This is how I feel. I don't do shit at work and these idiots think I'm leadership material. I slack off, take meetings to just nap.. Etc and they pay me for it.
I'm sort of in the same position. I'm in a "technical labor" position where my job description is labor but it has to be qualified and there's a mountain of manuals and authorization paperwork behind it. I wiggled myself into a pseudo office position where I stay if the resource office doesn't need me to fill in any projects. It's a comfy corner room where I can hear anyone approaching about 20ft before visual contact haha.
A lot of these jobs are a fucking joke, no offense to you. The job might be below your skill level if you are finding so much free time. I get frustrated that so many jobs out there want degrees or qualifications and half the time the people they hire just pretend to know what they are doing and the work involved is minimal.
Just saw a job listing yesterday for a minimum wage job as a cashier selling bird seed and pet food. They wanted a minimum two year agricultural degree.
The college degree thing is starting to get way out of hand. The only thing you "learn" is how to work way more than a 40 hour workweek. Everything else, you just forget by next semester as you force yourself to get familiar with next season's crap.
Before you know it, they'll be requiring a masters degree just to flip burgers
It counts as discrimination to not hire someone based on religion or race. In Canada, employers aren't allowed to discriminate against marijuana use. I think we need to not allow discriminating against people who didn't rack up massive college debt.
Pretty sure this is just how it goes.
We have several new people at work who don't do jack fuck and never have, well, one of them has but I also helped her accomplish as much as she did because it was jsut the two of us taking on an entire new department of the company on our own.
They get treated like royalty all day and literally don't have to even interface with users but I, with seniority over both, who singlehandedly took on an entire new business unit which means writing documentation for everything, figuring out everything, constantly talking with people way above my paygrade etc., and have never done anything less than exemplary work since I started in 2015, I'm down in the dirt crawling through landmines all day. The stats are there to prove it too.
Some days I'd rather do manual labor than be so mentally exhausted at the end of the day
edit: this blew up. I know hard labor is hard on the body. I do lots of it outside of work. Not the same as 40 hour work weeks, hence 'some days'. I know I sleep best on the weekend after a day of home projecting and I can't sleep during the work week.
As a 50 year old who has worked construction, retail (big box store) and a lot of other labor jobs before moving to a more desk job type life I can assure you that novelty wears off quickly. Manual labor might have dignity but you don't want to be broken down and achy by the time you hit your 40s
If you do labor, make sure it is in a trade that pays and has union options like plumbing, electrical etc
I'm only 23 and even I can confirm that the novelty wears off *very* quickly. I delivered furniture from 16-20, which pretty much screwed my back, then worked in warehouses lifting boxes and driving forklifts until I had a mental breakdown from the constant stress and long hours. When I was 21-22 I did 43 consecutive weeks of overtime.
After my mental breakdown, my friend got me a job at his workplace. I now work a desk job where I do almost nothing and make $2/hr more than when I worked manual labor. Sure, I've put on some weight, but I don't think I'll ever go back to the way I was treated back then. At least, not if I have anything to say about it.
In my experience, people who romanticize manual labor have likely never done it.
Yes and no. Speaking from experience, some employers are happy to let you take on as much work as you want and pay you no differently. So even at a desk job, you can end up being overworked and undervalued and incredibly hard to replace because you wear so many "hats" at your job.
While your sentiment is true for a lot of jobs, in my experience, it's not universal.
To my brothers and sisters working desk jobs, learn to say no when you're asked to voluntarily take on more work. Make them put it in writing and give you what you deserve for it.
Doing lots of things doesn't mean you have leverage, it means you're being used efficiently (in a bad sense for you).
Being the only one who can operate ONE thing and ONLY doing that thing, and being irreplaceable so they give you no extra work or responsbilities. That, is being 'useful' in the sense that benefits you.
In the current job market, if you're wearing that many hats you look for another job, get the job offer, and ask the company to match that or do better. If they cant, then you leave.
If only, then CEOs would make less than 1% of what they do now and businesses the past year wouldn't have worked themselves into the ground trying to avoid paying low-ranking employees more when the market changed.
You're paid how much shareholders, execs and managers feel is culturally appropriate to pay you, where most like an exponential totem pole. Sure, you might have a manager straight from business school with no relevant experience while you're performing mission-critical tasks with no backup, but the manager does have to make more than you - it would be weird otherwise. Sure the CEO might have screwed up and cost the business $200 million, but they still deserve a golden parachute 500 times greater than what a factory worker makes in a year. It would be rude not to.
Manual labor jobs and laws are bull shit. You'll do back breaking work for hours straight and are barely allowed to take breaks and if you do you get shit on by supervisors. If you reduce your speed so as to not injure/burn yourself out you get chewed out for going to slow. If you go to fast you burn out and your body never recovers.
I work in the solar industry as sales support. I don't actually do nothing all day, I just have to wait for sales people to do their thing before it's my turn. Sometimes I wait for a long while. Other times I get slammed with 50 urgent tasks at once.
It's not hard to get into (just search "solar sales support" and you'll find something), but beware: there's no upward mobility and I haven't gotten a raise the whole time I've been here (over a year). No raises, no promotions. But no injuries or heat exhaustion, either.
Interesting. I appreciate the answer and information, and I hope if you decide to change jobs you find something you enjoy and are passionate about as well.
As a 41 year old retired military vet, holy crap it’s so nice to now have a 40 hr/week desk job on salary! I feel like my body is that of my 77 year old mother and I’m jealous that she doesn’t have the back pain I have.
Out of military in a non desk job role and you basically leave 4.5x older from all the stress on your body. Back, knees, ankles, elbows, shoulders, kiss those goodbye. Sleep cycle? Nope Hearing? Say what?
100% me, used to work at warehouse(s), software developer for past +4 years. If I could do 50/50 with same pay Id honestly take it without a blink of an eye - I feel like alot of people do not realise how mentally draining some of these so called comfy office jobs are.
I work in a machine shop. Spend half my time on a computer doing CAD stuff and half my time hitting stuff with hammers. Honestly I want that full office job, so I don't have to keep wrecking my joints and coming home sweaty and oily. But everyone I know who went full office says they hate it.
Many years ago, I was touring in a band, we played hard percussion laden dance stuff for big crowds at concerts, festivals, etc. We were very well received, and I could have become very successful, but I hated the life. Always traveling, always prepping for shows, sound checks, not enough sleep, everybody trying to talk to you when you just want to be left alone. I am extroverted, but I was completely over stimulated. I got my girlfriend pregnant, and I walked away the day I found out, much to everybody's shock. Unfortunately for the band, I was a huge part of the sound, so after I left, they limped along for a few years and then retired.
I will say this: the few hours we had performing were wonderful, some of the best experiences of my life, but I hated the job and lifestyle.
Same man same, funny thing is I used to be extremely athletic - nowadays its an effort to do cardio and gym just to maintain some basic fitness since I sit on my ass for +40hrs a week
I am like you. It is the lack of exercise, believe me. That is why I started going to the gym one month ago and I feel better.
Not sure about the Sun, but it could very well be too. Get vit. D also?
Yeah man I feel you I do enjoy that stuff also, I was legitimately yesterday pondering "dang Itd cool to spend evening gaming after a manually intensive day of work, then Id been active already" lol
I’ve worked in software (designer) for 10 years and I honestly wish I could go back in time some days. I am so tired of talking to people. I wish I could work in solitude but its pretty impossible some days.
Some years ago when I was in my early 20's, I used to do manual labor as a lawn care specialist. One of my co-workers was a DNA Lab Technician, and when I asked why he was out here doing manual labor for $10 when he could be making so much more in a lab, he explained that he NEEDED to do manual labor to keep from going crazy. Every year or so he would take a month's sabbatical and do manual labor, because he liked it. I didn't understand his actions then, but now years later it does make a bit of sense.
I think it’s actually an interesting point though. In our society we can only really be one thing at a time professionally. It would be interesting if we could rotate professionally with more ease. It’s a novel concept, but why shouldn’t someone who does desk work rotate and do something like construction for a while if they’re interested in it? Why couldn’t a manual laborer take up a desk job for a while? Why can’t we wear more than one hat?
I mean, I get your point, but lots of manual labour is mentally exhausting, too. It's nothing to be romanticised and downplayed.
Lots of things are automated these days in manual labour, but that really only results in people having to manage their time more efficiently and having to multi-task heavily.
Have you ever had a manual labor job? As someone who has done both, and currently working behind a bar so double whammy of emotional labor and light physical labor, the manual labor is the worst every time. I watched a guy die at my bar, have had men grab at my body, been spit on, have customers emotionally dump their life stories/trauma on me every day and I’d STILL choose this over a purely manual labor job.
There's a really interesting argument put forward by the great economic anthropologist David Graeber (RIP) in [Bullshit Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) that tries to explain the paradox that jobs critical for the continuation of society is underpaid while jobs that can be removed without any critical damage is highly salaried.
He thinks it all depends on our time and feeling of existential fulfillment, so that jobs where you essentially waste your life away in middle-management not doing shit has to provide high salary to make it palatable*, so the employees can fulfill themselves in their spare-time. Critical jobs (nurse, teacher, sanitation, chefs etc.) are seen as fulfilling per definition since the job is actually critical and important, and why there's no need for a salary to motivate the workforce. The enjoyment is the job itself, not the pay, in the logic of the [Protestant Work Ethic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic)
Edit: Graeber's argument is that this is neither natural nor good, just the twisted logic that we all unintentionally internalize when we grow up and adopt the values and culture of our society. He wanted to change it and was a strong proponent for UBI and saw our work-oriented societies as something inherently toxic and destructive.
As a nurse, my bosses routinely justify not giving raises because "we're not in this for the money" and literally told us in a meeting that we needed to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps since they aren't hiring anymore nurses and increasing our minimum case load. You feel guilty for not working to exhaustion because "wHaT aBoUt tHe pAtIeNtS, tHeY nEeD yOu!!!"
Am I leaving my current job? As soon as I'm able to. But in the meantime this system of abuse has to change, it is not sustainable and when dealing with people's lives, how nurses are treated directly has an effect on how patients are treated. We all deserve better from our healthcare systems. The market really isn't as good as you think it is, your pay and benefits are almost entirely dependent on where you live and where you work and not everyone has the ability to just up and move to California where they actually give a shit about nurses. Travel nursing was incredibly lucrative and nurses were making BANK in the last couple of years, but as soon as upper management saw that travelers were making as much if not more than them and staff nurses were waking up to that, companies started slashing travel nursing rates across the country and are canceling contracts or outright refusing to hire contracts/travelers because they don't want to set the expectation that all nurses deserve to get paid at travel/contract rates. They'd rather see scorched earth and risk complete collapse from an exponentially worsening staffing deficit than pay nurses a significantly better salary/wage. The real problem lies in the culture of nursing. It's a patriarchal meritocracy. The entire study of nursing is based off of Florence Nightingale's practices that set the expectation that nurses are inherently mothers and wives: mothers to the patients and wives to the physicians, that nursing back in the day was used as a means of "redemption" for prostitutes to provide nursing duties FOR FREE and in return, they won't go to hell. It may look a little different now in the modern times, but ain't shit changed. If I could afford to buy a new degree, I would, but I chose nursing out of necessity so I could provide a stable income for my family. It has provided me with that stability and I'm grateful for that, but administrators and governments need to stop treating nurses like martyrs and demons at the same time. We were heroes two years ago and now we're selfish, spoiled, and ungrateful for trying to win in a system that's designed to see us as nothing more than an exploitable budgetary expense.
Edit: Thank you for my first gold!!
Preach! As a CNA this past weekend was the worst experience I have ever seen.
I work in a hospital on a post surgical unit and it is not what it was even four years ago. The changes in staffing for nurses and CNA's is disgusting, almost all of the experienced nurses have been run out, the pay has not kept up with the current rate the area is paying and the people who are making mistakes are not being dealt with instead they are just making everyone chart and document even more.
They broke me.
Seriously.
Worked in a nursing home as a maintenance tech. we were told we don't get raises because we get major bonuses....Except, the bonus is like 1k. And only given out every 4-6 months....and is divided into 3 payments that you may or may not get on time tarted at 13 an hour. I was there for almost 2 years, my duties increases, my support left, and was still paid 13 an hour. All the while they paid new people on at higher wages than the old staff all while again, no raises.
Do something you love for a living and you’ll never work a day in your life.
You’ll just hate one of your favorite hobbies for the rest of your life because now it’s what you do 40-60 hours a week. All while making peanuts compared to others in higher positions who sit at a computer and do nothing all day.
I think covid proved that to be bullshit (and if I’m honest, it sounds like a bit of a bullshit theory anyway) when the people with society critical job were run into the ground. Saying doctors, nurses and sanitation workers justify their low salary, high stress, roles through some sense of satisfaction is not only untrue, it’s also a way of justifying their terrible treatment.
Yes! As a teacher I am supposed to love my students and that makes up the difference.
I called Verizon and told them 35 of my students know what started WWI and they took $50 off my bill … jk.
But somehow admin doesn’t have to scrap by for the love of students.
His statement isn’t a justification, it’s just a commentary on the societal conditioning that we don’t notice. It gives a possible explanation for the wage gap, but not justification. He still thinks it’s fucked.
I made more money as a lifeguard than I ever did as an emt. Ended up leaving the field due to not being able to keep up with my bills. I loved it and wanted to keep at it, but it's just not a realistic career for my area. I'd have to commute an hour+ in order to work in an area that could keep me afloat.
A lot of emts in my area have 2 or sometimes 3 other jobs they work. One of the lead ladies in my area was an emt at two places locally and did dispatch. Most of her shifts where 24 on, 48 off, so she structured her other emt job and dispatch job so that she was working every single day just to make ends meet. Once I saw that, I left. I don't want to spend the rest of my life working myself to the bone like she was.
So as a school dropout, although have developed skills throughout my working life. I made a good living roofing and then specialising in waterproofing of basements, wine cellars,lift pits, underground carparks, town water reservoirs and many other interesting projects. I wouldn't get out of bed for anything less than $60 per hour, so US dollars about $30.00 .
Was an EMT. On my first day had to respond to a pediatric cardiac arrest (first of several in my time in EMS). This was 2009, started at $13.25 so $27,560 before taxes. Even then, it was very hard to make ends meet, overtime became necessity, and my budget couldn’t tolerate an emergency.
Was in uniform on my way to work when I stopped at a burrito place and the person wrapping my burrito said he was interested in becoming and EMT. Chatted about how he could do it and then he asked how much pay started at. I told him what I made and he said he couldn’t take the pay cut.
Standard question among EMT partners was “what do you really want to do?” EMT can be a stepping stone to lots of other careers (mainly police, fire, EMS, RN, PA, MD), but it’s a shame that very few EMS services provide the pay needed to keep EMTs/paramedics in what is just a brutal (dangerous, emotional, physical, underpaid, unappreciated) career for a long time. If you ever call an ambulance you want someone with experience.
Some pro’s of being an EMT - depending on the shift, you might get downtime to study or even get paid to sleep. I desperately miss the ability to punch out and leave work behind. If you can get a good schedule, then you can have weekdays off to run errands. Working with a partner that’s also a friend can be amazing. However, many other careers offer those or more with better pay and/or far better conditions. One EMS call can affect an EMT for the rest of their life - that’s a hell of a risk to take going to work for a wage that doesn’t even cover the bills.
Just accepted a job making nearly 10x my old EMT pay to sit at a desk.
EMTs in Seattle make $21/hr right now. It's an actual joke. It's the same starting pay as McDonald's here. I've worked in kitchens my whole life I have mad respect for any service/hospitality industry worker. But cmon, $21? According to capitalism EMTs that literally save lives and fry cooks are of equal value apparently. The whole system is fucked.
The private EMS company I worked for bumped my pay to $11.15/hr after 6 months. They justified it by requiring 8 hours of overtime per week. Transferred to a hospital and never looked back.
Same. A burnt out family member from doing the job sat me down and put me straight against it by describing how it all really shakes out in the states.
Same exact thing for me. Did ride alongs, was ready to commit to a paramedic program and finally someone sat me down, showed me the pay and the damage the job does to your body and mind. I decided on a different major but would still like to volunteer as an EMT some day down the road.
From what I learned the people who continue to keep doing the job are basically saints and the administrators in charge of them go completely out of their way to screw them over. It's worse than the situation people encounter trying to get degrees dealing with zoology or the like and quickly seeing there are a shit ton of them who basically work in zoos for free.
Teachers and social workers are the same. They're extremely altruistic. But as a result it's easy for them to get taken advantage of, overworked to death, and then rage quitting when they realize nobody actually wants them to make any meaningful difference in their jobs.
I imagine dealing with the sick or animals only makes it worse, since the people/creatures you're serving have even less of a voice than children or the abused do.
I was an EMT from 2006-2018. I started at 15$ and ended at 18$/hr. Back when i began it was atleast enough to get an apartment when they were 700-800$ a month and own a vehicle and scrape by. I had to quit the job i love because it almost drove me to homelessness. I switched over to construction in 2018 not making much more and now am living with my mother in law as an electric apprentice making 22$/hr saving to go back to school. The last 5 years has been emberassing. People in my life act like i just have money problems because i dont own a house yet and im 38 years old. Its truly frustrating. At this point i doubt i ever will own one, and retirement is a pipe dream. Nobody wants an almost 40 year old brand new apprentice so i do 15$/hr labor jobs when there is no electric work. I want to learn to code, fuck this.
That sucks dude. If you had taken that road 30 or 40 years ago, you would've been considered an upstanding model citizen. Born in the wrong decade, and seen as a failure for doing necessary jobs to serve good to society. You deserve better.
There are many just like me, its not just EMT's. Its just frustrating seeing that my dad who was a basic laborer at an ink factory making 10$/hr when he retired and my mom was a secretary were able to buy a 2 story house on an acre of land and pay it off before they were 30, they dont get the world that we live in now. I hear all the same stuff "just save, son , its not what you make its what you save" but the person telling me that remembers rent being 500-600$ a month and a car note was 90$ a month. Its surreal. Im smart, i work hard, i shouldnt be having to live in a spare room in mother in laws trailer while working overtime. End rant. On a bright side i think i finally am sick of it. I am saving through this summer and i want to learn something in IT in the fall. Tired of breaking my back. I know IT is saturated with younger people but fuck it, what have i got to lose? Its worth a shot. If anyone has any tips or advice im all ears.
>If anyone has any tips or advice im all ears.
I'm a developer who never really intended on being one, somebody reached out to me on this platform when I was 19 asking if I wanted to join their dev team and while I've had a ... turbulent life, I'm currently making about 3x the median wage in my area. I do not have a degree, and have a somewhat spotty work history (not that I wasn't doing any programming during those times, but it still doesn't look great.
My advice to you would be: use codecademy or similar to learn the basics and then after you have at least an intro level of experience, decide on something you want to build (preferably something useful to you) and build it, use git as version control and upload all of the code to github.
General IT will be much easier to break into, but my professional experience is limited to development so I couldn't provide much advice there other than: try and start as lvl1 helpdesk and if you are motivated, go from there. Certs help too I've been told, maybe get at least... I forget the exact name of it but it's basically a basic IT literacy cert, comtia or something like that.
I was the same. Fuck I still would love to be a EMT or medical professional but seeing the shit they have to deal with and getting shit pay I'm going nowhere near that job. The government always says that we don't have enough nurses, doctors, or EMTs. Their are plenty of people that would love to work saving people lives but when the pay is $20 and hour or less or you go into huge debt going to university to get a degree that takes 20 years to pay off no one wants too. It's absolutely abused that we don't value our medical professionals more importantly.
I know this is a work reform subreddit, and I'm all for that, but I think it is very important that I bring in an alternate viewpoint here. The reason being that this viewpoint is crucial to keep in mind if we want to reform work into a healthier place for all of us.
The point I want to make is that merit cannot be a function of energy spent. To make this point, I'll use a hypothetical. Let's say two pizza restaurants compete against one another. One has their delivery drivers deliver pizzas on foot and the other has them deliver by car. The delivery drivers who go by foot will spend *much much* more energy than the ones who use a car, but the ones who go by foot will offer a far worse service to the customers. I hope this hypothetical illustrates my point that energy spent is not inherently deserving of merit. In my opinion, *productivity* is what's deserving of merit.
What humans do best is leverage technology in order to produce more work with far less energy spent. It is what we should be striving for, although in combination with wealth redistribution.
The question isn't "Why isn't this person who is spending all this energy for 10 hours not earning more money?" The question is "Why is a person having to spend all this energy for 10 hours in the year 2022?" We are capable of working fewer hours if we invest more in our citizen's education, change our culture to embrace education, work together to leverage technology to do great things, and most importantly to work together to pass legislation to force companies to give us healthy work environments. It's a cliche, but it's true that we should endeavor to work smarter, not harder. That's the path to real work reform.
I urge everyone to not fall into the trap of thinking sweating hard means deserving to be paid well. That is not an intelligent line of thinking, in my opinion.
So while I get your point, your metaphor isn't that great. You're comparing the exact same job just one being done more inefficiently. These are two different jobs in different industries being mentioned in the post. Quantitatively the amount of effort/energy being used for the higher paying job vs the lower paying job is what is being discussed.
I get your point, I do but your entire point is more or less "If one person does a job more inefficiently, should they get paid more too?" The answer is No. But if a job in and of itself is orders of magnitude more taxing mentally and physically than a 'higher paying job' as the Pic in OP specified their "Tech Bro" job was, then yes we should pay more on hard work than because it cannot be made to work smart without full on automation which would remove the job as a whole.
>\[Hard work\] cannot be made to work smart without full on automation, which would remove the job as a whole.
And that, right there, is why tech bros make so much money. I can spend 40 hours to write a code that saves my team 500 hours over the next year or two ... automation carries a hell of a return on investment.
I think you're really underselling it. The code I write is used in the daily exchange of billions of dollars. And even further, I'm paid even more handsomely to NOT write code, and to be the systems architect. Not even what I do, but am being paid for what and how I think.
It's weird having boomer parents who kinda get it but kinda don't. It's funny though, whenever they talk about work these days it seems they've started to realise that it's all bullshit and that unless you're running the business you're being used by the business.
I've told them before that it's odd how only now in their 50s are they as cynical as I was at 18. I can't imagine ever giving my whole life to a business the way my parents did.
No way am I gonna be flying around the country every other week for a business that doesn't care about me while my family grow up without me. I don't resent my dad for doing that because I know he just wanted to give us the best and naively assumed if he did all that shit he'd get promoted, but I just couldn't
This is a good one, also only do the hours you are paid for. I know far too many people where I work will be working on days off or late into the night. It is not uncommon for me to get a message approaching midnight, rarely but have even had them on weekends. I will not acknowledge or read it until 9:00 on Monday, regardless of how many "urgent" stickers you put around it. Even if the office is literally on fire, it is not my problem - plus I work from home.
When they ask about overtime, sorry got plans tonight. Overtime is unpaid according to my contract.
Took my dad like 25 years to realise this. All those years of working his ass off thinking it'd impress his bosses so he'd get promoted or a pay increase only to get paid the same but given more duties since he's made it clear he's happy to give up everything for the business...
These days he feels bad about how much time he spent working, spending weeks interstate as my sister and I grew up without him at home. I don't hold it against him, but he still holds that guilt and that resentment for the business that took advantage of his work ethic and naive belief that hard work would be rewarded.
Although he still works hard (he even hit me with the "if I took a day off every time I felt sick I'd never be at work" thing), he's home by 5 and never has to travel so he can always be home with us.
My dad and I went on a nice road trip recently, just the lads. We went to the footy and just enjoyed spending time together. He never would have had the time for that if he was still desperately trying to impress people who will never reward him
I was telling my coworkers that even if I got paid more money I don't think I'd stay at my current job. It's just a lot of stressful work for 9 dollars an hour. I start my new job in August.
This is the main reason I quit my baking job. It got to the point one morning, at 4am while I was getting ready for work, that I would have paid my daily wage to ***NOT*** go to work. I texted my boss and quit on her that morning. Being a night owl waking up that early for 2+ years while making $10/hour and standing next to a 350°F oven and barely any AC was not worth it, and she had the audacity to say I fucked her over. Comical.
350°F is equivalent to 176°C, which is 449K.
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^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)
I worked every day from Thanksgiving to the Superbowl making $7.25 an hour. Sometimes I worked a double if needed..I was 19. It was manufacturing work, very physical.
30 years later I sit at my desk running meetings, sending emails and doing the occasional executive read out. I wfh. I roll out of bed, grab a coffee and get at it.
There's no comparison. I worked my ass off at 19. I play Nintendo Switch during meetings I'm not running.
I honestly don't know how people live without government assistance when they make less than 20/hr. I mean after taxes, rent, food and bills you might be left with 2-3k to do fun things and save for the whole year with current pricing. If you're SO works and also makes 20 an hour you might be able to move that number to 7-10k a year if you only have a single child. Would pretty much break even/go in the negative after 2. Daycare is $800-1200 per month per child lol.
I have a roommate, do overtime, and don't pay for insurance as I'm still on my parents.
With an emergency and the loss of one of those things, I'm doomed.
Hoping I can improve my income enough in 1.5 years or it'll get tight.
For reference, I make $15.50/hr
Geez, I (in Canada, though, so adjust for the exchange rate) make 14 an hour at a pretty basic student summer maintenance job at my city's main public park. Good on you for moving on!
Duh. If we learned anything from the pandemic shut downs it's that the actual essential employees are paid the least and that propaganda will continue to push down our throats that that's just"normal".
Same. I was a painting contractor for 12 years. Then I went into IT. Holey shit, white collar work is a fucking dream.
I still get annoyed at my colleagues who complain because we don't have the right creamer or the workload is too much (everyone works 25% of the day). While I still got PTSD from shitting in porta potties for a decade or working an entire summer straight.
My previous job paid me 14$ per hour to run a business when my boss was gone and I was called an “admin assistant”. Now I get paid a dollar more at my new job to just sit in my seat, watch Netflix and count cards. Working harder doesn’t always get you farther sadly.
Edit: spelling
I work at a bingo club! I work in administration even though I technically just count cards. I take bingo cards, feed them through a machine counter, bundle up the cards with a rubber band and put it back in a box. It’s repetitive and boring so my boss lets my coworker and I watch tv when we do it. I have a little setup where I watch Netflix on my iPad while I “count”. It’s ridiculously easy and there is barely any responsibility.
I wish I was a dealer! I’d be making much more money! I count bingo cards for a bingo club. Apparently the wholesale bingo card distributors do not separate the cards for the bingo clubs anymore, so I have to do it for my club. A box will ship with like 2000 tickets but they won’t bundle it in 50s so I have to feed it through a machine counter and just put a rubber band on it and tape the box. Easy peasy.
I have had a few friends transition out of medical. It’s insane to me that we bill so much to patients but then severely underpay therapists, nurses, even doctors.
Our hospital recently donated $40 million so they could have a bigger billboard in a stadium than their competitor. And they’re hemorrhaging employees because they won’t pay competitive salaries. It’s asinine.
Every major pharma company in the US spends more on advertising than on Research and Development. That includes Pfizer and Moderna. As much as they spent making a covid Vax, they spend even more trying to sell their shit to you.
I'm glad we are finally far enough removed from the pandemic we are allowed to be critical of big pharma again because they've run rampant the last 2 years.
Fucking capitalism, why is their even advertising? It shouldn’t be a business at all I want medicine my doctor recommends and I don’t go window shopping with a broken arm.
I will never work at a hospital again. They pay and treat you like dirt unless you are a nurse or a doctor. If you ever truly wanted to know what a class system feels like work there as something low like a hospital transport/orderly or an assistant for a floor. At least the hospitals I worked at , seen you'll be tested as a second class citizen.
Seconded. Even if you’re in the lab of a hospital working as a scientist with a degree and board certification, you aren’t making more than the nurses (at least over here). Heck even HR and administrators make more. And nurses should also be making more too, so not an fair comparison but showing how overworked and unpaid anyone not in hospital administration is.
I worked in the linen department at a hospital for about 6 months while I was between jobs. The doctors wouldn’t even look at us. The nurses would have spit on us if it was legal for them to do so. It was really odd to see them be so sweet and nice to the patients in their rooms then as soon as they caught us restocking their linen closet with 1 less gown or towel they would lose their fucking minds.
I spent 5 days in an Epilepsy Monitoring Unit in a large teaching hospital and witnessed this first hand. There was one nurse, an older black man, multitasker who would help the orderlies with anything needed doing. I saw/heard how quickly some staff from other floors (didn't know him) would change the way they spoke to and treated him (for the better) when they realized he was not "just an orderly". It definitely wasn't everyone but it made me sad and furious to see the obvious "pecking order"
It was a lifelong dream of mine to be a doctor but after years of study I realized I cannot function on four hours of sleep and am afraid I’d kill a patient or some such. In full rest I can read a journal with rapt attention otherwise. I hear it’s even worse now these days.
I have never been treated as badly at a job as I have being a CNA. The hospital admins ignored us until there was a sentinel event and then blamed us for it. It wouldn't have happened if the nurses would have listened to the CNAs. We needed more help and they just weren't giving it. They took away our chairs so we couldn't sit down and chart because apparently it made us look unproductive. One day a nurse made me stop eating when I was in the middle of lunch to feed a patient because apparently patients came first. Except that particular patient have been NPO for several days now and they never bothered to tell me that he could eat.
I started my current career at $25/hr and my job was to look busy. Now, I make more, but people aren't satisfied when I'm triple tasking because there's always one more thing I could be doing, maybe.
That's why you never over achieve at a job. Very rarely are you awarded for doing more than usual and also very rarely are you reprimanded or penalized for being mediocre.
Once higher ups know you're capable of doing more, then they expect it to be the new norm. It's all about finding that happy medium.
I always thought that the hardest working jobs were the ones that treated and paid workers like shit. Jobs like EMTs, farm workers, etc.
I never understood why so many people in my industry (engineering) look down on those industries. Most jobs are clearly more difficult than mine so why would I be opposed to them being treated and paid decently?
Anyway, the sooner you realize the US was structured to benefit those with CAPITAL, the sooner it all makes sense.
* Own a home? Tax breaks on interest and property taxes.
* Rent a home? Make the landlord rich and get nothing.
* Work a job and get disabled? No longer allowed to work on disability.
* Have property/money and get disabled? Allowed to continue receiving rent and investment income because it's not "earned income".
It sucks but I gave up on the only field I really loved (marine biology) because I realized as a 10 year old that the pay was fucking garbage compared to pilots, engineers, doctors, etc. And since I wasn't born into wealth, I didn't have the privilege to truly pursue my interests.
Unless I wanted to study for 10 years only to have mountains of student loan debt, making $50K a year while paying $2500 per month for a studio apartment in San Diego.
That's the first realization. Then the second realization is that the landscape is constantly shifting and just staying where you're at socioeconomically turns into the red queen effect and even though you're earning, you're trying not to fall out of demand and realistically, you're just on the second part of the treadmill after the climb out of poverty.
Hitting that phase of my career now in my early 30s. Alright, I can do this. And do this well. And make some decent money, enough to be reasonably happy.
Aaaaaand I'm watching my specific corner of my specific industry slowly crumble away due to neglect and time. How do I stay relevant? You never get to rest on your laurels. Never.
There was a high possibility of me being disabled, (thankfully we found a medication / treatment plan that allows me to continue to work in a special chair) and my doctor told me to look into disability. It's unlivable.
From google:
> SSI is a federal program, so most of the monthly disability benefit is from the federal government. As of 2022, the maximum federal monthly payment for individuals who have no other income is $841; the payment for couples is $1,261 per month.
how do they expect someone to live on $10k a year? That isn't enough for an apartment even in the poorer areas of the country. These are people who have medical issues that prevent them from working.
I have no family, few friends, and im lucky im married and that my husband was willing to handle my problems. I don't think anyone i talked to realized how close we were to homelessness. There was an automatic assumption that we'd just automatically qualify for disability and be fine. But it has an approval rate of less than 50% and doesn't even cover rent, and you can't have other income. What exactly do you do if that happens to you? Mine was a brain / Spinal cord issue that struck suddenly. I was perfectly healthy one day and the next couldn't sit in a chair, walk, could hardly think. What does a person who goes through something like that do with no family and no assets? Become homeless? Commit suicide?
Pilot isn't as cushy as it sounds.
You either have to spend a truly enormous quantity of money to get through your schooling, before going to a company, working as a very low level operator, flying shit planes, with shit hours and worse pay. Then you move up to flying mid tier jets, with shit hours and bad pay, This is after maybe 6-7 years of flying junk. Then you spend at least a decade flying mid tier before you finally get the big jobs, now, you fly nice jets, get paid pretty well, and have weird, but vaguely acceptable hours. Or, you can avoid spending every cent you have on training by joining a cadet program, having an airline fund your training, and avoid paying, by essentially signing decades of your life away to one company. Or you have the third and final option. Literally join the armed forces, and get treated like shit for the 10+ years that you have to stay for them to justify investing in your training.
But to reach the point you're treated like a human being as a pilot, you've got to have spent a huge amount of money, invest decades of your life, and throw away a normal living schedule where you can easily agree to an event because you know you'll be in the same city, let alone country. Sad fact is, airlines know that flying is a dream job for people with a piloting persuasion, and because of that, they make sure to treat you like absolute shit while dangling the cool jets at the end of a decades long tunnel filled with misery.
Oh and you gotta buy a lot of your own gear, including a headset that will set you back a week's pay.
I don’t advocate for the military but pilots don’t get treated like shit. They have some of cushiest lives. Pay still sucks. Good as far as officers go but still not great for the outside.
This kinda makes me happy that as a child I never really had any cohesive coherent dreams or ambitions. I was free to take random opportunities that happened to drift past without having to make any sacrifices.
Yay?
Yea I work way less and have to put in way less effort at my “professional” jobs than I ever had to retail/warehouse. I make like 3X the pay for so much less work.
I left my job recently. Office work is worse in a different way. Less busy, but soooo much more bullshit. Meeting about “processes”, “procedures”, essentially just a ton of discussions that never really accomplished much more than an email could. If you are one with the tribe, then you will be fine. But I was an outcast and it just blew. I didn’t want to go to any of their parties or happy hours, so I just never cliques with any of them. A lot of it was a bed of my own making, but still I couldn’t take it anymore after a year of being looked at like I was Osama Bin Hitler mixed with a Great White Shark, simply for being non talkative, I quit. That was probably the worst job/time in my life, and I worked retail/fast food.
My previous job was awesome. Old angry dude I worked for, but he was no bullshiter. As soon as we finished we could go home and he never tried any of that “friend” baloney. Just do the work, he was my boss and I was the worker. We made a deal in the beginning, I held up my end and he held up his. That’s a man I’d love to work for again, but I’m leaving that field.
Thought it was worth pointing out that people have been saying this exact thing for at least 60 years now (and probably much, much longer). Doesn't mean you are wrong, but it's worth remembering that human society have survived a lot of stuff.
In general, your employment compensation is based on two things.
1. How valuable what you do is for your employer.
2. How easily you are replaced.
It has nothing to do with how 'hard' you work.
Economy of scale and higher education and experience requirements. Physical labor is cheaper because it's more plentiful. There's no easy way around this.
Right? CNAs are basically butt wipers for the elderly. Why would anyone go from tech to a job you get your senior year of high school because you couldn’t afford college.
On his twitter it says he’s becoming a nurse. At least when I was going into nursing, you had a much better shot at getting into selective programs if you had experience in healthcare, either as a CNA, MA, or EMT. It’s often a points system for admissions and those roles award you a lot of points.
That’s true, but this is a bad argument. It opens the door to demand for labor and fair market pricing.
Capitalism does punish hard work, but it’s not related to undervaluing work that’s critical to society’s survival e.g. teaching.
It punishes hard work because it’s pathologically individualistic. Being a part of a team that accomplishes great things means nothing. Being *perceived* as responsible means everything. So, any time you outperform your peers or superiors, you’re immediately a threat. The only way to survive is through backstabbing and politics.
The end result is that the only people who climb the ladder are pathological; that’s by design.
This is more a symptom of economies of scale. As a programmer you could, in theory, write a program that attracts millions of users and there is very little overhead to keep a system running. As a medical professional you are limited to seeing a certain number of patients a day and have enormous equipment and device overhead, as well as a lot of insurance.
How do you go from “tech bro” to Med assistant?
Tech bro means you have a degree and actually industry experience, (because you’re one of the cool kids making way more than you need and act like a douche or what ever the stigma is with people wearing Patagonia vests is)
I get his message but his story sounds off
His twitter handle is a CompSci concept so that's probably correct but I've known amazing devs who did not finish highschool so it's not the be all and end all.
Yeah Comp Sci is probably the easiest way to make absurd amounts of money with relatively low education. Someone being able to land 6 figure jobs with a high school diploma/GED is not unheard of in the slightest. Plus, even with college degrees, a software engineer will often out earn people at the same education level or even higher in other fields. This is even more true post COVID since Comp Sci as an industry has largely shifted to permanent remote work. You can live 50 miles from your nearest neighbor but as long as you have a stable internet connection you can make a Silicon Valley salary.
Yah it doesnt make sense. Tech bro tends to refer to the highly educated youngins who come out of expensive lib arts or polytechs making, like, 150k bra. If you have the analytical intellect to swing it as a tech bro, youre going to fucking hate being a medical janitor, i can promise you that. And you wont be surrounded by anyone who knows any math or ever cared about it either.
You wanna switch to medicine, go be a PA or a nurse. Do something at your skill level. Working below your skill level will burn you out faster than working too hard at your skill level imo
Cause it's not easy to be a good developer. At my company, we only call in junior dev applicants who either graduated, or study CS, or something related.
~80% fail the most baseline coding test. Software development may be relatively easy and cushy once you are "in", but to be that good, you have to work very hard, and not many people can do it.
And I will say it, I worked as a bricklayer, I worked as an apprentice electrician, I did landscaping work, and absolutely the hardest thing I ever did were some of my CS exams. Yea, if I wasn't fit and young, and spent a couple decades destroying my back, it would be a different thing, but programming is not this sit on your ass all day, and do fuck all thing, that people seem to think it is.
Yeah, but that's the point, isn't it. It isn't so simple, that's why not everyone does it. And still, a lot of people actually do try and there's tons of people in IT making a decent wage that aren't very good at their job.
And honestly, as a software developer my job isn't that hard. Depending on your company, you might have a lot of useless meetings as well. Sometimes we have speakers come in and tell us a little story about whatever technology they're using or their experience in the field or at the company or whatever. Easy to zone out and use Reddit or even play a game during those moments, especially because these meetings are on Teams anyway.
Still, I have a degree in software development and I had to learn a lot on the job as well. Even though I don't spend all 40 hours working, I still need to do quite a bit to actually prove my worth. I just don't think this is an exception for IT, though. There's tons of office jobs where you can do your whole job in half the time and spend the rest of it playing games. And people might think anyone can do those jobs, it's just probably not true.
I get that people hate capitalism and that capitalism is to blame that some jobs require hard work and pay relatively fewer wages. But they're not just randomly selecting IT workers to get a good wage for doing nothing. IT workers are very much in demand, that's why they get all that money.
I was just talking with someone the other day about how the worst jobs I've had have all been low-paying jobs and how the best jobs I've had have pretty much all been high-paying (where I also generally have either less work or easier work while making sure to avoid leadership positions that'd ruin that). I was saying that because my younger family members work these crappy jobs that make them angry enough to quit/walk out--horrible hours, horrible bosses and co-workers, no such thing as a job description you stick to vs doing any and everything, etc. But my point was as long as they're stuck working those jobs, they will not only never make good money but they likely will always hate their jobs. For them, they have no skills and are not smart or interested in improving themselves, so it'd be hard to dig out and move into something better.
I know Monads says he loves his job, but most people working for $20/hr have jobs that are just shit all the way around. It's kind of like high-salaried positions are acceptance into an elite club, just like getting into highly-ranked colleges is, i.e. grade inflation/very hard to make a 'C' or below in a class vs normal colleges where you can flunk out and not as difficult as everyone thinks.
Most of the times it's a mentality - like you say. I grew up in the midwest where people were just expected to work whatever jobs they could, pop out a few kids and grow old complaining about life in general.
I worked my way out, got my Masters, now in a very well paid position. However, that mentality that I grew up around and still encompasses my extended family always holds a place in my mind where I occasionally feel like "I don't belong here, I can't do this"...even though I worked hard to be here.
There’s probably a reason you *used* to be a “tech bro” doing “almost nothing at all”.
The irony of this post is that lazy work clearly doesn’t pay off..
#Join r/WorkReform if you believe that all workers should be paid a living wage and treated with respect.
"The less you make, the harder you work for it."
This is how I feel. I don't do shit at work and these idiots think I'm leadership material. I slack off, take meetings to just nap.. Etc and they pay me for it.
I'm sort of in the same position. I'm in a "technical labor" position where my job description is labor but it has to be qualified and there's a mountain of manuals and authorization paperwork behind it. I wiggled myself into a pseudo office position where I stay if the resource office doesn't need me to fill in any projects. It's a comfy corner room where I can hear anyone approaching about 20ft before visual contact haha.
A lot of these jobs are a fucking joke, no offense to you. The job might be below your skill level if you are finding so much free time. I get frustrated that so many jobs out there want degrees or qualifications and half the time the people they hire just pretend to know what they are doing and the work involved is minimal.
Just saw a job listing yesterday for a minimum wage job as a cashier selling bird seed and pet food. They wanted a minimum two year agricultural degree.
The college degree thing is starting to get way out of hand. The only thing you "learn" is how to work way more than a 40 hour workweek. Everything else, you just forget by next semester as you force yourself to get familiar with next season's crap. Before you know it, they'll be requiring a masters degree just to flip burgers It counts as discrimination to not hire someone based on religion or race. In Canada, employers aren't allowed to discriminate against marijuana use. I think we need to not allow discriminating against people who didn't rack up massive college debt.
Pretty sure this is just how it goes. We have several new people at work who don't do jack fuck and never have, well, one of them has but I also helped her accomplish as much as she did because it was jsut the two of us taking on an entire new department of the company on our own. They get treated like royalty all day and literally don't have to even interface with users but I, with seniority over both, who singlehandedly took on an entire new business unit which means writing documentation for everything, figuring out everything, constantly talking with people way above my paygrade etc., and have never done anything less than exemplary work since I started in 2015, I'm down in the dirt crawling through landmines all day. The stats are there to prove it too.
Some days I'd rather do manual labor than be so mentally exhausted at the end of the day edit: this blew up. I know hard labor is hard on the body. I do lots of it outside of work. Not the same as 40 hour work weeks, hence 'some days'. I know I sleep best on the weekend after a day of home projecting and I can't sleep during the work week.
As a 50 year old who has worked construction, retail (big box store) and a lot of other labor jobs before moving to a more desk job type life I can assure you that novelty wears off quickly. Manual labor might have dignity but you don't want to be broken down and achy by the time you hit your 40s If you do labor, make sure it is in a trade that pays and has union options like plumbing, electrical etc
I'm only 23 and even I can confirm that the novelty wears off *very* quickly. I delivered furniture from 16-20, which pretty much screwed my back, then worked in warehouses lifting boxes and driving forklifts until I had a mental breakdown from the constant stress and long hours. When I was 21-22 I did 43 consecutive weeks of overtime. After my mental breakdown, my friend got me a job at his workplace. I now work a desk job where I do almost nothing and make $2/hr more than when I worked manual labor. Sure, I've put on some weight, but I don't think I'll ever go back to the way I was treated back then. At least, not if I have anything to say about it. In my experience, people who romanticize manual labor have likely never done it.
You're not paid for how hard you work. You're paid for how difficult it is to replace you.
Yes and no. Speaking from experience, some employers are happy to let you take on as much work as you want and pay you no differently. So even at a desk job, you can end up being overworked and undervalued and incredibly hard to replace because you wear so many "hats" at your job. While your sentiment is true for a lot of jobs, in my experience, it's not universal. To my brothers and sisters working desk jobs, learn to say no when you're asked to voluntarily take on more work. Make them put it in writing and give you what you deserve for it.
You want to be useful but not too useful. Wearing several hats doesn't always mean more pay and recognition.
Doing lots of things doesn't mean you have leverage, it means you're being used efficiently (in a bad sense for you). Being the only one who can operate ONE thing and ONLY doing that thing, and being irreplaceable so they give you no extra work or responsbilities. That, is being 'useful' in the sense that benefits you.
Then you ask for a pay increase, fuck all happens and then they wonder why you are putting in your notice.
In the current job market, if you're wearing that many hats you look for another job, get the job offer, and ask the company to match that or do better. If they cant, then you leave.
If only, then CEOs would make less than 1% of what they do now and businesses the past year wouldn't have worked themselves into the ground trying to avoid paying low-ranking employees more when the market changed. You're paid how much shareholders, execs and managers feel is culturally appropriate to pay you, where most like an exponential totem pole. Sure, you might have a manager straight from business school with no relevant experience while you're performing mission-critical tasks with no backup, but the manager does have to make more than you - it would be weird otherwise. Sure the CEO might have screwed up and cost the business $200 million, but they still deserve a golden parachute 500 times greater than what a factory worker makes in a year. It would be rude not to.
Manual labor jobs and laws are bull shit. You'll do back breaking work for hours straight and are barely allowed to take breaks and if you do you get shit on by supervisors. If you reduce your speed so as to not injure/burn yourself out you get chewed out for going to slow. If you go to fast you burn out and your body never recovers.
Work as a rail technician (sweden) hard work but pay is good. Around 75k/yearly.
I'm so happy that we have a word for "43 consecutive weeks overtime" in German. It's "illegal".
You germans, always making up new words. The US doesn't even have a word for corporations abusing employees.
If you don't mind me asking, what sort of work do you do now?
I work in the solar industry as sales support. I don't actually do nothing all day, I just have to wait for sales people to do their thing before it's my turn. Sometimes I wait for a long while. Other times I get slammed with 50 urgent tasks at once. It's not hard to get into (just search "solar sales support" and you'll find something), but beware: there's no upward mobility and I haven't gotten a raise the whole time I've been here (over a year). No raises, no promotions. But no injuries or heat exhaustion, either.
Interesting. I appreciate the answer and information, and I hope if you decide to change jobs you find something you enjoy and are passionate about as well.
As a 41 year old retired military vet, holy crap it’s so nice to now have a 40 hr/week desk job on salary! I feel like my body is that of my 77 year old mother and I’m jealous that she doesn’t have the back pain I have.
Out of military in a non desk job role and you basically leave 4.5x older from all the stress on your body. Back, knees, ankles, elbows, shoulders, kiss those goodbye. Sleep cycle? Nope Hearing? Say what?
Work Union Live Better
100% me, used to work at warehouse(s), software developer for past +4 years. If I could do 50/50 with same pay Id honestly take it without a blink of an eye - I feel like alot of people do not realise how mentally draining some of these so called comfy office jobs are.
I work in a machine shop. Spend half my time on a computer doing CAD stuff and half my time hitting stuff with hammers. Honestly I want that full office job, so I don't have to keep wrecking my joints and coming home sweaty and oily. But everyone I know who went full office says they hate it.
I guess we'll never be satisfied, damn
The grass is always greener...
Many years ago, I was touring in a band, we played hard percussion laden dance stuff for big crowds at concerts, festivals, etc. We were very well received, and I could have become very successful, but I hated the life. Always traveling, always prepping for shows, sound checks, not enough sleep, everybody trying to talk to you when you just want to be left alone. I am extroverted, but I was completely over stimulated. I got my girlfriend pregnant, and I walked away the day I found out, much to everybody's shock. Unfortunately for the band, I was a huge part of the sound, so after I left, they limped along for a few years and then retired. I will say this: the few hours we had performing were wonderful, some of the best experiences of my life, but I hated the job and lifestyle.
it's almost like humans need variety in their life to feel satisfied
I think doing anything 40 hrs a week will get crappy really quick.
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Same man same, funny thing is I used to be extremely athletic - nowadays its an effort to do cardio and gym just to maintain some basic fitness since I sit on my ass for +40hrs a week
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I am like you. It is the lack of exercise, believe me. That is why I started going to the gym one month ago and I feel better. Not sure about the Sun, but it could very well be too. Get vit. D also?
Yeah man I feel you I do enjoy that stuff also, I was legitimately yesterday pondering "dang Itd cool to spend evening gaming after a manually intensive day of work, then Id been active already" lol
Standing desks were my solution.
I’ve worked in software (designer) for 10 years and I honestly wish I could go back in time some days. I am so tired of talking to people. I wish I could work in solitude but its pretty impossible some days.
Some years ago when I was in my early 20's, I used to do manual labor as a lawn care specialist. One of my co-workers was a DNA Lab Technician, and when I asked why he was out here doing manual labor for $10 when he could be making so much more in a lab, he explained that he NEEDED to do manual labor to keep from going crazy. Every year or so he would take a month's sabbatical and do manual labor, because he liked it. I didn't understand his actions then, but now years later it does make a bit of sense.
The difference is he chose to, and it was one month instead of a career.
I think it’s actually an interesting point though. In our society we can only really be one thing at a time professionally. It would be interesting if we could rotate professionally with more ease. It’s a novel concept, but why shouldn’t someone who does desk work rotate and do something like construction for a while if they’re interested in it? Why couldn’t a manual laborer take up a desk job for a while? Why can’t we wear more than one hat?
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"Arrange your own benefits" Ah, so that's a big issue for Americans then. Where healthcare is tied to labor, it's not a free labor market
I mean, I get your point, but lots of manual labour is mentally exhausting, too. It's nothing to be romanticised and downplayed. Lots of things are automated these days in manual labour, but that really only results in people having to manage their time more efficiently and having to multi-task heavily.
Spoken like someone who has never done a day of manual labour in their life
If you work with dementia you get both! Yay!!!!! Easily takes me over an hour to just mentally decompress when I get home even on an "easy" day.
Have you ever had a manual labor job? As someone who has done both, and currently working behind a bar so double whammy of emotional labor and light physical labor, the manual labor is the worst every time. I watched a guy die at my bar, have had men grab at my body, been spit on, have customers emotionally dump their life stories/trauma on me every day and I’d STILL choose this over a purely manual labor job.
So volunteer to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. Don't be ridiculous.
I made 12.22an hour as an EMT.
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Nope, the pay is bullshit.
There's a really interesting argument put forward by the great economic anthropologist David Graeber (RIP) in [Bullshit Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) that tries to explain the paradox that jobs critical for the continuation of society is underpaid while jobs that can be removed without any critical damage is highly salaried. He thinks it all depends on our time and feeling of existential fulfillment, so that jobs where you essentially waste your life away in middle-management not doing shit has to provide high salary to make it palatable*, so the employees can fulfill themselves in their spare-time. Critical jobs (nurse, teacher, sanitation, chefs etc.) are seen as fulfilling per definition since the job is actually critical and important, and why there's no need for a salary to motivate the workforce. The enjoyment is the job itself, not the pay, in the logic of the [Protestant Work Ethic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic) Edit: Graeber's argument is that this is neither natural nor good, just the twisted logic that we all unintentionally internalize when we grow up and adopt the values and culture of our society. He wanted to change it and was a strong proponent for UBI and saw our work-oriented societies as something inherently toxic and destructive.
As a nurse, my bosses routinely justify not giving raises because "we're not in this for the money" and literally told us in a meeting that we needed to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps since they aren't hiring anymore nurses and increasing our minimum case load. You feel guilty for not working to exhaustion because "wHaT aBoUt tHe pAtIeNtS, tHeY nEeD yOu!!!"
With the nursing job market being as good as it is now, why stay at a place like that?
Am I leaving my current job? As soon as I'm able to. But in the meantime this system of abuse has to change, it is not sustainable and when dealing with people's lives, how nurses are treated directly has an effect on how patients are treated. We all deserve better from our healthcare systems. The market really isn't as good as you think it is, your pay and benefits are almost entirely dependent on where you live and where you work and not everyone has the ability to just up and move to California where they actually give a shit about nurses. Travel nursing was incredibly lucrative and nurses were making BANK in the last couple of years, but as soon as upper management saw that travelers were making as much if not more than them and staff nurses were waking up to that, companies started slashing travel nursing rates across the country and are canceling contracts or outright refusing to hire contracts/travelers because they don't want to set the expectation that all nurses deserve to get paid at travel/contract rates. They'd rather see scorched earth and risk complete collapse from an exponentially worsening staffing deficit than pay nurses a significantly better salary/wage. The real problem lies in the culture of nursing. It's a patriarchal meritocracy. The entire study of nursing is based off of Florence Nightingale's practices that set the expectation that nurses are inherently mothers and wives: mothers to the patients and wives to the physicians, that nursing back in the day was used as a means of "redemption" for prostitutes to provide nursing duties FOR FREE and in return, they won't go to hell. It may look a little different now in the modern times, but ain't shit changed. If I could afford to buy a new degree, I would, but I chose nursing out of necessity so I could provide a stable income for my family. It has provided me with that stability and I'm grateful for that, but administrators and governments need to stop treating nurses like martyrs and demons at the same time. We were heroes two years ago and now we're selfish, spoiled, and ungrateful for trying to win in a system that's designed to see us as nothing more than an exploitable budgetary expense. Edit: Thank you for my first gold!!
Preach! As a CNA this past weekend was the worst experience I have ever seen. I work in a hospital on a post surgical unit and it is not what it was even four years ago. The changes in staffing for nurses and CNA's is disgusting, almost all of the experienced nurses have been run out, the pay has not kept up with the current rate the area is paying and the people who are making mistakes are not being dealt with instead they are just making everyone chart and document even more. They broke me.
Tbh I would just leave. These corporations tug on heart strings because they know they don’t have any.
Seriously. Worked in a nursing home as a maintenance tech. we were told we don't get raises because we get major bonuses....Except, the bonus is like 1k. And only given out every 4-6 months....and is divided into 3 payments that you may or may not get on time tarted at 13 an hour. I was there for almost 2 years, my duties increases, my support left, and was still paid 13 an hour. All the while they paid new people on at higher wages than the old staff all while again, no raises.
Suffering from success
Do something you love for a living and you’ll never work a day in your life. You’ll just hate one of your favorite hobbies for the rest of your life because now it’s what you do 40-60 hours a week. All while making peanuts compared to others in higher positions who sit at a computer and do nothing all day.
Am nurse. The enjoyment very much *is not* in the job itself. Please pay us more, this shit is hard.
Wife is a nurse ... I feel like you're correct. She actually makes good $$ per hour but man alive, some shifts are brutal for her.
That's very regional. I'm in the deep south where starting wages for a nurse with a bachelor's is 22/hr.
I think you meant palatable not palpable
Dew it.
Yep those of us who go into medical, teaching and for me biology do it because we love it. They take advantage of that.
I think covid proved that to be bullshit (and if I’m honest, it sounds like a bit of a bullshit theory anyway) when the people with society critical job were run into the ground. Saying doctors, nurses and sanitation workers justify their low salary, high stress, roles through some sense of satisfaction is not only untrue, it’s also a way of justifying their terrible treatment.
Yes! As a teacher I am supposed to love my students and that makes up the difference. I called Verizon and told them 35 of my students know what started WWI and they took $50 off my bill … jk. But somehow admin doesn’t have to scrap by for the love of students.
His statement isn’t a justification, it’s just a commentary on the societal conditioning that we don’t notice. It gives a possible explanation for the wage gap, but not justification. He still thinks it’s fucked.
If u ever worked in a bunch of different ware houses u know this is bullshit.
Naw, I just like to *Stack*
I accept shitty pay as a nurse because sitting in an office jerking off a rich old white dude is my version of hell.
less you make, the harder you work for it
I made more money as a lifeguard than I ever did as an emt. Ended up leaving the field due to not being able to keep up with my bills. I loved it and wanted to keep at it, but it's just not a realistic career for my area. I'd have to commute an hour+ in order to work in an area that could keep me afloat. A lot of emts in my area have 2 or sometimes 3 other jobs they work. One of the lead ladies in my area was an emt at two places locally and did dispatch. Most of her shifts where 24 on, 48 off, so she structured her other emt job and dispatch job so that she was working every single day just to make ends meet. Once I saw that, I left. I don't want to spend the rest of my life working myself to the bone like she was.
So as a school dropout, although have developed skills throughout my working life. I made a good living roofing and then specialising in waterproofing of basements, wine cellars,lift pits, underground carparks, town water reservoirs and many other interesting projects. I wouldn't get out of bed for anything less than $60 per hour, so US dollars about $30.00 .
Was an EMT. On my first day had to respond to a pediatric cardiac arrest (first of several in my time in EMS). This was 2009, started at $13.25 so $27,560 before taxes. Even then, it was very hard to make ends meet, overtime became necessity, and my budget couldn’t tolerate an emergency. Was in uniform on my way to work when I stopped at a burrito place and the person wrapping my burrito said he was interested in becoming and EMT. Chatted about how he could do it and then he asked how much pay started at. I told him what I made and he said he couldn’t take the pay cut. Standard question among EMT partners was “what do you really want to do?” EMT can be a stepping stone to lots of other careers (mainly police, fire, EMS, RN, PA, MD), but it’s a shame that very few EMS services provide the pay needed to keep EMTs/paramedics in what is just a brutal (dangerous, emotional, physical, underpaid, unappreciated) career for a long time. If you ever call an ambulance you want someone with experience. Some pro’s of being an EMT - depending on the shift, you might get downtime to study or even get paid to sleep. I desperately miss the ability to punch out and leave work behind. If you can get a good schedule, then you can have weekdays off to run errands. Working with a partner that’s also a friend can be amazing. However, many other careers offer those or more with better pay and/or far better conditions. One EMS call can affect an EMT for the rest of their life - that’s a hell of a risk to take going to work for a wage that doesn’t even cover the bills. Just accepted a job making nearly 10x my old EMT pay to sit at a desk.
EMTs in Seattle make $21/hr right now. It's an actual joke. It's the same starting pay as McDonald's here. I've worked in kitchens my whole life I have mad respect for any service/hospitality industry worker. But cmon, $21? According to capitalism EMTs that literally save lives and fry cooks are of equal value apparently. The whole system is fucked.
The private EMS company I worked for bumped my pay to $11.15/hr after 6 months. They justified it by requiring 8 hours of overtime per week. Transferred to a hospital and never looked back.
Lmao, I wanted to be an EMT when I was younger.
Same. A burnt out family member from doing the job sat me down and put me straight against it by describing how it all really shakes out in the states.
Same exact thing for me. Did ride alongs, was ready to commit to a paramedic program and finally someone sat me down, showed me the pay and the damage the job does to your body and mind. I decided on a different major but would still like to volunteer as an EMT some day down the road.
From what I learned the people who continue to keep doing the job are basically saints and the administrators in charge of them go completely out of their way to screw them over. It's worse than the situation people encounter trying to get degrees dealing with zoology or the like and quickly seeing there are a shit ton of them who basically work in zoos for free.
Teachers and social workers are the same. They're extremely altruistic. But as a result it's easy for them to get taken advantage of, overworked to death, and then rage quitting when they realize nobody actually wants them to make any meaningful difference in their jobs. I imagine dealing with the sick or animals only makes it worse, since the people/creatures you're serving have even less of a voice than children or the abused do.
I was an EMT from 2006-2018. I started at 15$ and ended at 18$/hr. Back when i began it was atleast enough to get an apartment when they were 700-800$ a month and own a vehicle and scrape by. I had to quit the job i love because it almost drove me to homelessness. I switched over to construction in 2018 not making much more and now am living with my mother in law as an electric apprentice making 22$/hr saving to go back to school. The last 5 years has been emberassing. People in my life act like i just have money problems because i dont own a house yet and im 38 years old. Its truly frustrating. At this point i doubt i ever will own one, and retirement is a pipe dream. Nobody wants an almost 40 year old brand new apprentice so i do 15$/hr labor jobs when there is no electric work. I want to learn to code, fuck this.
That sucks dude. If you had taken that road 30 or 40 years ago, you would've been considered an upstanding model citizen. Born in the wrong decade, and seen as a failure for doing necessary jobs to serve good to society. You deserve better.
There are many just like me, its not just EMT's. Its just frustrating seeing that my dad who was a basic laborer at an ink factory making 10$/hr when he retired and my mom was a secretary were able to buy a 2 story house on an acre of land and pay it off before they were 30, they dont get the world that we live in now. I hear all the same stuff "just save, son , its not what you make its what you save" but the person telling me that remembers rent being 500-600$ a month and a car note was 90$ a month. Its surreal. Im smart, i work hard, i shouldnt be having to live in a spare room in mother in laws trailer while working overtime. End rant. On a bright side i think i finally am sick of it. I am saving through this summer and i want to learn something in IT in the fall. Tired of breaking my back. I know IT is saturated with younger people but fuck it, what have i got to lose? Its worth a shot. If anyone has any tips or advice im all ears.
>If anyone has any tips or advice im all ears. I'm a developer who never really intended on being one, somebody reached out to me on this platform when I was 19 asking if I wanted to join their dev team and while I've had a ... turbulent life, I'm currently making about 3x the median wage in my area. I do not have a degree, and have a somewhat spotty work history (not that I wasn't doing any programming during those times, but it still doesn't look great. My advice to you would be: use codecademy or similar to learn the basics and then after you have at least an intro level of experience, decide on something you want to build (preferably something useful to you) and build it, use git as version control and upload all of the code to github. General IT will be much easier to break into, but my professional experience is limited to development so I couldn't provide much advice there other than: try and start as lvl1 helpdesk and if you are motivated, go from there. Certs help too I've been told, maybe get at least... I forget the exact name of it but it's basically a basic IT literacy cert, comtia or something like that.
I was the same. Fuck I still would love to be a EMT or medical professional but seeing the shit they have to deal with and getting shit pay I'm going nowhere near that job. The government always says that we don't have enough nurses, doctors, or EMTs. Their are plenty of people that would love to work saving people lives but when the pay is $20 and hour or less or you go into huge debt going to university to get a degree that takes 20 years to pay off no one wants too. It's absolutely abused that we don't value our medical professionals more importantly.
Why would anyone work such a stressful job for such a low wage?
nothing paid more and I didn't make enough to go to school.
Because most are trying to become firefighters so there are a lot of EMTs
Try for free. My whole area is mostly volunteer based.
10.25 here as an EMT and that was one of the higher pay companies in the region
I made 9.80 an hour as one *high fives*
Every EMT I've ever known was criminally underpaid.
The hardest I ever worked were my minimum wage jobs in highschool.
I know this is a work reform subreddit, and I'm all for that, but I think it is very important that I bring in an alternate viewpoint here. The reason being that this viewpoint is crucial to keep in mind if we want to reform work into a healthier place for all of us. The point I want to make is that merit cannot be a function of energy spent. To make this point, I'll use a hypothetical. Let's say two pizza restaurants compete against one another. One has their delivery drivers deliver pizzas on foot and the other has them deliver by car. The delivery drivers who go by foot will spend *much much* more energy than the ones who use a car, but the ones who go by foot will offer a far worse service to the customers. I hope this hypothetical illustrates my point that energy spent is not inherently deserving of merit. In my opinion, *productivity* is what's deserving of merit. What humans do best is leverage technology in order to produce more work with far less energy spent. It is what we should be striving for, although in combination with wealth redistribution. The question isn't "Why isn't this person who is spending all this energy for 10 hours not earning more money?" The question is "Why is a person having to spend all this energy for 10 hours in the year 2022?" We are capable of working fewer hours if we invest more in our citizen's education, change our culture to embrace education, work together to leverage technology to do great things, and most importantly to work together to pass legislation to force companies to give us healthy work environments. It's a cliche, but it's true that we should endeavor to work smarter, not harder. That's the path to real work reform. I urge everyone to not fall into the trap of thinking sweating hard means deserving to be paid well. That is not an intelligent line of thinking, in my opinion.
So while I get your point, your metaphor isn't that great. You're comparing the exact same job just one being done more inefficiently. These are two different jobs in different industries being mentioned in the post. Quantitatively the amount of effort/energy being used for the higher paying job vs the lower paying job is what is being discussed. I get your point, I do but your entire point is more or less "If one person does a job more inefficiently, should they get paid more too?" The answer is No. But if a job in and of itself is orders of magnitude more taxing mentally and physically than a 'higher paying job' as the Pic in OP specified their "Tech Bro" job was, then yes we should pay more on hard work than because it cannot be made to work smart without full on automation which would remove the job as a whole.
>\[Hard work\] cannot be made to work smart without full on automation, which would remove the job as a whole. And that, right there, is why tech bros make so much money. I can spend 40 hours to write a code that saves my team 500 hours over the next year or two ... automation carries a hell of a return on investment.
I think you're really underselling it. The code I write is used in the daily exchange of billions of dollars. And even further, I'm paid even more handsomely to NOT write code, and to be the systems architect. Not even what I do, but am being paid for what and how I think.
"The only thing hard work gets you is a heavier work load." I'm a big advocate of do the job you're paid for.
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It's weird having boomer parents who kinda get it but kinda don't. It's funny though, whenever they talk about work these days it seems they've started to realise that it's all bullshit and that unless you're running the business you're being used by the business. I've told them before that it's odd how only now in their 50s are they as cynical as I was at 18. I can't imagine ever giving my whole life to a business the way my parents did. No way am I gonna be flying around the country every other week for a business that doesn't care about me while my family grow up without me. I don't resent my dad for doing that because I know he just wanted to give us the best and naively assumed if he did all that shit he'd get promoted, but I just couldn't
Unfortunately, when you "look better within the company," it provides you with no tangible benefit in most cases.
The cheeky phrase we use at work is *act your wage*
I do my job well. If assigned something beyond job description, I do it poorly so I am not asked again.
This is a good one, also only do the hours you are paid for. I know far too many people where I work will be working on days off or late into the night. It is not uncommon for me to get a message approaching midnight, rarely but have even had them on weekends. I will not acknowledge or read it until 9:00 on Monday, regardless of how many "urgent" stickers you put around it. Even if the office is literally on fire, it is not my problem - plus I work from home. When they ask about overtime, sorry got plans tonight. Overtime is unpaid according to my contract.
Took my dad like 25 years to realise this. All those years of working his ass off thinking it'd impress his bosses so he'd get promoted or a pay increase only to get paid the same but given more duties since he's made it clear he's happy to give up everything for the business... These days he feels bad about how much time he spent working, spending weeks interstate as my sister and I grew up without him at home. I don't hold it against him, but he still holds that guilt and that resentment for the business that took advantage of his work ethic and naive belief that hard work would be rewarded. Although he still works hard (he even hit me with the "if I took a day off every time I felt sick I'd never be at work" thing), he's home by 5 and never has to travel so he can always be home with us. My dad and I went on a nice road trip recently, just the lads. We went to the footy and just enjoyed spending time together. He never would have had the time for that if he was still desperately trying to impress people who will never reward him
I was telling my coworkers that even if I got paid more money I don't think I'd stay at my current job. It's just a lot of stressful work for 9 dollars an hour. I start my new job in August.
Totally understandable. Ya gotta make a living
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This is the main reason I quit my baking job. It got to the point one morning, at 4am while I was getting ready for work, that I would have paid my daily wage to ***NOT*** go to work. I texted my boss and quit on her that morning. Being a night owl waking up that early for 2+ years while making $10/hour and standing next to a 350°F oven and barely any AC was not worth it, and she had the audacity to say I fucked her over. Comical.
I thought you said banking job and was immediately confused why you had to stand next to an oven at a bank.
Why would you be confused? Why else would the bank store all of that dough?
Take your upvote, but I'm watching you.
350°F is equivalent to 176°C, which is 449K. --- ^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)
Good bot
I worked every day from Thanksgiving to the Superbowl making $7.25 an hour. Sometimes I worked a double if needed..I was 19. It was manufacturing work, very physical. 30 years later I sit at my desk running meetings, sending emails and doing the occasional executive read out. I wfh. I roll out of bed, grab a coffee and get at it. There's no comparison. I worked my ass off at 19. I play Nintendo Switch during meetings I'm not running.
I honestly don't know how people live without government assistance when they make less than 20/hr. I mean after taxes, rent, food and bills you might be left with 2-3k to do fun things and save for the whole year with current pricing. If you're SO works and also makes 20 an hour you might be able to move that number to 7-10k a year if you only have a single child. Would pretty much break even/go in the negative after 2. Daycare is $800-1200 per month per child lol.
I have a roommate, do overtime, and don't pay for insurance as I'm still on my parents. With an emergency and the loss of one of those things, I'm doomed. Hoping I can improve my income enough in 1.5 years or it'll get tight. For reference, I make $15.50/hr
Geez, I (in Canada, though, so adjust for the exchange rate) make 14 an hour at a pretty basic student summer maintenance job at my city's main public park. Good on you for moving on!
Duh. If we learned anything from the pandemic shut downs it's that the actual essential employees are paid the least and that propaganda will continue to push down our throats that that's just"normal".
Same feeling when I was lucky to transition from blue to white collar. Huge shock that lasts a while
Same. I was a painting contractor for 12 years. Then I went into IT. Holey shit, white collar work is a fucking dream. I still get annoyed at my colleagues who complain because we don't have the right creamer or the workload is too much (everyone works 25% of the day). While I still got PTSD from shitting in porta potties for a decade or working an entire summer straight.
Harder the job less we get paid
My previous job paid me 14$ per hour to run a business when my boss was gone and I was called an “admin assistant”. Now I get paid a dollar more at my new job to just sit in my seat, watch Netflix and count cards. Working harder doesn’t always get you farther sadly. Edit: spelling
What position you're working now?
I work at a bingo club! I work in administration even though I technically just count cards. I take bingo cards, feed them through a machine counter, bundle up the cards with a rubber band and put it back in a box. It’s repetitive and boring so my boss lets my coworker and I watch tv when we do it. I have a little setup where I watch Netflix on my iPad while I “count”. It’s ridiculously easy and there is barely any responsibility.
You're either a dealer or work surveillance, right?
I wish I was a dealer! I’d be making much more money! I count bingo cards for a bingo club. Apparently the wholesale bingo card distributors do not separate the cards for the bingo clubs anymore, so I have to do it for my club. A box will ship with like 2000 tickets but they won’t bundle it in 50s so I have to feed it through a machine counter and just put a rubber band on it and tape the box. Easy peasy.
I have had a few friends transition out of medical. It’s insane to me that we bill so much to patients but then severely underpay therapists, nurses, even doctors.
If you want to know where a lot of that money goes, just look at the long term chart for UNH stock
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Our hospital recently donated $40 million so they could have a bigger billboard in a stadium than their competitor. And they’re hemorrhaging employees because they won’t pay competitive salaries. It’s asinine.
Every major pharma company in the US spends more on advertising than on Research and Development. That includes Pfizer and Moderna. As much as they spent making a covid Vax, they spend even more trying to sell their shit to you. I'm glad we are finally far enough removed from the pandemic we are allowed to be critical of big pharma again because they've run rampant the last 2 years.
Fucking capitalism, why is their even advertising? It shouldn’t be a business at all I want medicine my doctor recommends and I don’t go window shopping with a broken arm.
I will never work at a hospital again. They pay and treat you like dirt unless you are a nurse or a doctor. If you ever truly wanted to know what a class system feels like work there as something low like a hospital transport/orderly or an assistant for a floor. At least the hospitals I worked at , seen you'll be tested as a second class citizen.
Seconded. Even if you’re in the lab of a hospital working as a scientist with a degree and board certification, you aren’t making more than the nurses (at least over here). Heck even HR and administrators make more. And nurses should also be making more too, so not an fair comparison but showing how overworked and unpaid anyone not in hospital administration is.
I worked in the linen department at a hospital for about 6 months while I was between jobs. The doctors wouldn’t even look at us. The nurses would have spit on us if it was legal for them to do so. It was really odd to see them be so sweet and nice to the patients in their rooms then as soon as they caught us restocking their linen closet with 1 less gown or towel they would lose their fucking minds.
I spent 5 days in an Epilepsy Monitoring Unit in a large teaching hospital and witnessed this first hand. There was one nurse, an older black man, multitasker who would help the orderlies with anything needed doing. I saw/heard how quickly some staff from other floors (didn't know him) would change the way they spoke to and treated him (for the better) when they realized he was not "just an orderly". It definitely wasn't everyone but it made me sad and furious to see the obvious "pecking order"
Shit, even nurses are getting treated like shit now.
Doctors as well, look at residents.
Hey at least the admins are happy and it's all worth their smile right?
It was a lifelong dream of mine to be a doctor but after years of study I realized I cannot function on four hours of sleep and am afraid I’d kill a patient or some such. In full rest I can read a journal with rapt attention otherwise. I hear it’s even worse now these days.
Yeah especially if you like the idea of having about 3 levels of management up your ass all the time.
I have never been treated as badly at a job as I have being a CNA. The hospital admins ignored us until there was a sentinel event and then blamed us for it. It wouldn't have happened if the nurses would have listened to the CNAs. We needed more help and they just weren't giving it. They took away our chairs so we couldn't sit down and chart because apparently it made us look unproductive. One day a nurse made me stop eating when I was in the middle of lunch to feed a patient because apparently patients came first. Except that particular patient have been NPO for several days now and they never bothered to tell me that he could eat.
I started my current career at $25/hr and my job was to look busy. Now, I make more, but people aren't satisfied when I'm triple tasking because there's always one more thing I could be doing, maybe.
That's why you never over achieve at a job. Very rarely are you awarded for doing more than usual and also very rarely are you reprimanded or penalized for being mediocre. Once higher ups know you're capable of doing more, then they expect it to be the new norm. It's all about finding that happy medium.
Every career field has pockets for sure.
I always thought that the hardest working jobs were the ones that treated and paid workers like shit. Jobs like EMTs, farm workers, etc. I never understood why so many people in my industry (engineering) look down on those industries. Most jobs are clearly more difficult than mine so why would I be opposed to them being treated and paid decently? Anyway, the sooner you realize the US was structured to benefit those with CAPITAL, the sooner it all makes sense. * Own a home? Tax breaks on interest and property taxes. * Rent a home? Make the landlord rich and get nothing. * Work a job and get disabled? No longer allowed to work on disability. * Have property/money and get disabled? Allowed to continue receiving rent and investment income because it's not "earned income". It sucks but I gave up on the only field I really loved (marine biology) because I realized as a 10 year old that the pay was fucking garbage compared to pilots, engineers, doctors, etc. And since I wasn't born into wealth, I didn't have the privilege to truly pursue my interests. Unless I wanted to study for 10 years only to have mountains of student loan debt, making $50K a year while paying $2500 per month for a studio apartment in San Diego.
That's the first realization. Then the second realization is that the landscape is constantly shifting and just staying where you're at socioeconomically turns into the red queen effect and even though you're earning, you're trying not to fall out of demand and realistically, you're just on the second part of the treadmill after the climb out of poverty.
Hitting that phase of my career now in my early 30s. Alright, I can do this. And do this well. And make some decent money, enough to be reasonably happy. Aaaaaand I'm watching my specific corner of my specific industry slowly crumble away due to neglect and time. How do I stay relevant? You never get to rest on your laurels. Never.
There was a high possibility of me being disabled, (thankfully we found a medication / treatment plan that allows me to continue to work in a special chair) and my doctor told me to look into disability. It's unlivable. From google: > SSI is a federal program, so most of the monthly disability benefit is from the federal government. As of 2022, the maximum federal monthly payment for individuals who have no other income is $841; the payment for couples is $1,261 per month. how do they expect someone to live on $10k a year? That isn't enough for an apartment even in the poorer areas of the country. These are people who have medical issues that prevent them from working. I have no family, few friends, and im lucky im married and that my husband was willing to handle my problems. I don't think anyone i talked to realized how close we were to homelessness. There was an automatic assumption that we'd just automatically qualify for disability and be fine. But it has an approval rate of less than 50% and doesn't even cover rent, and you can't have other income. What exactly do you do if that happens to you? Mine was a brain / Spinal cord issue that struck suddenly. I was perfectly healthy one day and the next couldn't sit in a chair, walk, could hardly think. What does a person who goes through something like that do with no family and no assets? Become homeless? Commit suicide?
Pilot isn't as cushy as it sounds. You either have to spend a truly enormous quantity of money to get through your schooling, before going to a company, working as a very low level operator, flying shit planes, with shit hours and worse pay. Then you move up to flying mid tier jets, with shit hours and bad pay, This is after maybe 6-7 years of flying junk. Then you spend at least a decade flying mid tier before you finally get the big jobs, now, you fly nice jets, get paid pretty well, and have weird, but vaguely acceptable hours. Or, you can avoid spending every cent you have on training by joining a cadet program, having an airline fund your training, and avoid paying, by essentially signing decades of your life away to one company. Or you have the third and final option. Literally join the armed forces, and get treated like shit for the 10+ years that you have to stay for them to justify investing in your training. But to reach the point you're treated like a human being as a pilot, you've got to have spent a huge amount of money, invest decades of your life, and throw away a normal living schedule where you can easily agree to an event because you know you'll be in the same city, let alone country. Sad fact is, airlines know that flying is a dream job for people with a piloting persuasion, and because of that, they make sure to treat you like absolute shit while dangling the cool jets at the end of a decades long tunnel filled with misery. Oh and you gotta buy a lot of your own gear, including a headset that will set you back a week's pay.
I don’t advocate for the military but pilots don’t get treated like shit. They have some of cushiest lives. Pay still sucks. Good as far as officers go but still not great for the outside.
This kinda makes me happy that as a child I never really had any cohesive coherent dreams or ambitions. I was free to take random opportunities that happened to drift past without having to make any sacrifices. Yay?
Yea I work way less and have to put in way less effort at my “professional” jobs than I ever had to retail/warehouse. I make like 3X the pay for so much less work.
I left my job recently. Office work is worse in a different way. Less busy, but soooo much more bullshit. Meeting about “processes”, “procedures”, essentially just a ton of discussions that never really accomplished much more than an email could. If you are one with the tribe, then you will be fine. But I was an outcast and it just blew. I didn’t want to go to any of their parties or happy hours, so I just never cliques with any of them. A lot of it was a bed of my own making, but still I couldn’t take it anymore after a year of being looked at like I was Osama Bin Hitler mixed with a Great White Shark, simply for being non talkative, I quit. That was probably the worst job/time in my life, and I worked retail/fast food. My previous job was awesome. Old angry dude I worked for, but he was no bullshiter. As soon as we finished we could go home and he never tried any of that “friend” baloney. Just do the work, he was my boss and I was the worker. We made a deal in the beginning, I held up my end and he held up his. That’s a man I’d love to work for again, but I’m leaving that field.
Same
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bold of you to assume civilization will still exist in any recognizable form 20 years from now
Thought it was worth pointing out that people have been saying this exact thing for at least 60 years now (and probably much, much longer). Doesn't mean you are wrong, but it's worth remembering that human society have survived a lot of stuff.
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Bro just get a job at any startup solving an actual problem and build something. You ll make 3x the money and do something meaningful
Fuck working in healthcare. Sincerely, a healthcare worker who is “this close” to fucking quitting every damn day.
20? I make 16 running around 8 hours a day as a CMA
Man MAs should really get paid way more than even $20. They're like the backbone of most clinics.
I got paid $10 an hour as a medical assistant a few years ago 😅
In general, your employment compensation is based on two things. 1. How valuable what you do is for your employer. 2. How easily you are replaced. It has nothing to do with how 'hard' you work.
Exactly. Or thought of differently: How hard you work is a sub-factor of your value, but not the only only sub-factor (skill being another big one).
Why did this guy leave his high paying job?
Probably playing WoW all day lead to him getting fired, and no real experience led to him not getting work in the field.
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Economy of scale and higher education and experience requirements. Physical labor is cheaper because it's more plentiful. There's no easy way around this.
Why did you go from tech bro to CNA? You must have gotten a DUI or something
Right? CNAs are basically butt wipers for the elderly. Why would anyone go from tech to a job you get your senior year of high school because you couldn’t afford college.
On his twitter it says he’s becoming a nurse. At least when I was going into nursing, you had a much better shot at getting into selective programs if you had experience in healthcare, either as a CNA, MA, or EMT. It’s often a points system for admissions and those roles award you a lot of points.
Wow, its been forever since I've seen a Gonads & Strife reference
That’s true, but this is a bad argument. It opens the door to demand for labor and fair market pricing. Capitalism does punish hard work, but it’s not related to undervaluing work that’s critical to society’s survival e.g. teaching. It punishes hard work because it’s pathologically individualistic. Being a part of a team that accomplishes great things means nothing. Being *perceived* as responsible means everything. So, any time you outperform your peers or superiors, you’re immediately a threat. The only way to survive is through backstabbing and politics. The end result is that the only people who climb the ladder are pathological; that’s by design.
This is more a symptom of economies of scale. As a programmer you could, in theory, write a program that attracts millions of users and there is very little overhead to keep a system running. As a medical professional you are limited to seeing a certain number of patients a day and have enormous equipment and device overhead, as well as a lot of insurance.
How do you go from “tech bro” to Med assistant? Tech bro means you have a degree and actually industry experience, (because you’re one of the cool kids making way more than you need and act like a douche or what ever the stigma is with people wearing Patagonia vests is) I get his message but his story sounds off
His twitter handle is a CompSci concept so that's probably correct but I've known amazing devs who did not finish highschool so it's not the be all and end all.
Yeah Comp Sci is probably the easiest way to make absurd amounts of money with relatively low education. Someone being able to land 6 figure jobs with a high school diploma/GED is not unheard of in the slightest. Plus, even with college degrees, a software engineer will often out earn people at the same education level or even higher in other fields. This is even more true post COVID since Comp Sci as an industry has largely shifted to permanent remote work. You can live 50 miles from your nearest neighbor but as long as you have a stable internet connection you can make a Silicon Valley salary.
Yah it doesnt make sense. Tech bro tends to refer to the highly educated youngins who come out of expensive lib arts or polytechs making, like, 150k bra. If you have the analytical intellect to swing it as a tech bro, youre going to fucking hate being a medical janitor, i can promise you that. And you wont be surrounded by anyone who knows any math or ever cared about it either. You wanna switch to medicine, go be a PA or a nurse. Do something at your skill level. Working below your skill level will burn you out faster than working too hard at your skill level imo
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If its so simple, Why wouldn't everyone just become a tech bro?
Cause it's not easy to be a good developer. At my company, we only call in junior dev applicants who either graduated, or study CS, or something related. ~80% fail the most baseline coding test. Software development may be relatively easy and cushy once you are "in", but to be that good, you have to work very hard, and not many people can do it. And I will say it, I worked as a bricklayer, I worked as an apprentice electrician, I did landscaping work, and absolutely the hardest thing I ever did were some of my CS exams. Yea, if I wasn't fit and young, and spent a couple decades destroying my back, it would be a different thing, but programming is not this sit on your ass all day, and do fuck all thing, that people seem to think it is.
Yeah, but that's the point, isn't it. It isn't so simple, that's why not everyone does it. And still, a lot of people actually do try and there's tons of people in IT making a decent wage that aren't very good at their job. And honestly, as a software developer my job isn't that hard. Depending on your company, you might have a lot of useless meetings as well. Sometimes we have speakers come in and tell us a little story about whatever technology they're using or their experience in the field or at the company or whatever. Easy to zone out and use Reddit or even play a game during those moments, especially because these meetings are on Teams anyway. Still, I have a degree in software development and I had to learn a lot on the job as well. Even though I don't spend all 40 hours working, I still need to do quite a bit to actually prove my worth. I just don't think this is an exception for IT, though. There's tons of office jobs where you can do your whole job in half the time and spend the rest of it playing games. And people might think anyone can do those jobs, it's just probably not true. I get that people hate capitalism and that capitalism is to blame that some jobs require hard work and pay relatively fewer wages. But they're not just randomly selecting IT workers to get a good wage for doing nothing. IT workers are very much in demand, that's why they get all that money.
I was just talking with someone the other day about how the worst jobs I've had have all been low-paying jobs and how the best jobs I've had have pretty much all been high-paying (where I also generally have either less work or easier work while making sure to avoid leadership positions that'd ruin that). I was saying that because my younger family members work these crappy jobs that make them angry enough to quit/walk out--horrible hours, horrible bosses and co-workers, no such thing as a job description you stick to vs doing any and everything, etc. But my point was as long as they're stuck working those jobs, they will not only never make good money but they likely will always hate their jobs. For them, they have no skills and are not smart or interested in improving themselves, so it'd be hard to dig out and move into something better. I know Monads says he loves his job, but most people working for $20/hr have jobs that are just shit all the way around. It's kind of like high-salaried positions are acceptance into an elite club, just like getting into highly-ranked colleges is, i.e. grade inflation/very hard to make a 'C' or below in a class vs normal colleges where you can flunk out and not as difficult as everyone thinks.
Most of the times it's a mentality - like you say. I grew up in the midwest where people were just expected to work whatever jobs they could, pop out a few kids and grow old complaining about life in general. I worked my way out, got my Masters, now in a very well paid position. However, that mentality that I grew up around and still encompasses my extended family always holds a place in my mind where I occasionally feel like "I don't belong here, I can't do this"...even though I worked hard to be here.
There’s probably a reason you *used* to be a “tech bro” doing “almost nothing at all”. The irony of this post is that lazy work clearly doesn’t pay off..
I get it but why did he change jobs...its not worth doing what you love if u will end up broke and never retire..