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Meh. Sounds like a run of the mill shitty job. You can destroy your body laying bricks and unloading trucks or you can destroy your mental health doing someth

Meh. Sounds like a run of the mill shitty job. You can destroy your body laying bricks and unloading trucks or you can destroy your mental health doing something like this. Of course they're not paid well enough to compensate for the long term damage. Nobody ever is. There's all sorts of shit you might have to put up with in a shitty job, the work, the environment the customers. This job is shitty but some people are bothered less by this particular kind of shitty than they are by by angry customers yelling at you or laying bricks in the Arizona weather. Sure you might have to see some really screwed up shit among the sea of nip-slips and racial slurs but you get to do it in an air conditioned office without killing your body like the guys in the Amazon warehouse. Some people prefer that. Different people have different degrees to which they'll tolerate the various ways shitty jobs are shitty. At least one person the author interviewed said "well, it sucks less than Walmart". Back at the point in my life when I was doing shitty jobs I would have preferred brick laying or custodial work but I wouldn't have turned down this job if I needed it. Of course it's terrible for you and turnover is high but all the equally shitty jobs are this way. There really is no winning in the "minimum wage or thereabouts" income bracket. Edit: Since apparently this opinion is unpopular can anyone tell me why this particular implementation of shitty job is worse than all the other implementations?

untog 8y ago
Disregarding for a second that you're dismissing this entirely without having done so much of one minute of the job yourself... A lot of manual labour jobs are protected by unions, which establish safety standards, limits to shift length and healthcare to help employees when they need it. Sounds like these employees could do with the same.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >A lot of manual labour jobs are protected by unions, which establish safety standards, limits to shift length and healthcare to help employees when they need it. Sounds like these employees could do with the same. I'm not comparing to those jobs. The union dishwasher in some public university cafeteria gets time off, healthcare, etc, etc. that makes his or her job much less shitty than the infinite-term temp that works beside them. I'm comparing to the temp. You can make a job better/worse by adding/subtracting pay, benefits or working conditions. If I could get tech pay and benefits for construction work I'd be doing construction. If we're gonna compare this job to others then we should compare to other jobs that are "equally shitty" not jobs that are similar but actually compensated more highly if you roll the benefits into total comp.
monetus 8y ago
The way you phrase your statement doesn't end on a note of solution or hope and, "the perfect is the enemy of the good." "Nobody ever is," is also an absolute dripping with sadness. Just my 2 cents on the reactions, I doubt it's because they think the working poor aren't systemically disadvantaged.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Yeah I could have made my comment more likable by ending with a call for unionization/regulation/HN's silver bullet of the week. I feel like that doesn't do justice to people who have to work shitty jobs to make their living but I can't quite articulate why.
  - plausibilities 8y ago
    Let me take a stab at it - perhaps it makes you feel disingenuous to some degree to propose large-scale, "silver-bullet", beaten-to-death solutions/strategies. Reason being that, from a practical/cynical perspective, these proposals can too easily be co-opted into red-herring cudgels intended to end discussions before they delve into the realm of the more granular, nuanced, uncomfortable details.
intended 8y ago
A job which gives you ptsd in a few months by having you sit in a chair and see images, is by most human standards astonishingly awful. People go to war zones and put their lives on their lines to have their minds be harmed in the same way - in contrast these moderators don’t even get hazard pay.

untog 8y ago

Disregarding for a second that you're dismissing this entirely without having done so much of one minute of the job yourself... A lot of manual labour jobs are protected by unions, which establish safety standards, limits to shift length and healthcare to help employees when they need it. Sounds like these employees could do with the same.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>A lot of manual labour jobs are protected by unions, which establish safety standards, limits to shift length and healthcare to help employees when they need it. Sounds like these employees could do with the same. I'm not comparing to those jobs. The union dishwasher in some public university cafeteria gets time off, healthcare, etc, etc. that makes his or her job much less shitty than the infinite-term temp that works beside them. I'm comparing to the temp. You can make a job better/worse by adding/subtracting pay, benefits or working conditions. If I could get tech pay and benefits for construction work I'd be doing construction. If we're gonna compare this job to others then we should compare to other jobs that are "equally shitty" not jobs that are similar but actually compensated more highly if you roll the benefits into total comp.

monetus 8y ago

The way you phrase your statement doesn't end on a note of solution or hope and, "the perfect is the enemy of the good." "Nobody ever is," is also an absolute dripping with sadness. Just my 2 cents on the reactions, I doubt it's because they think the working poor aren't systemically disadvantaged.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Yeah I could have made my comment more likable by ending with a call for unionization/regulation/HN's silver bullet of the week. I feel like that doesn't do justice to people who have to work shitty jobs to make their living but I can't quite articulate why.
- plausibilities 8y ago
  Let me take a stab at it - perhaps it makes you feel disingenuous to some degree to propose large-scale, "silver-bullet", beaten-to-death solutions/strategies. Reason being that, from a practical/cynical perspective, these proposals can too easily be co-opted into red-herring cudgels intended to end discussions before they delve into the realm of the more granular, nuanced, uncomfortable details.

intended 8y ago

A job which gives you ptsd in a few months by having you sit in a chair and see images, is by most human standards astonishingly awful. People go to war zones and put their lives on their lines to have their minds be harmed in the same way - in contrast these moderators don’t even get hazard pay.