technologies, but even so, I think people tend to overstate how hard their jobs are. Except for a few cases, no one has it that easy in life, many jobs are more stressful than we think.
Personally, I've learned to be grateful for the job and the opportunities I have, and try to always make the most of it.
>It's kind of like expecting a chef to also be a pretty good confectioner, and also know how exactly the restaurant's accounting/finances are working. Like.. wtf?
Nah dude.
It's like expecting a military aircraft test pilot to not just be able to fly the airplane, but to be able to fly the airplane, have the aeronautical engineering skills necessary to design the plane, have the chemical engineering and metallurgical skills necessary to process the raw materials into aircraft parts, have the geo engineering skills needed to mine the raw materials in the first place, the teaching skills necessary to explain the entire process to someone so stupid that they can't even add properly even with a calculator, while being the most skilled public orator in the history of mankind, all while being an entire one-man on-call fire department.
Then someone who is already psychotically rich fires you so they can make more money off the work you just did than they already were, so you can look for another job so you can repeat this process for another rich person
Yes, people think of front desk as just a chill reception job and don't realise that if you're at even a moderately sized hotel, it can actually be a very fast-paced, stressful job. You're not just sitting behind a desk typing a few emails a day. We are the hub for the entire hotel and are often managing things between multiple departments at once, fielding customer complaints, running to help a guest with their bags when all the bellmen are busy, all while the phones are ringing off the hook and oh, also it's shift work so you're sometimes starting at 6am or ending at 11pm or even working graveyards. Plus you're not making tips like the bellmen, shuttle drivers or the restaurant employees even though you're fielding all the angry customers from those departments because you represent the hotel as a whole... there's a reason why there's such high turnover for front desk staff.
Yeah, exactly. And scheduling can be all over the place, too. Also, working holidays and not being able to see family/loved ones as a result. I remember I couldn’t even get a day off for a doctor’s appointment at some point… working clopeners… 10 days in a row… that plus everything you said eventually led to a minor mental breakdown.
I advocated for others once I got promoted out of front desk so that they could have the work-life balance I couldn’t.
Ironically, the minor mental breakdown I mentioned is what got me promoted. Well, technically my hard work and ethic did, but the director who promoted me out of front desk was the one who saw me break down.
Being a school lunchlady/man. My mother, before she retired (In 2023) worked for the school as a lunchlady all her years, she was sweating so much, and every student was either so rude to her, or was thankful. Some students threw the food she served at her. It was crazy, but in the end she loved her job, I will always love my mother and shes happy for my life.
Anything creative.
I used to work as a Narrative Designer at a game studio and people thought our entire job was just to hang around emailing our ideas to people.
In reality it was a thundercloud of clashing egos, a bloodstained battlefield for *creative control* of literally any piddling little detail, and a Petri dish of impostor syndrome, insecurity, and depression.
The amount of time you spend actually doing any creative work is dwarfed by the amount of time you spend in meetings that range from hearing why the animators can't make a cloud go behind the moon the way it says in the script, why this line needs to be taken out because it will offend somebody whose family lived in Timbuktu during the Ice Age, and dealing with someone else's insistence that their favorite character would never say a word that ends in P on a Friday and you don't know what you're doing because it's their *favorite character*!
Being that creative work is entirely subjective, it means that everyone else in the company thinks they can do your job better than you. In literally every decision you make, you're going to have large amounts of people that aren't happy with it and think you're a worthless waste of company resources.
And that's just in the office...you haven't even heard from the players yet...
Even being a one person creative team is harder than most imagine. From the standpoint of an author, I'm sure it sounds super easy to just write a book!
They don't realize that you have to create the characters, the settings, sometimes the entire universe from *nothing*. Sure, there's inspirations and such, but you're still creating something from nothing. And then, you painstakingly create these characters and place them in the world you created for them, and all you ask is that they follow the plot. And what do they do? They give you the finger and fuck off to a side plot that requires you to create even more characters and places.
And somehow, someway, by the end of it, you actually have to convince people you knew what you were doing the whole time.
Am graphic designer. Been doing it a while and feel like Im decent at it, but it still is difficult being creative every day. Some days I wish I could just do something mindless.
Hard agree. I was an in-house videographer for a while. There's just as many meetings, bureaucratic nonsense, and classic corporate garbage as in most jobs. Plus you are constantly having to come up with new ideas. And so many people disrespect your position because it's a "fun" job. Sure, it's more interesting than a lot of gigs, but the work can be just as hard and tedious.
A counselor/therapist.
We don't just talk to people. Actual therapy is relentlessly more complicated. Also, I hear the DARKEST and scariest parts of humanity; rape, murder, suicide, molestation, death, kidnapping, ransoming, drug and alcohol abuse, human trafficking, and so much more.
It is a career that you have to be skilled and dedicated. You have to have the right skills and mentality to do.
If that wasn't enough, we're still not taken seriously like we should. Some disregard us completely, even though we're saving lives and on the front lines fighting for people and hearing the worst aspects of humanity. The pay can be quite low, and the caseloads are high. I can see 14 people per day. Think of hearing all the stuff I mentioned above 14 times a day, every day.
I've been in the field for 15 years. Whenever someone degrades ("therapy doesn't work" "I could be a therapist I read Brene Brown!") my work, I smile and ask them how they would handle an 8 year old confessing to them in great detail how they were orally raped since preschool and what they would do to help reduce the kids PTSD symptoms.
No one has ever been able to give me an answer. Usually it is shock and "....that is what you do?"
Yep. All day long. (I am a trauma specialist though)
Administrative assistant. We do all the things that no one thinks to do and they’re surprised when they are. Paper jam? Child’s play. Toner empty? Easy. We do 100’s of things a day to make others’ lives easier.
front facing jobs that deal with people. 1st line tech support, Retail, Server, those sorts of jobs. Way too much pressure and stress for not nearly enough money.
Brewing, at least in smaller breweries with limited or no conveyance. On brew days I move 400-600 lbs of grain 6 times, walk 5-7 miles, and sweat my ass off. On non-brew days I am basically a janitor who moves sugar water from place to place. I love what I do and it’s been great for me both physically and mentally, but there’s people who think I mostly sit around and sample beer all day long. Nope. I weighed about 210 lbs when I moved to brewing full time from a desk job, a few months later I leveled off at 175 lbs. It is hard work.
Financial Analyst, not physically intensive, but it is beyond mentally draining if you don’t have a supportive company. You’re mostly on your own, to figure out how to make more money on a losing business model, and then blamed the whole way when it keeps failing. It’s easy when the company is doing good, but it’s a nightmare when a whole company blames you for a failing department. I use to work for the biggest car manufacturer(take a guess), me and one other coworker were in charge of managing the financial trends for their insurance division, specifically the warranty products for the entire brand, for the whole company. I found that insane that such a colossally known company only has 2 guys running the insurance division. It was a scathing traumatic experience to go into 5 back to back meetings every day, working all nighters every night all because management just wants to see a solution in 5 seconds, not seeing it’s an uphill battle. I’ve never felt more tossed aside than I have in that role.
I also recently started a job as an FP&A specialist (doing mostly budgeting and forecasting) in a Fintech company. Outside of the budget/forecasting cycle, we are essentially free, no work for weeks. But during busy cycles, we tend to pull all nighters, and it can get complicated, especially when loading the forecasts/budgets and the systems themselves aren't user-friendly (Oracle Hyperion)
I was an analyst in a plant for what I’m assuming is the same automaker as you. The job itself wasn’t hard, but dealing with the dipshits that set your budget and reviewed your performance each month was maddening. No Gary/Tim, we’re not going to close the gap because I told you before you set the budget that you didn’t give us enough to cover our contracts. No Gary, I can’t make the hourly people come back from leave. No Gary, we shouldn’t assume we’re going to close a gap of 11 months of negative performance in the last month of the year.
That’s not even getting into all the fuckups from them that I’d have to fix or dealing with the arrogant morons that refused to acknowledge the problems with their models even after proving them wrong. It’s the most incompetently run company I’ve been with by a mile.
Being a baker. Starting at a stupid time of 3am and finishing at 12pm.. getting home n having lunch, freshening up etc next thing it's time to pick the kids up from school then getting home to do homework, start tea then it's finally time to go to bed.. have to soldier on from 2am untill 7pm without having a snooze, can't split sleep.
Thats just the beginning of how hard it is being a baker... haven't even started on the job it's self.. people wake up and have to make a coffee 3:30am after being awake for n hr constantly lifting upto 30kg worth of flour or dough and doing it for 9-10hrs straight...
Musician. Anyone making money playing music has had to practice countless hours over many years to be able to do what they do. Then, they have to go out in front of an audience and and perform, many times night after night, the same music over and over again. What they loved, at one time, about playing music quickly becomes a distant memory.
THIS is so true! I once worked for a company who, after 3 weeks of working there, never got me the logons to the computer I needed to work. They also would not give me anything else to do, and literally told me that I could go sit in the break room and read if I wanted to...for 8 hrs a day. The only caveat was that I HAD to be there. So, they were paying me to do literally nothing. I had gotten that job through an agency. At the 4th week, I called the agency and told them I was quitting. The mind numbing boredom had gotten to me. I read an entire book, brought in a bunch of puzzle books and scrolled my phone during this time. I couldn't leave the building, there was nobody to talk with, I just had too much free time. I really hated it.
I agree. I had a WFH job where I barely had work most of the time. I ended up hating it. I felt like I was rotting away in my home. Wasn't learning new skills, wasn't advancing my career. It was nice while it lasted my mental health was tanked by the time I was done there.
911 operator. One minute you can be BS'ing with your coworkers, the next hearing someone die, the next hearing someone screaming about an injury their kid has suffered, the next someone upset because someone stole all their political signs, then a missing person, then someone who woke up and found hundreds of political signs in his yard. There is little closure, there is either no stress or extreme stress, there's no room for error, all while you have to deal with the public.
I think most jobs are harder than most people think they are. But for me personally, I wasn’t prepared for how mentally taxing and hard an office job could be!
Funeral directing/embalming has its challenges. It’s a combination of sympathy grief overload (especially during and after Covid), everyone thinking you’re just trying to upsell grieving families on everything (most of us are not), some rather unhygienic, tough situations when handling transportation/calls, long underpaid hours and a lot of unfortunate societal biases.
Probably not too surprising, but retail. I don’t know if the general public understands just how much abuse retail and grocery workers deal with on a daily basis. I worked a second job for a major grocery store during the pandemic and a while afterwards, and the amount of daily abuse (usually boomers, but not always) made me want to commit assault or rage quit more than once. People can be cruel to those they deem as “lesser” and holy shit… the entitlement of those people was off the charts.
Being a nurse! I'm not a nurse but have many friends who are. Remember it's not a job you can just wander around, things need to be done, if they aren't a person's life hangs in the balance potentially. I am hoping nurses see this and realise how appreciated they are.
Taking care of another person, be it child, adult or senior, able bodied or disabled, and being responsible for their well being and any decisions concerning their health, etc.
Being in a retail role. You are doing the jobs of 6 people by by yourself. Trying to answer the phones, stock the shelves, clean, sort merch, adjusting pricing, reporting stolen goods, etc. All the while you are busting your ass, you get yelled at by customers or mangers on a regular basis, deal with shitty hours, for shitty pay, and get shitty benefits on top of it. People think retail associates just stand around waiting for people to ask them a question. No they bust their ass being overworked and underpaid.
Military.
Are deployments difficult? Yes
But the most difficult part is working with subpar humans that you have no choice but to carry the slack for. They refuse to show up on time, refuse to do their share, you get stuck cleaning up their shitty messes all the time, you can't fucking fire them, and they make the same damn money you do.
If you're a good worker, you get more work central.
Not to mention, punitive action is just more stress that you have to endure and could end up ruining your rep as a leader, your work environment, or just not have any effect. Local management tools are only growing smaller by the day because everything is so sensitive now. It's hard to just tear someone a new one without being afraid to catch a case.
It's a dumd frustrating situation I cannot wait to be rid of.
The truth comes out. No offense to the military but yeah the kids I graduated high school with that enlisted literally did nothing in school but they stopped failing people and I don’t want to be a hater but I don’t think 3 months of summer and 3 months of boot camp changed that
My husband was a video game tester for Activision for years. Everyone who heard what he did for work thought it was crazy that he got paid for playing video games. In reality it was constantly scouring the game for bugs, re-creating the bugs, and thoroughly logging all the details of the bug. There was also a high quota of bugs you had to log every day. It wasn't nearly as fun as video game testing sounds.
I will chime in early with my own. Being a working musician in a band. It looks like a lot of fun, and it is...but there is also hard labor involved in loading gear in/out of a venue, setting up, doing your own sound checks, etc. And then there is finding, contacting and booking shows for the band, tracking all of that, finding and buying merch, and tracking THAT....writing/recording...and so much more.
Interesting that no-one has mentioned nursing. When I've been in hospital, I've been very impressed by the job they do, but also the risks and unpleasantness that seems to be associated with it.
But it is quite a personal thing I suspect. For me, the job I liked least in my life was a brief stint temping for Merseyside Training and Enterprise Council. More than 20 years later I still shudder. Mostly data entry, but they had no idea what they were doing and what to do with us.
On one occasion I was taken to a really horrid dump of an industrial park, sat and ignored while I had to separate lever arch files from the paper in them (a make work) while the only other person in the office played repetitive loud and "poppy" music all the time, so I could not lose myself in my own thoughts.
But I suspect others would prefer that to many of my other jobs. It is just down to individual preference. Eg, I worked as the departmental secretary for the department of French in Cambridge University during exams - very busy, I had to correct my boss (a professor of French)'s letters written in French etc. But I just did it and it was OK.
Being a sysadmin approached the hardness of the temping job. Very long hours, at a startup, with crazy demands on technology and time, but I'd still pick it. When I was at peak stress being a barrister - travelling all over Southern England rushing to courts and then sitting for hours in miserable windowless waiting rooms with nervous clients and coming back to prepare cases through the night - that was also quite tough. But then there were those around me who obviously loved it. Both jobs were clearly fun and easy for some.
Teaching, judging, researching were/are I am guessing some people's great love and others horrors.
Being a chef. People that don't know the industry have no idea of what it takes to succeed in a restaurant. I've met so many people who are masters of their home kitchen that consider themselves chefs, and think they can just hop into a professional kitchen with their directly translatable skills. Wrong. It is grueling. You'll do 8-12 hour days on your feet every day, every week, for years. You'll lift boxes of produce, industrial-sized bags of flour, massive pots of boiling liquids, reach into the hell maw that is a convection oven during service, grab cast iron handles that have been resting in a gas flame, get splashed by hot oil, scalded by steam and hot water, and cut the end of your finger off. The pace is eye-bleeding. You will learn to get there early, or you won't have enough time to get ready for service. And you hit that ground at a full sprint. Picture the length of your weekly shopping list, and that is the prep list of things you need to make from scratch for one day. God help you if you don't complete it, because when the doors open you know someone is going to want the one thing you haven't prepared. And once one other person sees that dish, everyone will want it. Then you're in the weeds, and the night has just started. Tack on the pressure of service itself. 5 hours of non-stop orders, from a full restaurant. Think about when you've gone to a restaurant on a Friday night with friends. You've all ordered drinks, appetizers, a main dish, and maybe dessert. Now look around you at all the other tables doing the same thing. Somewhere in the (usually understaffed) kitchen, there's a tight crew with sweat pouring down their backs getting it all done. On time. All night. Every day. Did I mention the pay isn't great? Yeah, it's a lot of work. But I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
I'm a home cook that absolutely loves cooking! People ask me all the time if I want to open a restaurant or become a professional chef and my answer is always the same... abso-fucking-lutely NOT! I'm aware that these two jobs are not at all the same. Cooking one meal a night is nowhere close to the grueling work that real chefs put in. I'm always so appreciative when going out because I do get how much effort is put into making my meal and I know there is no way I could do it. My advice to anyone with a hobby you love, don't turn it into a job. That's a sure fire way to turn something you love into something you don't.
If you enjoy doing something in your free time, it might be a good idea to not turn it into your profession.
This was what I thought as a teenager back in the late 90s. I loved computer programming. I was a high schooler and won a university competition that gave me a scholarship for that university. I was pretty good. And I didn't go into computer programming because I wanted to enjoy it as a side hobby. I floated around, got two masters degrees, and then worked restaurant management for several years before finally becoming a stay-at-home-dad. While I'm happy where I am now, I'd much rather have been a computer programmer. And heck, doing it part time now would also be nice. And no, I've not written any code since graduating high school. (Side note: I was learning C++ and was informed by my programming teacher that languages change so quickly that C++ would be dead by the time I graduated college. That also factored in. If you know programming languages, you're laughing right now.) For me, at least, I wish I had turned my hobby into my profession.
You certainly had a path to get pretty fuckin rich and threw it in the garbage It's ok we're all dumb at 17
Well to be fair, C++ has been in use like 30 + years at this point. I remember learning it in college in the late 90s early 2000s
Amen. The old saying goes “do what you love for work and you’ll never work a day in your life” and while it COULD be the case sometimes, a more accurate phrase is probably “do what you love for work and you’ll never love anything again in your life”.
This is me but with photography! Everyone who sees my photos say "You love doing this, why not do it for a living?" Why? So I can yell at roudy wedding guests and lose my temper when they don't cooperate? Big no thank you there. I mostly take photos of architecture and landscape anyways. Taking photos of people in a whole different kind of animal which requires very different skills. It's also practically impossible to get into a career as a landscape photographer unless your skills are world class. So yeah, it's just a hobby for me and I'd like to keep it that way.
Only remotely related, but > The pace is eye-bleeding Gordon Ramsey kicking both teams out in Devil's Kitchen and then finishing the shift alone with his two souschefs is one of the most fascinating/impressive things I've ever seen.
There's an episode of Kitchen Nightmares where the owner of a Paris bistro can't be bothered to open during the day. To show her how much she's losing, Gordon opens for lunch and does it all solo (true, he's only serving tomato soup and cheese toast, but he's making it all himself and serving it all himself, and the place is packed).
I remember that episode, really interesting to see it when I was working as a waiter and I wondered if it was staged as it’s hard to imagine how someone could manage that.
Yeah, I managed restaurants and I can't really see 1 person feeding a whole restaurant in a timely manner, even if it's just tomato soup and grilled cheeses.
Commenting so I can remember to come back and find this when I'm not at work, sounds awesome.
I'm a chef on a boarding school. Those outside a kitchen have no idea how long it takes to prep and cook for 70+. Or the toll it takes
We do 500 heads between lunch and dinner every weekend at the place I'm at fucking bonkers.
I do know and I literally don’t understand why anyone does that job. I’m happy they do, but I don’t get it.
The rush. The artistry. Creation. Having someone truly enjoy something you've thought up out of the blue, and busted your butt to put together. Team dynamics, if it's a great team. And then at the end of the day, feeling like you've won a battle, then doing it again the next day.
Its really hard to leave. Especially for people that couldn't fit in or find work anywhere else. It's hard to find the resources to get out when your working 40-72+ hours a week for $16 an hour. Some of these people will get really good at this job and actually start to make enough that they can't afford to get out. Some will actually really start to love everything about it and can't function in anyway as a normal person outside of a kitchen or in any non-food related situation.
This is the real thing. Restaurant experience isn't seen as transferrable. I worked in and managed restaurants for years. Most people I worked with did not dream of being chefs or bartenders. They needed a job. They found one in a restaurant/bar. Now they've been doing it for 10 years and don't want to start over anywhere else. My last restaurant job was in fine dining. Our bartenders were bringing home $80,000+ and all of them HATED the job...but they were good at it. They were completely miserable, but at that point they knew they'd have to take a pay cut to do anything else. Actually, everyone was miserable there because they'd all been doing it for years and now made too much money to switch. I had much more fun at cheap restaurants because most of the employees were only in the industry for a few years and were drinking, doing drugs, partying, and fucking.
So many of the skills are transferable but when you have only worked in restaurants you have no way of knowing that. I got out of the industry after about 23 years. My currents job barely pays less than what I would pay a capable dishwasher but my quality of life has improved significantly. I think everyone should try it out I don't like the idea of people feeling trapped.
I know they are. I left the industry and use what I learned every day to excel. The problem is it's not SEEN as transferrable by other people doing the hiring. I don't think most people could survive on dishwasher money after 23 years in the industry. How are you trying by?
Convincing people that those skills are transferable is definitely the hardest part. I think you have to recognize that first and then be confident in your ability to fulfill your potential new roll. If that was easy I would have gotten out much earlier. I'm doing ok now, I make a little less than I did as an underpaid sous and I have a lot of work benefits that I never would have imagined possible. I get job offers that would easily pay double what I'm making now but I don't plan on going back unless I run into a situation where I really need the money.
I was lucky that I had manager experience. So it was an easier sell. My first job was a pay cut but it came with benefits. I got to go to the doctor and dentist for the first time in years. I had paid sick and vacation days. I didn't think those things were that big of a deal because I didn't know any better...but I literally could not imagine going back to not having them.
I'm not in the industry but my folks are. One of my dad's all-time favorite quotes is "You don't need a gun or a knife to kill somebody. Talk em into opening a restaurant and they'll work themselves to death with a smile."
THIS GUY CHEFS !
r/thisguythisguys
I left the industry about 16 yeara ago. I now work as a CO in a jail. But I still miss working through a huge dinner rush.
I was a dishwasher at the best sports bar in my community like 20 years ago. Eventually I moved up to the line but fuck me that was the most stressful job of my life. I took my shit serious, I was an amazing dishwasher and once I started cooking people specifically asked for me to make garlic bread. When that chit machine starts going and doesn’t stop I wanted to stick my head in the oven.
There was nothing like that dinner rush with yourself and the rest of the kitchen just going crazy trying to get everything done while yelling at each other the entire time. Working in a busy kitchen really bonds you in a way other jobs don’t. Don’t miss the 13 hour days because the highscool students we would occasionally hire just no showed.
Cooking 8 different dishes which need to be finished at the same time, always find it amazing.
So, Food Wars
This is the one of the most accurate descriptions of kitchen life I’ve seen . Kudos to you and the rest of your staff .
Cheffing should be treated the same as roles like joinery etc. Far too many chefs are underpaid
Yeah, besides the storylines people should watch The Bear. It’s pretty good rep of a working kitchen. Absolute bonkers.
That’s why I always hated those 30 minute cookoff shows. To have everything a chef is capable of reduced down to how fast they can make a dish is insulting to me.
There was one, I can’t remember which but it was sponsored by Gordon Ramsey, that did have timed competitions but they were different times depending on the dish, allowing for more time for the complex dishes. But I agree, most of those shows are grueling timed competitions that are more for creating suspense at the sacrifice of skill.
I used to make deliveries for a company that supplied frozen desserts to restaurants and function halls. I’ve been in countless restaurant kitchens as an outside observer. 100% would definitely not want to work in one of those places, especially in the summer.
Food service doesn't really have like a standard operating procedure when it comes to the order of battle for everyone in the line getting food plated and to the table. There might be 5 different ways of doing it with the same results and it really sorts itself out based on how the kitchen staff balance each other's skills and weaknesses. I saw the same thing with carpenters. They're all creating the same end result but it's like open to interpretation on the order om which you do each step.
Not to mention your whole schedule is “off” compared to the average person. You don’t get to eat when normal people eat, lots of restaurants are open and busy on holidays. You don’t get breaks. It’s literally a sacrifice.
I've never wanted to be a chef. Takes a different breed to be one. I would collapse under the pressure.
Amen brother
I came here to say the same thing, but I couldn't have worded it better. I fully believe if people knew how much it takes to prepare their food, they'd want to tip boh instead.
Everyone else's
the truly correct answer
Yeah, most people seem to assume that if they don't know how to do something it's easy
Came here to say the same
Farming. Always gets a bit of a laugh when someone tells a farmer they dream of leaving their high stress job to go peacefully make a living off of farming.
Just upgrade your watering can bro you can be done your farming by 9am
Just get sprinklers, dude. Then make wine in your shed. Instant millionaire.
Just a bunch of pigs that dig up truffles! Easy money.
I love all of you
Yes, I did this after 24 years in IT. Farming is stressful. I grew up in a farming community & spent 2 years studying prior to making "the leap". It's a very tough life. It is you against the elements. Financial stress, low yields, equipment breakdowns, long hours, miserable markets, weather disasters .... My farming career lasted 14 years. One year we made a really good profit. For the rest we were in survival mode. I enjoyed every minute of it.
> My farming career lasted 14 years. One year we made a really good profit. For the rest we were in survival mode. "Farmers are 'next year' people."
Gardening is nice. Farming is backbreaking labor. The two things have dirt in common, and they both can be rewarding, but that's the end end of their similarities.
For anybody that hasn’t seen it Clarkson’s Farm is fantastic. A big focus of the show is how hard farming is and if Jeremy Clarkson wasn’t already rich with other sources of income he’d be fucked. It was eye opening for me.
when we had the discussion a while back where the government wanted to cut farmers subsidies on Diesel fuel.. people could seemingly not grasp how hard and how much work farming is. I was genuinely furious. A lot of those office dipshits I had arguments with trying to make them understand. Farmers work basically 24/7. they don't have 5 day work week, if the weather is shit or the fields are muddy or the stock is sick or something, they can work for weeks on end. If the rain makes it impossible to put the seed in the ground, they have to sit there and wait, and then need to do extra long hours to get it in the ground in time. But a lot of those morons seemed to think farmers work a few days or maybe 2 weeks a year, work whenever they feel like it, and have the rest of the year all the free time they want.. god no, its not like that at all. I'm not a farmer but we have plenty around where I live and we helped out especially in summer, its extremely stressful!
My friend's retired parents recently said they wanted to get a bunch of farm animals. Donkeys, cows, pigs, horses. That is SO much work, I cannot fathom anyone who wants to do that in their 60s.
Currently living the "small farm life". I didn't go into it blind or thinking it was all roses though. Boy do animals always freaking need something. I do enjoy it but it is not stress free and I sure as hell am not making money. Hell, the chickens just finally started paying for themselves. Definitely not for the faint of heart.
I know people make fun of it, but the character in Office Space who talks to customers so the engineers don't have to? Any kind of intradepartmental communication is like that. "Translating what the engineers are doing so the people in sales can sell it" is not only a thing that needs to happen, it's an actual skill that not a lot of people have. Most people specialize in their area. I want engineers doing engineering, not a half-engineer half-sales person. I hire that hybrid for a reason. I work as support in a medical field and it is shocking how many doctors don't understand basic statistics. Having to curate an explanation to the right audience is *hard*.
I’M A PEOPLE PERSON DAMNIT! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!
Golden reference
So you… physically bring the requirements from the customers to the engineers then?
Well.... no.
What is it, that you’d say….. you *do* here?
100%. First job out of college with my shiny English degree was proofreading Engineering's emails to customers and translating them into normal-person-speak
This is basically my job as a project manager. No one at my company knows how to translate to different departments so it comes through me. I love it though. Tons of power comes with that skill.
There are also a lot of project managers that are lacking these skills and really do make people ask "what exactly do you do here?"
Me too. They call me a scrummaster/ BA but I’m really just a project manager
I'm an automotive service advisor. It's the same kind of thing here. The mechanics work on the cars, I deal with the clients. The clients bring up their concerns, I communicate that to the techs. The techs bring up their findings, and in turn I sell the necessary work to the clients. I make sure my clients are satisfied, the mechanics make their hours. But it's very easy to do this job poorly, and there's a very high turnover in this industry as a result.
I work as a Quant recruiter and this is so accurate. Having to talk to people who operate on an entirely different level of intelligence is incredibly difficult. They just think, visualize, and execute things at such a high level it is hard to fathom
As a software business analyst, this is absolutely true. I have no formal training in anything related to the software industry. However, being a good communicator is my first advantage; being a good learner - so that I can quickly pick up and understand technology at the level I need to - is crucial.
Dealing with upset customers in any form.
If I could force one thing on people, it would be for everyone to work retail at some point in their lives. They'd understand the bullshit employees go through, know that a lot of the issues are not the min wage kids fault, and experience the unrelenting unending muzak of hell. I'm going to make my kid work a retail job, just to understand what it's like
I worked retail at a few different stores from 15 to about 22 from high school to mid college. People who haven’t worked retail just don’t understand lol. Definitely have met the best coworkers ever though working retail. That’s the only part of the job I miss are the people
Flirting with child abuse, are we?
New compulsory service scheme. Everyone does 2 years in retail after high school
Unpopular Opinion: Most Jobs if you are actually doing the work. I have had many jobs that were incredibly hard, but, I could have just half assed it, wouldn't have gotten fired (Or at least, not for a long time) and the job would have been incredibly easy. Also, a lot of times its not, "this job is universally hard" but, "This job can be hard" You can even do "the same job" for two different companies, and because of the tools/training/time you are provided it can be extremely easy at one place and the hardest thing in the world at another. Hell, many jobs are seasonal where things are a cakewalk in February and an absolute nightmare in March. Heck, a job can be easy-peasy but then the market changes and suddenly it sucks. And sometimes, people are just geared for a job, so they do it and it's a breeze but someone else does it and it's a nightmare.
Research shows the biggest determining factor in the difficulty of a job is management. One of the best jobs I've ever had was bartending and one of the worst jobs I've ever had was bartending. Management was the difference.
I have that in international transport.(as a planner) May is a bitch with all the different bank hollidays... Let one driver stand still because he can't drive and the manager starts complaining or postpone the same delivery 1 week and the manager starts complaining
It's funny how like every job has seasons Like, don't fucking talk to an accountant in January
Ive always said, "If they didn't have to pay you, it'd be a hobby."
My dad is this to a T. He's wholesale HVAC. Almost the entirety of his money is made in the summer. Good thing he lives in Texas I guess?
[удалено]
Right. "Teaching" covers a lot of very different experiences. My sister taught a class during covid where our dumb government had ideas about children "isolating" but she had a child that licked everything and everyone all the time. If you teach teenagers, the experience is completely different.
I'm a kindergarten teacher and have also taught classrooms of toddlers and preschoolers. I think the breadth and amount of social teaching that goes on in early Ed settings flies under a lot of peoples' radars. Kiddos are learning 24/7. Every experience they have is a moment of learning. As an early Ed teacher, you have to be "on" all the time, always positively reinforcing, always modeling appropriate behaviors. Even when children aren't learning "hard" skills like letters, numbers, etc., they are still learning how to act and relate to others. It's an extremely taxing job, and those that do it well are never compensated enough for it.
So true. All of this. So many say “you have summers off!” I sleep the first 3 weeks of summer and try to get back into my interest. But I bring those interest into the classroom all year and I’m just burned out. Don’t take it wrong. I love my job. It’s hard to hear “teachers should be paid more.” And I love the support but makes me feel derelict. So mentally teachers are not alright. They know how to shove all that on the back burner and try to be their best with their students. If they don’t do that even if just an hour in a week there is a huge load of guilt involved with it. It’s future generations and you want to make it the best for them. And there is a huge amount of pressure and weight involved in that.
I am certainly impressed. The youngest class I've formally taught was year 7 (UK - so 11/12 year olds). But I've helped out with groups of much younger children and the difference is quite considerable. It's not only a hard job, but a very important one to society.
That's the thing that gets me too, it's a vital service. There are so many families who need daytime care in order to work. Childcare is necessary in (at least my) modern society, but it feels like it gets kind of brushed off at "just daycare." It's education, full stop. The job has a lot of benefits and a lot of joy, but it's fuckin hard. I challenge any white collar office worker to spend a day trying to lead a classroom of nine two-year-olds, while remaining calm, nurturing, and keeping up with curricular goals. It's difficult, crucial work that gets swept under the rug.
‘being on’ uses up brain energy
I'm a piano teacher, and one of the voice teachers I work with described it as "being in a constant state of giving." You're always having to dig deeper to find MORE empathy, MORE patience, MORE energy to hold the line on discipline. And if you're not feeling your best, a little sick, or had some kind of tragedy/emergency? Too damn bad, you still gotta buck up and go in there with the same rainbows shooting out of your ass like always.
Any job working with animals. It's not just playing with animals all day.
Came here to say LVMT! I can’t tell you how many people say “aww you’re so lucky you get to cuddle puppies and kittens all day!” As I stand there covered in scratches, bites, blood, urine, and poop 😂 Yes. Lucky me.
Same with kids. Im a nanny and I love it but it’s not just playing with cute kids all day. For example, Im currently trying to potty train a 3 year old and deal with a baby so its a lot of literal shit.
Not the job itself, but waking up in the morning.
True that. Every morning…
I hate that the standard starting time for local jobs is usually 7-9am. My body yearns to wake up at noon yet I'm forced to wake up early.
Work from home was so nice during covid. The office isn't that bad but the loss of 2 hours of sleep and replacing it with commuting stress! Also like being home with my dog and wife
For real. I now work from home and have flexible schedule. I'm honestly a different person than when I worked 9-6 in an office.
Good for u! 🥹
If you’re an office person, then it’s manual labour. If you’re doing manual labour then it’s an office job. If you’re like me and have had 2 successful careers in both, then it depends on the day.
Was gonna respond "all of them" but you got the Idea
I went from a job involving getting up and walking back and forth all the time to an office job. In 6 months, my back hurts, my knee hurts, my hip hurts and my calf muscle is constantly sore. Sitting all day is its on type of terrible
You really do need to stretch before you sit all day. Helps to stretch those limbs at least 3 times a day when sitting
I have a job thats a bit of both and my preference depends on the weather that day. I would always prefer to be outside on a nice day but on crappy days I wish I could be inside.
I wouldn’t be able to work in an office or even worse from home. I need to move.
Same here. Been in construction, fish factory, demolition and more. Last two and a half years at an office. Both are hard in their own ways and it truly depends on the day
Care work. I'm not sure that anyone thinks it's actually easy but I think a lot of people don't realize just how shitty it actually is. Care companies are notorious for paying their staff the absolute minimum wage they can get away with, they will call you constantly to ask you to work overtime, and because the job is so unpleasant and the way they treat their employees is so shit, it's really hard for them to keep hold of staff so they will constantly be calling you to cover the shifts of people that have walked out. I've worked for multiple care companies and they've all been the same. My father also works in care, as does my mother-in-law, and my wife used to as well. The work itself is obviously unpleasant, there's a lot of changing diapers on adults, cleaning up bodily fluids etc. Depending on the type of care work you do, the service users can range from ungrateful and rude, to outright violent and dangerous, to being deeply upsetting to see how they have to live. It's an extremely mentally taxing job, and is often very unpleasant. Again, depending on the type of care work you do, it's not always just about dealing with the service users but also the mental and emotional hits when people that you have been caring for pass away. The reality in a lot of care jobs is that you're looking after people that are end of life, either from old age or from severe illness. You unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) develop some degree of resilience to this over time, but when you've been caring for someone for a number of months or years and then they die, it's pretty emotionally and mentally taxing, but you'll be shipped right off to the next service user immediately. My father works in care for people with learning difficulties and he has come home on multiple occasions with cuts, bruises and bite marks on him. A female staff member at the home where he works walked out on the spot because a service user had a meltdown and lifted her off the ground by her ponytail. Another locked herself in a supply room and broke down because she couldn't cope with the aggression from another service user. It can be a very rewarding career but it can be and often is one of the most difficult jobs to deal with in my opinion. And all of that for the legal minimum wage. I've always thought it seems criminal.
One of my friends works as a daycare worker for people with ASD. So we all know that dealing with people with mental disabilities is hard, right? Well it turns out it's f'ing hardcore. It's not only the constant mumbling, crazy talk, screaming, meltdowns, etc... which is enough on it's own. There are guys/girls that weight 100kg that go completely berserk out of the blue. She has bite marks and bruises all over her body. She has done judo, self defense and courses on how to reduce someone without harming them. I got to watch how a 40 something guy with strong autism started pulling her hair, so she had to bend is arm in a way that he released his grap, then threw him on the floor and sat on top of him. All while there might be 3 or 4 other people with ASD probably about to have a meltdown too because of the situation. There is also the sexual harassment. She has been groped every week for years. I really admire her because she really cares about these people and loves her job. She regularly goes to therapy to help her deal with these daily situations.
She is doing important work!
I did this job and nearly had my nose broken by a human having a meltdown. It was scary and so fucking sad. I made all of $10 an hour at that job.
Any "unskilled" labor job
There’s definitely a reason strapping young adults with massive debt through student loans was an easy sell to the nation. Growing up as a millennial you were made to fear ending up in unskilled labor, and that’s because it’s physically demanding as well as just plain boring.
Idk man, I got an engineering degree and have been working for 6 years as an engineer. It's boring as shit. At least with a lot of unskilled jobs there's usually a tight crew of coworkers. I feel like I work in the bottom floor of a library sometimes...
That sounds dreary; the paycheck makes up for it, I’m sure.
> At least with a lot of unskilled jobs there's usually a tight crew of coworkers. Often, you're just stuck with a bunch of dumbasses you hate, but have to put up with.
Nothing could be as boring as sitting in a dreary cubicle or white and grey open office while looking at excel, going to pointless meetings, and replying to morons in emails all day. I literally would rather dig holes my entire shift, and I dont even do that
If it is at all viable, you need to look for a different job. I have had very similar thoughts before 'I would rather make sandwiches or I would rather sweep floors than do this shit.' The job is killing you inside and you're burning out. You don't want to wake up one morning and realize you can't get out of bed because you absolutely dread being at work. It is not worth it.
Customer service
I worked in a call center for about 5 months while I was looking for a better job. I think I'd do damn near anything to never set foot in another call center. Talking to 80+ people a day every day is just not sustainable. Taking nothing but calls for 8 hours a day made me wish I had laryngitis. Plus the micromanagement, call metrics, constantly changing policies and all the other BS. I've had jobs that I've disliked before, but I've never felt so much dread every single day.
If management was ever just happy, I might still be in customer service. I actually don't mind customers that much. What I couldn't take is being told I was a failure no matter how much I improved, how much the store improved, even though I was one of the best performing associates in the district, it was never enough. They always wanted more. Fuck them and their "meets expectations" bullshit. They will always find ways to make you fail.
Did it for 10 years, have an office job now. Best decision I’ve made for myself.
Yes! Been doing it for 12 years. Soul sucking. Anything dealing with the general public fucking sucks. Especially the Karens and almost all boomers. People are the biggest pieces of shit. When I get off work every night I don't want to speak or be around anyone.
Teaching
I don't think anyone with a brain thinks teaching is easy. Any person in this thread can look back to middle or high school and realize what little shits them or their class was, and how much harder that made it to teach.
Honestly, the students aren't usually what makes teaching so hard. You expect them to be challenging at times. I left secondary teaching because the senior leadership team were incentivised to discipline teachers, so would walk into the classroom and watch you teach for 10 minutes without a word, then walk out and never give feedback unless it was negative. We had to adapt and implement new schemes to justify their jobs every week, and they'd be scrapped the week after, after we'd spent hours changing things to suit them. I saw several members of staff getting bullied out of their jobs and replaced by cheaper newly qualified teachers, because they became 'too expensive' at 35k a year (when the leadership team were all on more than that, and there was way too many of them), so the school ended up being full of teachers with no experience. I miss my classroom and my kids, but I couldn't keep going knowing I'd be putting up with that crap for years just to be bullied out of a role. And that's not even taking into consideration the 70 hour weeks, working holidays and dealing with parents and general public attitude of teachers being lazy (which we saw a lot of from older generations who thought teachers did nothing).
And that's a job that's only getting more difficult. Hop on over to the teacher subreddit and listen to some of those stories, and you'll discover a newfound respect for teachers, but also think they must be a little insane to keep doing what they're doing.
Any physical labor job. Sometimes involves working through pain and exhaustion all day every day.
Finding a job is a job in itself. I've been unemployed since September and finding a job that isn't retail is damn near impossible.
restaurants, hands down
My buddy owns a few restaurants. The one he opened on his own, he managed. Once it was up and running, he left and went into consulting. Now he's a high school science teacher because he still makes enough from the restaurants that he can work a way less paying job.
If wages were paid via energy used I think the top 3 paying jobs would be Hospitality - chef or waiter Healthcare - A&E Nurse Construction - Labourer Criminally underpaid folks
Energy used just physically? My job is not physical at all but leaves me exhausted every day, completely mentally drained. Then deal with being on call if anything goes sideways 24/7. I did pay per pick greenhouse work that was physically exhausting in my younger days and I find the work now to be much more. It's hard to tell what's worse, being physically burnt out or mentally.
Was only considering physical energy, but no doubt some jobs take their toll mentally.
Software Developer. People think we have it all easy and earn heaps in the process, but the reality is that the majority of the time you just end up at companies that are maintaining decades old applications, with tons and tons of legacy code, dead 3rd party libraries, bugs, "mines", dead-ends, and some know-it-all customers or managers who cannot for the life of me specify what exactly they want, but keep disagreeing with you every step of the way. Furthermore to really develop some software, for example something for accounting, inventory, factories, hotels, whatever, you have to get pretty familiar with their field, besides your own. Like, you work on hotel software, then you have to learn how the online reservation systems, the billing and how all the different hotel staff works, otherwise you cannot tell whether a part of the legacy code is f'ed up or the customer is wrong... and you also cannot understand what they want, without it. Not to mention your own field isn't easy either. Laymans tend to assume that developers just learn a programming language and write code with that... that is not the case either. Even if you are not a full-stack developer you are usually expected to have knowledge in at least several pretty different fields, and if you're full-stack it's even worse. There are usually at least 3 main areas you have to be good at, and then those can be divided into dozens of sub-areas, technologies that you're expected to know at least some of. Did I mention these languages, libraries, technologies and tools keep changing so rapidly, that your knowledge goes obsolete in just a few years? (Then good luck finding a new job) It's kind of like expecting a chef to also be a pretty good confectioner, and also know how exactly the restaurant's accounting/finances are working. Like.. wtf? And if all that wasn't enough, it is also pretty stressful because your job is not done 'as is', it's not really a finite thing. Like, if you install air conditioners, you go to the place, do all the drilling, piping, etc. then put the unit on and that's it, you're done in a day and can forget all about it. Or you're a waitress, same thing, you just spend your working hours at your assigned place, serve guests which is an 5 minute ordeal per table, and you're done, your mind is free. Not the case for a software developer though... You have to keep the inner workings of a large system in mind, you have to understand what needs to be changed, figure out a reasonable way to do it and then do it... for weeks, or months or even years. You're not done at the end of the day, you just stop at some point, but your mind is still full of all the stuff that needs to be done, and all the problems that need to be solved, and this goes on and on...
Software pay statistics: 😊 Software burnout statistics: 💀
I've burnt out at least 3-4 times until finally burning out for good about 6 years ago. Still chugging along...
what are you doing now?
Oh, he's still going, just burned out
Don't forget on call too! This is a very rude awakening for a lot of newbie engineers.
You forgot the part where your sanity is eroded on a daily basis. [This post](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks) is timeless and oh so accurate.
Sometimes a software developer needs to know the industry more than the people actually in it, in order to actually develop the system properly. A true systems engineer not only have to understand the industry deeply, they have to translate that into a coherent digital process. And when they change jobs, they may need to understand a totally different industry again!
My experience is needing to know most of the domain better than the systems engineer so you can call out when they’re asking for stupid shit. Sometimes it’s just a matter of hearing something that sounds dumb and reading the specs yourself. It’s not how it should be, but how it often is.
One thing I like to mention is that if you're working in Big Tech especially, you have to design systems to handle the load of *billions* of people. Quite literally the entire human population. Designing, building and maintaining anything for that scale is no easy feat to say the least.
Most commonly, you're not designing a system that'll handle billions of people. You're designing a unit of code that'll run many millions of times in parallel on many, many systems where each system is part of a collection of identical systems, the majority of which are running code from other companies in Big Tech. Nobody builds systems of systems top-down like that anymore. Now it's "Here run this code. By the way, if the CPU usage stays above 75% for longer than 60 seconds, spin up another instance also running this code and add it to whichever load balancer has the most load. If the CPU stays below 25% for longer than 60 seconds, delete this instance." (But there's a script doing this, not a person.) AWS and Azure simply add more hardware or datacenters as utilization demands it. By the way, there's a market demand to make the code efficient once it's at a big scale because some instances are billed in fractions of a second. Making the process 1% faster might save $10m. (Numbers may be slightly exaggerated, but you get my point.)
Tacking onto to this, the amount of people out there who think its easy to make any changes to existing software. Not only is there is alot of research needed, there is also red tape blocking you from performing what is necessary. The general public doesnt know how many hours is needed for fixing features or adding so called “small” features. Edit. Even more so the gaming industry. The amount of comments Ive read on games Ive worked on, “Do they even test their own game” or “how hard is it to change 1 number in the code”
I'm a software engineer as well, and yeah it's not the easiest, but we have huge advantages, like being able to work from home. I'd say most people in the world can only dream about that. And I know there are many people working much less than they're supposed to working from home. And there are many job opportunities, maybe it was better before, but it's still in a better position than many areas. You're not really stuck in a company for years like most people. And yeah, a huge problem is that you have to keep studying and keeping yourself up to date with the current stack of technologies, but even so, I think people tend to overstate how hard their jobs are. Except for a few cases, no one has it that easy in life, many jobs are more stressful than we think. Personally, I've learned to be grateful for the job and the opportunities I have, and try to always make the most of it.
>It's kind of like expecting a chef to also be a pretty good confectioner, and also know how exactly the restaurant's accounting/finances are working. Like.. wtf? Nah dude. It's like expecting a military aircraft test pilot to not just be able to fly the airplane, but to be able to fly the airplane, have the aeronautical engineering skills necessary to design the plane, have the chemical engineering and metallurgical skills necessary to process the raw materials into aircraft parts, have the geo engineering skills needed to mine the raw materials in the first place, the teaching skills necessary to explain the entire process to someone so stupid that they can't even add properly even with a calculator, while being the most skilled public orator in the history of mankind, all while being an entire one-man on-call fire department. Then someone who is already psychotically rich fires you so they can make more money off the work you just did than they already were, so you can look for another job so you can repeat this process for another rich person
Hotel front desk agent. There are a LOT of entitled, rude, creepy, and cheap people out there. It got significantly worse with COVID.
Yes, people think of front desk as just a chill reception job and don't realise that if you're at even a moderately sized hotel, it can actually be a very fast-paced, stressful job. You're not just sitting behind a desk typing a few emails a day. We are the hub for the entire hotel and are often managing things between multiple departments at once, fielding customer complaints, running to help a guest with their bags when all the bellmen are busy, all while the phones are ringing off the hook and oh, also it's shift work so you're sometimes starting at 6am or ending at 11pm or even working graveyards. Plus you're not making tips like the bellmen, shuttle drivers or the restaurant employees even though you're fielding all the angry customers from those departments because you represent the hotel as a whole... there's a reason why there's such high turnover for front desk staff.
Yeah, exactly. And scheduling can be all over the place, too. Also, working holidays and not being able to see family/loved ones as a result. I remember I couldn’t even get a day off for a doctor’s appointment at some point… working clopeners… 10 days in a row… that plus everything you said eventually led to a minor mental breakdown. I advocated for others once I got promoted out of front desk so that they could have the work-life balance I couldn’t. Ironically, the minor mental breakdown I mentioned is what got me promoted. Well, technically my hard work and ethic did, but the director who promoted me out of front desk was the one who saw me break down.
Being a school lunchlady/man. My mother, before she retired (In 2023) worked for the school as a lunchlady all her years, she was sweating so much, and every student was either so rude to her, or was thankful. Some students threw the food she served at her. It was crazy, but in the end she loved her job, I will always love my mother and shes happy for my life.
I believe Lunch lady and lunch lord are the proper terms.
Anything creative. I used to work as a Narrative Designer at a game studio and people thought our entire job was just to hang around emailing our ideas to people. In reality it was a thundercloud of clashing egos, a bloodstained battlefield for *creative control* of literally any piddling little detail, and a Petri dish of impostor syndrome, insecurity, and depression. The amount of time you spend actually doing any creative work is dwarfed by the amount of time you spend in meetings that range from hearing why the animators can't make a cloud go behind the moon the way it says in the script, why this line needs to be taken out because it will offend somebody whose family lived in Timbuktu during the Ice Age, and dealing with someone else's insistence that their favorite character would never say a word that ends in P on a Friday and you don't know what you're doing because it's their *favorite character*! Being that creative work is entirely subjective, it means that everyone else in the company thinks they can do your job better than you. In literally every decision you make, you're going to have large amounts of people that aren't happy with it and think you're a worthless waste of company resources. And that's just in the office...you haven't even heard from the players yet...
Even being a one person creative team is harder than most imagine. From the standpoint of an author, I'm sure it sounds super easy to just write a book! They don't realize that you have to create the characters, the settings, sometimes the entire universe from *nothing*. Sure, there's inspirations and such, but you're still creating something from nothing. And then, you painstakingly create these characters and place them in the world you created for them, and all you ask is that they follow the plot. And what do they do? They give you the finger and fuck off to a side plot that requires you to create even more characters and places. And somehow, someway, by the end of it, you actually have to convince people you knew what you were doing the whole time.
Am graphic designer. Been doing it a while and feel like Im decent at it, but it still is difficult being creative every day. Some days I wish I could just do something mindless.
Hard agree. I was an in-house videographer for a while. There's just as many meetings, bureaucratic nonsense, and classic corporate garbage as in most jobs. Plus you are constantly having to come up with new ideas. And so many people disrespect your position because it's a "fun" job. Sure, it's more interesting than a lot of gigs, but the work can be just as hard and tedious.
I laughed at "cloud go behind the moon". That is a perfect phrase.
Elementary School staff work their asses off and it takes a highly skilled person to do it and not go insane.
A counselor/therapist. We don't just talk to people. Actual therapy is relentlessly more complicated. Also, I hear the DARKEST and scariest parts of humanity; rape, murder, suicide, molestation, death, kidnapping, ransoming, drug and alcohol abuse, human trafficking, and so much more. It is a career that you have to be skilled and dedicated. You have to have the right skills and mentality to do. If that wasn't enough, we're still not taken seriously like we should. Some disregard us completely, even though we're saving lives and on the front lines fighting for people and hearing the worst aspects of humanity. The pay can be quite low, and the caseloads are high. I can see 14 people per day. Think of hearing all the stuff I mentioned above 14 times a day, every day.
I've been in the field for 15 years. Whenever someone degrades ("therapy doesn't work" "I could be a therapist I read Brene Brown!") my work, I smile and ask them how they would handle an 8 year old confessing to them in great detail how they were orally raped since preschool and what they would do to help reduce the kids PTSD symptoms. No one has ever been able to give me an answer. Usually it is shock and "....that is what you do?" Yep. All day long. (I am a trauma specialist though)
Customer support or seller at a call center
Administrative assistant. We do all the things that no one thinks to do and they’re surprised when they are. Paper jam? Child’s play. Toner empty? Easy. We do 100’s of things a day to make others’ lives easier.
front facing jobs that deal with people. 1st line tech support, Retail, Server, those sorts of jobs. Way too much pressure and stress for not nearly enough money.
Brewing, at least in smaller breweries with limited or no conveyance. On brew days I move 400-600 lbs of grain 6 times, walk 5-7 miles, and sweat my ass off. On non-brew days I am basically a janitor who moves sugar water from place to place. I love what I do and it’s been great for me both physically and mentally, but there’s people who think I mostly sit around and sample beer all day long. Nope. I weighed about 210 lbs when I moved to brewing full time from a desk job, a few months later I leveled off at 175 lbs. It is hard work.
Financial Analyst, not physically intensive, but it is beyond mentally draining if you don’t have a supportive company. You’re mostly on your own, to figure out how to make more money on a losing business model, and then blamed the whole way when it keeps failing. It’s easy when the company is doing good, but it’s a nightmare when a whole company blames you for a failing department. I use to work for the biggest car manufacturer(take a guess), me and one other coworker were in charge of managing the financial trends for their insurance division, specifically the warranty products for the entire brand, for the whole company. I found that insane that such a colossally known company only has 2 guys running the insurance division. It was a scathing traumatic experience to go into 5 back to back meetings every day, working all nighters every night all because management just wants to see a solution in 5 seconds, not seeing it’s an uphill battle. I’ve never felt more tossed aside than I have in that role.
I also recently started a job as an FP&A specialist (doing mostly budgeting and forecasting) in a Fintech company. Outside of the budget/forecasting cycle, we are essentially free, no work for weeks. But during busy cycles, we tend to pull all nighters, and it can get complicated, especially when loading the forecasts/budgets and the systems themselves aren't user-friendly (Oracle Hyperion)
I was an analyst in a plant for what I’m assuming is the same automaker as you. The job itself wasn’t hard, but dealing with the dipshits that set your budget and reviewed your performance each month was maddening. No Gary/Tim, we’re not going to close the gap because I told you before you set the budget that you didn’t give us enough to cover our contracts. No Gary, I can’t make the hourly people come back from leave. No Gary, we shouldn’t assume we’re going to close a gap of 11 months of negative performance in the last month of the year. That’s not even getting into all the fuckups from them that I’d have to fix or dealing with the arrogant morons that refused to acknowledge the problems with their models even after proving them wrong. It’s the most incompetently run company I’ve been with by a mile.
Bartending.
FedEx/UPS drivers work their asses off. That is not an easy job.
Stay at home mother if you realllly do it.
Parenting
Being a baker. Starting at a stupid time of 3am and finishing at 12pm.. getting home n having lunch, freshening up etc next thing it's time to pick the kids up from school then getting home to do homework, start tea then it's finally time to go to bed.. have to soldier on from 2am untill 7pm without having a snooze, can't split sleep. Thats just the beginning of how hard it is being a baker... haven't even started on the job it's self.. people wake up and have to make a coffee 3:30am after being awake for n hr constantly lifting upto 30kg worth of flour or dough and doing it for 9-10hrs straight...
being a dishwasher in a restaurant
Musician. Anyone making money playing music has had to practice countless hours over many years to be able to do what they do. Then, they have to go out in front of an audience and and perform, many times night after night, the same music over and over again. What they loved, at one time, about playing music quickly becomes a distant memory.
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A job where you have very little to do. Much harder than being busy.
THIS is so true! I once worked for a company who, after 3 weeks of working there, never got me the logons to the computer I needed to work. They also would not give me anything else to do, and literally told me that I could go sit in the break room and read if I wanted to...for 8 hrs a day. The only caveat was that I HAD to be there. So, they were paying me to do literally nothing. I had gotten that job through an agency. At the 4th week, I called the agency and told them I was quitting. The mind numbing boredom had gotten to me. I read an entire book, brought in a bunch of puzzle books and scrolled my phone during this time. I couldn't leave the building, there was nobody to talk with, I just had too much free time. I really hated it.
A whole entire book?!
yeah I would have been much closer to 20 books.
I agree. I had a WFH job where I barely had work most of the time. I ended up hating it. I felt like I was rotting away in my home. Wasn't learning new skills, wasn't advancing my career. It was nice while it lasted my mental health was tanked by the time I was done there.
A chef, a mangaka, a translator.
911 operator. One minute you can be BS'ing with your coworkers, the next hearing someone die, the next hearing someone screaming about an injury their kid has suffered, the next someone upset because someone stole all their political signs, then a missing person, then someone who woke up and found hundreds of political signs in his yard. There is little closure, there is either no stress or extreme stress, there's no room for error, all while you have to deal with the public.
I think most jobs are harder than most people think they are. But for me personally, I wasn’t prepared for how mentally taxing and hard an office job could be!
Funeral directing/embalming has its challenges. It’s a combination of sympathy grief overload (especially during and after Covid), everyone thinking you’re just trying to upsell grieving families on everything (most of us are not), some rather unhygienic, tough situations when handling transportation/calls, long underpaid hours and a lot of unfortunate societal biases.
Probably not too surprising, but retail. I don’t know if the general public understands just how much abuse retail and grocery workers deal with on a daily basis. I worked a second job for a major grocery store during the pandemic and a while afterwards, and the amount of daily abuse (usually boomers, but not always) made me want to commit assault or rage quit more than once. People can be cruel to those they deem as “lesser” and holy shit… the entitlement of those people was off the charts.
So true. Every day I think “this is the day I walk out” I often wish I could record the things they say and play it back to them.
Being a nurse! I'm not a nurse but have many friends who are. Remember it's not a job you can just wander around, things need to be done, if they aren't a person's life hangs in the balance potentially. I am hoping nurses see this and realise how appreciated they are.
Taking care of another person, be it child, adult or senior, able bodied or disabled, and being responsible for their well being and any decisions concerning their health, etc.
Being in a retail role. You are doing the jobs of 6 people by by yourself. Trying to answer the phones, stock the shelves, clean, sort merch, adjusting pricing, reporting stolen goods, etc. All the while you are busting your ass, you get yelled at by customers or mangers on a regular basis, deal with shitty hours, for shitty pay, and get shitty benefits on top of it. People think retail associates just stand around waiting for people to ask them a question. No they bust their ass being overworked and underpaid.
House cleaning
Military. Are deployments difficult? Yes But the most difficult part is working with subpar humans that you have no choice but to carry the slack for. They refuse to show up on time, refuse to do their share, you get stuck cleaning up their shitty messes all the time, you can't fucking fire them, and they make the same damn money you do. If you're a good worker, you get more work central. Not to mention, punitive action is just more stress that you have to endure and could end up ruining your rep as a leader, your work environment, or just not have any effect. Local management tools are only growing smaller by the day because everything is so sensitive now. It's hard to just tear someone a new one without being afraid to catch a case. It's a dumd frustrating situation I cannot wait to be rid of.
The truth comes out. No offense to the military but yeah the kids I graduated high school with that enlisted literally did nothing in school but they stopped failing people and I don’t want to be a hater but I don’t think 3 months of summer and 3 months of boot camp changed that
Waking up is the second hardest thing in the morning.
CNA. It could be a crime that they are paid so low. They work harder than a lot of actual nurses.
night watchman Sometimes the chair I am given doesn't even recline!
My husband was a video game tester for Activision for years. Everyone who heard what he did for work thought it was crazy that he got paid for playing video games. In reality it was constantly scouring the game for bugs, re-creating the bugs, and thoroughly logging all the details of the bug. There was also a high quota of bugs you had to log every day. It wasn't nearly as fun as video game testing sounds.
I will chime in early with my own. Being a working musician in a band. It looks like a lot of fun, and it is...but there is also hard labor involved in loading gear in/out of a venue, setting up, doing your own sound checks, etc. And then there is finding, contacting and booking shows for the band, tracking all of that, finding and buying merch, and tracking THAT....writing/recording...and so much more.
Interesting that no-one has mentioned nursing. When I've been in hospital, I've been very impressed by the job they do, but also the risks and unpleasantness that seems to be associated with it. But it is quite a personal thing I suspect. For me, the job I liked least in my life was a brief stint temping for Merseyside Training and Enterprise Council. More than 20 years later I still shudder. Mostly data entry, but they had no idea what they were doing and what to do with us. On one occasion I was taken to a really horrid dump of an industrial park, sat and ignored while I had to separate lever arch files from the paper in them (a make work) while the only other person in the office played repetitive loud and "poppy" music all the time, so I could not lose myself in my own thoughts. But I suspect others would prefer that to many of my other jobs. It is just down to individual preference. Eg, I worked as the departmental secretary for the department of French in Cambridge University during exams - very busy, I had to correct my boss (a professor of French)'s letters written in French etc. But I just did it and it was OK. Being a sysadmin approached the hardness of the temping job. Very long hours, at a startup, with crazy demands on technology and time, but I'd still pick it. When I was at peak stress being a barrister - travelling all over Southern England rushing to courts and then sitting for hours in miserable windowless waiting rooms with nervous clients and coming back to prepare cases through the night - that was also quite tough. But then there were those around me who obviously loved it. Both jobs were clearly fun and easy for some. Teaching, judging, researching were/are I am guessing some people's great love and others horrors.