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What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
- jenny91 4y agoVerbose article with little substance.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoThat's because Google gives points for word count.
- sandworm101 4y ago>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep up with. Pediatric oncology. Extremely high skill/pay. Very prestigious. But most will leave within a few years. A working day surrounded by kids undergoing painful treatments, particularly when you are the person prescribing those treatments, grinds down one's soul. Or criminal defense attorneys/prosecutors. Or any law enforcement. To survive such jobs you mush develop a skin so think that to outsiders you appear inhumane.
- dazc 4y ago> Pediatric oncology. ... Or criminal defense attorneys/prosecutors. Not detracting from the point but, in either case, this person is not going to be on the breadline as a consequence of quitting his/her job. They will get a similalrly high paying and high prestige job the next day.
- User23 4y ago> Pediatric oncology. That job must be nightmarish for anyone who isn’t a full-blown sociopath. I’m not a particularly empathetic person and I couldn’t start that job let alone stay in it for years. Edit: > One of the attractions of pediatrics is, surprisingly enough… This is the opposite of surprising. I imagine one of the appeals of pediatrics is significantly fewer of your patients die. That’s why pediatric oncology is particularly striking, it’s dealing with high numbers of deaths in a cohort where they are otherwise quite rare.
- trillic 4y agoThere was a young woman in my high school and University class, she was a bit strange. Extremely bright beyond her years, sociable, and got along well with both the teachers and most of the students. There was always something a bit off with her though. From early high-school, as soon as “career” talk got more serious, she had only one job that she claimed she wanted to do, “Pediactric Oncology”. Some of the teachers were also taken aback by her fervor and intensity, but also her consistency. Last I checked she’s in Med school somewhere prestigious, I’m sure she’ll be a great doctor, and that a lot of children will get the attention they deserve, but something worries me about the whole situation.
- wpietri 4y agoOh no, was a person "a bit strange"? Were they "a bit off"? Think of the children!!! It seems especially ugly to see that here on HN. I grew up as the "a bit strange" person in a small midwestern town. It sucked. it wasn't until I got the fuck out and got into tech that I got to be around other nerdy, non-neurotypical people like myself that I finally felt like I could breathe. If you have a complaint about somebody, fine, make it in clear and precise terms. But this scary-scary vagueness looks to me like standard-issue neurotypical bigotry.
- unsupp0rted 4y agoHear hear! It’s really easy to paint someone as “a bit off” and imply without implying. It’s important when noticing instances of this to request further clarification.
- ModernMech 4y ago> A working day surrounded by kids undergoing painful treatments, particularly when you are the person prescribing those treatments, grinds down one's soul. This is why psychopaths are overrepresented in such professions. I guess it makes it easier to cut into people, and to make dispassionate decisions. edit: are the downvotes because you think I'm implying this is a bad thing? Am I wrong?
- hotpotamus 4y agoI was thinking this would be a eusocial use of psychopathy.
- chii 4y ago> dispassionate decisions. if they are able to make choices dispassionately that is objectively best for the patient, then it makes them good doctors. The only problem is how does one judge whether they made the decision in the best interest of the patient, when normally, this judgement is based on a proxy metric like sympathy?
- bryanrasmussen 4y agodidn't downvote, but I wonder if you have a study showing the stats. Before I've heard that psychopaths are over-represented in politics, as CEOs, as lawyers, as law enforcement, and as criminals. Now also, evidently, in pediatric oncology?
- ModernMech 4y agoOh okay I see. When I said "such professions" I meant all of the ones the parent had mentioned: medicine, lawyers, law enforcement. And like you said CEOs and politicians can be added to the list. I know I read something about surgeons in particular having an overrepresentation of psychopaths, but I don't have them handy. I'd imagine it could be true for pediatric oncologists as well for the same reasons, but I don't have any studies to back that up.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
- polotics 4y agoJust met one and she was the nicest person, just very careful and reserved, used to the toughest decisions. On the upside kids get cured more frequently than adults.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoSpeaking of criminal prosecutors, I'm binging Law and Order (the OG). I completely understand it's a dramatization of real life but I never understood how complex the process is and how much they actually lose. You'd think the State/People have the upper hand at every turn and most of the time they do, but the amount of process, discovery and overcoming the reasonable doubt burden on their (relatively) limited budgets is a marvel. I know he's fake but I have a ton of respect for the Jack McCoys of the world.
- brokenodometer 4y agoProsecutors do a lot of work, but the idea that they lose a lot is questionable. In the federal system, more than 90% of defendants plead guilty, and only around 1% of defendants take a case to trial and ultimately win. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f... The numbers in state courts may vary, but in NY they are similar to the federal system. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/New_York_State_Trial_Penalty_Report_FINAL_03262021.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/New_... Obviously a guilty plea still requires work, and maybe a lot of it. But in terms of outcomes, they rarely lose.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoYes true, I was more thinking when things went to trial. Pleas make up a large share of outcomes. I was just more surprised at how badly things can go wrong in the process which ends up with a dismissal or acquittal; whether that's police process, evidentiary, testimony, etc.
- Clubber 4y agoThe troubling part is the prime tactic is to get people to plea. One of the methods employed is to massively overcharge where the defendant is looking at say 20 years if they lose at trial vs 5 years if they plea. Most people plea, even if they are innocent. Many prosecutors overcharge even when they have a weak case. It's not justice, it's the system protecting its existence.
- aqme28 4y agoSat down at a bar once and the woman next to me was a pediatric oncologist, basically just crying into her beer about how she wanted to quit. It wasn't just sad-- it was an incredibly interesting conversation that I still remember about a decade later.
- the_only_law 4y agoI haven’t spoken to a lot of doctors, but a lot of nurses I know are desperate to leave the field. The last doctor I spoke to was the most condescending man I met in a while, unfortunately, he was also my surgeon.
- kingkawn 4y agoI think it is important to have some empathy for surgeons, despite the commonness of arrogance and the mostly absurdly high compensations they receive. Their work is to intentionally mutilate people and their skill is to make it so that the mutilation will improve health. It is an incredibly dissociating job, taking you out of all standard relationships to the body and other people. It takes years, sometimes decades of training to become skilled enough to lead operations, and even short breaks are known to significantly diminish skill and outcomes for patients. The stress level is unfathomable for lay people, and the distance it creates in them from other people is not a sign that they’re assholes but the remnant of the sacrifices they had to make to fulfill our idea of what they have to be. I know not all surgeons are arrogant in the way you and then I have described, but I always feel sad and caring for those people who are wrecked enough by the process to become so socially inept and disconnected from the people around them.
- short_sells_poo 4y agoI agree with this 100%. The more a matter of life and death a particular field of medicine is, the more I understand people who work there to be "cold" and "uncaring". Not because they are assholes, the exact opposite. I think people in these fields have to sacrifice a great deal of their humanity to be able to do their job and save lives. What we don't see are the undoubtedly countless cases where their pour every last drop of their will to save a person, and it just fails and the patient dies. Through no fault of the doctor. Imagine having to carry that burden. To always question whether the person who was put in your care died because you could've done better. In fact, I think this is an unimaginable burden to carry. I certainly wouldn't be able to do it. I'd break long before that. For this reason alone, these people will always have my very highest regard.
- TrackerFF 4y agoAs far as low-skill, high-pay goes, dockworkers unloading ships is up there with meatgrinder jobs. Your team gets paid for each lb / kg unloaded off the ship, and that sum is divided equally over each team member. So the faster and more ships your team can unload, the more you're paid. That's the incentive. I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day - but that day was 20 hours long, and you're pretty much beat to a pulp afterwards. We had people come in, and leave before lunch. No pay in the world would keep them there. Edit, for the curious - I tried to look up some footage of what it looks like: This clip shows a nice and modern trawler, the unloading requires little manpower. See those long brown blocks on the palets? Those would be around 40-50 kgs / 90 - 110 lbs. https://youtu.be/Qi7VNBOJetA?t=115 https://youtu.be/Qi7VNBOJetA?t=115 This is more on par with what you'd usually see - the rooms would be stack to the ceiling with frozen packet/blocks. Those blocks are around 20 kgs / 45 lbs each. https://youtu.be/e7u-X8XR1hs?t=543 https://youtu.be/e7u-X8XR1hs?t=543 Here's a larger trawler - again - sometimes the fish will be stacked to the ceiling https://youtu.be/fQEwECzZL_s?t=2739 https://youtu.be/fQEwECzZL_s?t=2739 Unfortunately I can't seem to find any footage of the more usual scenario, where the blocks are just piled up at random.
- ResNet 4y ago> I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day This is surprisingly high in that I would have assumed it would be far more cost-effective for the company to improve automation here and bring in more equipment to assist — intuitively, even if such equipment would be expensive, it couldn't be more expensive than the labor costs. What industry was this?
- pinko 4y agoI think the OP already said: dockworkers unloading ships -- that's the industry. And to the extent that the cargo isn't containerized (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't), automation is harder than it sounds here: sequencing, unstacking, moving, and re-stacking irregularly-shaped, imbalanced, fragile, and dissimilarly-packaged objects requires lots of experience and judgement or things go awry very fast, and one mistake can cost a ton of time to deal with when something falls over, gets punctured, or gets in the way. This is also true of movers (as in house movers). It's harder than it looks, at least to do well -- many cheaper companies write contracts such that they can screw up and customers have no recourse, which changes the economics a bit -- but the first-rate movers are expensive for a reason. Unless you're incredibly careful (which often implies going more slowly), bodies get wrecked and objects get broken. As an aside, one proxy for a first-rate moving company is them having front-line employees who have been on the job for 5+ years. It's basically impossible for companies that cut corners because no one survives that long. Firms like Gentle Giant out of Boston (I have no stake in the company, I just know them well)) have a stable of long-term employees, many of them athletes, because they're incentivized to do a good job while not hurting themselves. And they're expensive (but not necessarily more expensive than cut-rate firms if you factor in the risk of damage, and/or the likelihood of being fairly reimbursed if something is damaged).
- giantg2 4y agoIn the case of LEOs or prosecutors, I think many give up the search for truth and give in to the us-vs-them mentality. The cognitive dissonance and pressure of group dynamics make it almost a certainty. There is huge power in law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion. Yes, some parts of the job have to be strict for safety purposes. There are many other parts that don't. I've had prosecutors and police know that our rights were violated as part of a citation. They did not care. Cop lied multiple times in court and was caught. IAD merely gave them a warning. The LT of the troop made a bunch of BS excuses - either he's actually that stupid or he's lying too. Filed a complaint about an incompetent magistrate whow also violated due process rights - judicial board doesn't care. Prosecutor instructed the court not to talk to us which prevented us from securing remote accommodations for our witness - the Bar didn't care. Civil rights lawyer said our rights were violated, but unless there was substantial monetary damages, the system doesn't care and would likely see it as frivolous. Nobody cares. Nobody protects your rights. If nobody can enforce your rights, do you even have them at all? All the trooper/prosecutor/magistrate/judge had to do, was drop/throw out the case. They had the discretion, and even the responsibility, to do that. Their mentality was the problem. We were guilty in their mind because if we were not, that would make them participants in a broken and unjust system.
- ip26 4y agoDefense & prosecution aren't on a search for truth, they are on a search to make the best possible case for & against you, respectively. That's their role in the system. Law enforcement (officers, investigators) I would hope to be on the search for truth.
- Ozzie_osman 4y ago> Pediatric oncology My father in law does this, in a developing country no less. Bless his soul, he's a very kind man. But it's incredibly taxing. Not just the treatments but there are many cases where children die and there's nothing you can do about it. And it doesn't stop, even when he's on vacation, he has patient's families calling/texting him. I've been at dinner where someone will walk over and say something like "you saved my brother/daughter/sister/son's life." Or sometimes my wife and I will meet someone who will recognize she's his daughter and day the same. Hopefully that makes it worth it.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago> Or any law enforcement. Please don't equate healthcare workers with law enforcement. Healthcare workers have an astronomically harder job and actually make society a better place.
- mythrwy 4y agoI have a friend who used to be a cop in Dallas. He's a dentist now. He says he makes many times the money with much less stress. Being in law enforcement in this climate seems like a pretty rough job to me. And that's not to excuse bad law enforcement behavior (of which there is plenty) either. "Actually make society a better place". << What do you suppose your world would look like with no enforcement of any laws?
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI think in terms of difficulty, law enforcement has much more skin in the game- both jobs have to deal with potential guilt from screwing up but if a surgeon misjudges a situation pretty much the worst outcome is that they get sued and in egregious cases lose their job. Whereas in law enforcement you're more likely to have adversarial interactions with armed people, drunk drivers, etc where your own life is in danger. Based on my (definitely incomplete so feel free to fill in any blanks I have!) knowledge of places that don't have formal law enforcement, it's impossible to make a good faith argument that they're better places because of it.
- bluquark 4y agoPrior to 2020, health work was probably safer, but since then over eighty thousand health workers have died of Covid worldwide: https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-worker-deaths-during-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-wor... If the world is unlucky enough to experience another pandemic someday, health workers will be expected to risk their lives once again during the period where no vaccines or good treatments exist.
- sudosysgen 4y agoLaw enforcement in the United States is a fairly safe job. Adversarial interactions with armed people and drunk drivers are sadly part of many more jobs, and generally the most dangerous behaviour a cop will engage in is driving.
- baybal2 4y agoFor the interest of HN reader demographics: The salary of experienced assembly line worker in South China has passed that of USA's central states few years ago, just before the CoVID. For places like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan, working in a factory is quite a dream job, and a ticket to the middle class living. People who poo on "sweatshops" in Asia hardly realise that these sweatshops are better than 90% of all jobs there. I worked for companies who did manufacturing setup for Yadea in Vietnam, FairElectronics, and Walton in Bangladesh. Their HRs have a meter thick pile of resumes they work with every month.
- foogazi 4y ago> The salary of experienced assembly line worker in South China has passed that of USA's central states few years ago, just before the CoVID. What’s the salary for an experienced assembly line worker in US or China ?
- baybal2 4y ago
- selimthegrim 4y agoCan someone explain to me and maybe to great industrialist Shahbaz Sharif how Pak is supposed to compete with those two countries with a 20% lower literacy rate in comparison?
- baybal2 4y ago
- k__ 4y agoI always have to think about this when people say "buy more at small businesses!" Most small businesse owners I met were just as shitty as the ones of big businesses, they just weren't as smart as them.
- bambataa 4y agoThere is also the issue that big companies are usually watched more and have regulatory teams making sure they follow rules. I believe in the UK that small businesses are far worse for minimum wage violations.
- k__ 4y agoI have a few friends that work no-skill jobs and the stories they tell me...
- User23 4y agoSmall businesses are far worse at all regulatory compliance, because unlike big businesses they can’t afford a compliance department. I see this as more a problem with excessive regulation than small businesses, but reasonable minds can differ. And yes I’m a strong proponent of worker’s rights, it just sucks that being a small employer is a kafkaesque nightmare. I know one who was recently fined for paying his employees too much because they happened to be migrant workers.
- kebman 4y agoSmall businesses usually can't afford the army of lawyers and lobbyists necessary to make the regulations that favour their company. Meanwhile their bigger competitors more often do. All in all, more regulation often favour bigger players simply because smaller players aren't able to comply for a variety of reasons, usually due to economics at scale, but also because they simply don't have access to, or can't afford proper legal advice. Being fined out of the blue, and not knowing why, is often a result of this, for example, though you can always argue that not practising due diligence may lead to criminal negligence or other such liabilities. There is a way to fight that, though, and that is with business associations and interest groups.
- crate_barre 4y agoAny job that doesn’t holistically build your skill set (antithetical to a career). As in, the money is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If you stock Shampoo on a shelf, and you can’t flip that into something useful, it’s a worthless job. It’s better to get paid $0 being in the right field for a bit than actually being paid in the wrong path. It’s negative money unless you are using it to pivot into the right path via education. Which brings me to an aside, College for many people is a good example of a dead-end job. Not only did you not get paid, but someone also took your money wasting your time down a trail that many people pivot out of (your Classics majors that switch to Dev, congrats on paying to be led astray for 4 years). But software can also be a dead end job if you chased the money and went off the trail of the path you should have kept investing in. All this shit takes vision honestly.
- JaimeThompson 4y ago>It’s better to get paid $0 being in the right field for a bit than actually being paid in the wrong path. I am going to make the guess that you either have a lot of money right now or have an amazing support system to help you because such options aren't available to everyone who is making sure their food budget is correct down to the penny.
- crate_barre 4y agoYour guess is wrong then. I’m more of a person that has been at the upside and downside of things. I know what it’s like to just need the paycheck. But I never looked at it like that, it was mostly a paycheck to create the opportunity via stability to evolve another path. In that case, holistically, that dead-end job had a purpose for creating financial groundwork (once upon a time for me it was literally to buy some server hosting or a domain name - yeah, that’s how broke).
- formerkrogemp 4y agoNah being broke isn't being able to afford a domain. It's eating fast food 3 days in a row because your paycheck isn't coming for another three days and the gas bill was $50 higher this month and your kid needed to see the dentist.
- raynforprez 4y agoI believe it means actually having to do work.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoIt's practically a condemnation of the readership the extend to which the author has to build a complex network of rhetorical and example based fortification around what are fundamentally simple points that are plain as day and could be discussed frankly and freely among the demographics and employment situations he/she is describing but which the readership has scant if any direct experience working with. It pains me to think about all the writing and re-writing and very specific word choice that must have gone into this.
- hotpotamus 4y agoHave you considered that innocence inspires unparalleled actions?
- pjbeam 4y agoMany things in life are to some degree what you make of them, but a lot of low skill jobs don't even offer the hope of learning or advancement. This seems like a real situation of despair to me.
- slfnflctd 4y agoThis is one of the biggest mistakes we're collectively making right now, intentional or not. Ideally, every job should offer the opportunity to learn more and/or move into better-paid roles eventually-- and even if that's too much to ask, we could still be doing far better than we are. I showed a lot of promise in a field I was interested in early in life, but there was nowhere to go to level up in it without going back to college (which I couldn't afford either the time or the money for). Now I'm staring down a dead end at middle age with no idea what's next, other than that both my pay and my workload will be miserable compared with what I should be capable of. One apprenticeship at the right place & time would have dramatically changed my life, and I'd be contributing to the economy on a whole different level. When all the entry level jobs are dead ends, everybody loses.
- plussed_reader 4y agoIt means subsistence at someone else's benefit.
- TrackerFF 4y agoWorked a wide variety of low-skill, low-pay temp jobs during college. Lots of the people I worked with there were juggling multiple gigs, and were sort of locked into that system of work. By the time I graduated, it was mostly temp firms that handled the recruitment - and FYI, they absolutely follow the "hire fast, fire fast" mantra. So while you could land work the next day, you could just as easily get fired from the same gig 2 hours into work. That's how fast it went. This is turn made people stick around shitty gigs, if they knew that meant job security for the next 3-6 months. And once you start turning down other gigs, you might not get called up again, ever again. It's not that you're implicitly getting "blackballed", but rather that by the time you're calling back for work, they've gotten N new candidates working, and ready to go. And the worst part? These gigs do next to nothing for your resume. I worked with college graduates stuck in such positions, graduates with decent and hard degrees. One year turns into two, two into three, three into five...and before they know it, they've worked these shitty gigs long enough that their degrees start to lose value. But you gotta pay rent each and every month, so what can you do? For some more meat to this story - my least favorite gigs, which I consider stereotypical "shitty jobs" in this segment of jobs: 1. Warehouse worker for huge transportation corporation: 12 hour shifts, extremely high tempo, employees pretty much throwing every parcel that can be thrown, to work faster. If the supervisor caught you slipping for even 2 minutes during that shift, you could be removed from that job. Shit pay. No wonder people receive broken packages, when the warehouse workers are throwing them like basketballs. 2. Construction helper. You're just carrying stuff up and down stairs, all day long. That's it. Imagine carrying bags of cement up 5 floors, for 10-12 hours. Again, bottom bucket pay, and you'll be constantly monitored. 3. Roofer hand/helper. Same as 2, but you'll be spending your time on a roof, often time just getting stuff up there. I once spent the whole month of February shoveling a warehouse roof, that's all I did for 8 hours a day.
- formerkrogemp 4y agoYou just described my first 5 years out of college until I went back to school. You take that "temporary" job to pay the bills, and then you never get that entry level position to break into your industry after your degree and you're SOL and going back to school in the hopes that a master's degree and project portfolio will help you get an entry level position or internship which will translate into finally being able to afford retirement savings, a house, a younger than I am car, or something. I do feel this situation.
- woodruffw 4y agoThis was a great read. I think the true value of money is one of HN's biggest bubbles: the average person on here (but not all of us!) jumped right from their undergraduate career to making a six-figure salary in a city with lavish public amenities (by American standards). It's very easy to forget that the average American salary is less than half of that, and even that hides the number of people living well below the poverty line.
- vasco 4y agoThis is a public website, there's no security check for "Is american, went to Stanford and lives in SF pulling 100k/yr". I know plenty of software developers that frequent this site and make around 20-30k a year in Europe.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- robertlagrant 4y agoThat salary seems very low, other than maybe for a junior. And even then - maybe. What sort of company pays that in 2022?
- ip26 4y agoCertainly true, but by a process of self-selection, the population of the site does seem heavily skewed.
- Barrin92 4y ago
- alexfromapex 4y agoI think this article starts to touch on a topic area I don't hear much about but am extremely frustrated by: how modern work for a lot of jobs has become de facto indentured servitude. In the "When They Know They've Got You" section, they mention the real challenges of not being able to obtain a lawyer if things truly aren't fair. The average worker can't afford anything without taking on debt. Insurance is a scam in a lot of cases but if a worker is sick it will only hurt the worker not the company a lot of the time. To make matters much worse, the corporations lobby the government and fund all candidates and have seemingly captured the government so no changes are being made. Healthcare, extremely high rent, and things like property tax where failure to pay sends you to prison are used as the means of coercion. If the United States continues on the current political course, nothing will ever change.
- throw1234651234 4y agoThis is the best post in this thread. This is all very much true. One more thing that most Americans don't admit is that people mostly work jobs they have started out in. When I was in shitty jobs, people started out and stayed there. As I move up, I notice that people also started out and stayed there. Anecdotally, the US has much less mobility than what is commonly believed. Anyway, I went off topic - don't want to detract from the parent point - you can work 10 hrs a day and not be able to afford anything and barely have a chance to progress because you are ground down by "real life^tm". Tech and MDs are definitely a special little island.
- kebman 4y agoYou're not just having a hunch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
- silexia 4y agoThe solution here is to open up the free markets again. This means: -Right to repair -Abolish the patent system and non competes -Drop the IRS and let the government simply print money it needs... This eliminates all tax loopholes and special treatment. Perfectly fair wealth tax.
- thenerdhead 4y agoI had a "shitty job" as a high schooler. I was a janitor at a public elementary school where I'd have to clean the unspeakable things that kids do in the bathrooms and classrooms. While it was a literal "shitty" job, anyone could do it for the $10/hr. I saw that it was a dead-end though. I would be looking at my twenty-something year old boss and wanting much more for myself than the fun job he had. I saw that I could make a positive out of a negative. I would work my ass off to give myself an extra hour each day after I locked up the school to then learn how to code online and did all of my lagging coursework on the computer we had in the janitor office/closet. Looking back now after being part of a successful startup and working for big tech for the last 6 years, I believe this "shitty" job is one of the big reasons I made it. I think we underestimate the privilege that certain jobs can give us. I think it's especially important that you have enough time to work on your personal development in someway at any job. Sometimes you have to make that time for yourself somehow even if there are risks of being terminated. Also it helps to have a job where nobody else is around and all people care about is the job gets done each day.
- oaiey 4y ago.. the privilege of a teenager with unlimited time and no responsibility. I get your point but the personal development can only happen if the primal needs are covered.
- wpietri 4y agoFor sure. There are so many people out there who use that "extra" time to take care of siblings or make extra money for the household budget or just deal with the trauma of their day-to-day living.
- GoodJokes 4y ago
- hamiltonians 4y agothis is why i think teen summer jobs squander potential. young adults should be learning skills instead of doing shitty jobs, although someone has to do that work.
- wpietri 4y agoOoh, good article. As somebody who had a bunch of shitty jobs in my youth, I recognize a lot of this. One thing he doesn't quite name here, though, is trauma and recovery. Decades of cushy software jobs has given me opportunities to heal. I have my shit much more together now, and wouldn't have happened without that healing. Sanity is a luxury good. So it's this part that troubles me: > on average low-skill workers are worse in a lot of ways than high-skilled people I think this is partly correct, but it treats worse-ness as an intrinsic of the person, not a consequence of the circumstances. It's a good example of the fundamental attribution error. [1] It's also a good example of why playing around with E-Prime [2] can be such a useful cognitive tool; avoiding intrinsics can clarify thinking. As he noted, shitty jobs caused physical illness. But they also break and stunt people in non-physical ways. Treating people like an underclass is a good way to create an underclass. Not just in the workers themselves, but in the children of the workers. The various ACE studies make clear the ongoing cost of childhood trauma, some of which is caused and all of which is worsened by poverty and economic instability. And from the story in the footnote, that's quite clearly what some people want. That manager didn't regret fucking all those people over. She gloried in it. Managerialism [3] is the modern, socially acceptable form of feudalism. There are plenty of people who only feel good if they have it better than somebody else. We let that continue at our peril. [1] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution-error https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime [3] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confronting-managerialism-9781780320724/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confronting-managerialism-9781...
- frontman1988 4y agoThese low paying shitty jobs in developed countries sound quite pleasant compared to what people in third world countries are forced to do. These jobs are what came to my mind as an Indian when I read the title: https://dw.com/en/india-manual-scavengers-continue-to-remove-human-waste-by-hand-despite-ban/a-58970498 https://dw.com/en/india-manual-scavengers-continue-to-remove... https://thewire.in/labour/manual-scavenging-sanitation-workers https://thewire.in/labour/manual-scavenging-sanitation-worke...
- weakfish 4y ago“Things are worse somewhere else, therefore we shouldn’t improve anything here”
- hhlevnjak3 4y agoOr put differently, if we can't improve things in a rich society, how do we expect it to improve elsewhere.
- erikerikson 4y agoOr, perhaps, help offer better options everywhere so that the tide rises?
- chse_cake 4y agoIndia is notorious for paying shit money to people. When I started my first software job in India i was paid less than 4k$ a year, I lived in a slum and worked 60 hour weeks. I obviously did not have to pickup some one else’s shit. And I am not saying that America has a prettier picture but overall being on minimum wage in America/Europe is actually a little better than being on minimum wage in 3rd world / developing nations.
- steve76 4y ago
- photochemsyn 4y agoThe rational thing to do with any job is to first figure out what revenue to profit ratio is for the business. If there's a large profit margin and you're getting low pay, demand a raise. If you're refused a raise, talk to the other employees about the situation and then, if they agree, walk in to see the boss and demand a raise together. As companies get larger this gets more difficult and retaliation becomes more common and you get layers of middle managers between owners and workers. That's why there's this big push to unionize at Amazon, it's the only way they can get pay comparable to that of auto workers before neoliberal globalization and moving the factories from the Rust Belt to Mexico. (In today's economy, that would be $30 / hr entry or so).
- kazinator 4y ago> Annualized, it was the difference between $28,000 and $36,000 a year. $8,000 might not seem like a huge absolute increase in pay, but for the subject of the story it was almost a 30% raise. In Canada, if you're poor like this, you might take home just 40 cents home on every extra dollar earned. This is due to paying extra taxes, while losing tax benefits at the same time. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/low-income-families-in-canada-hit-hard-by-high-effective-tax-rates https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/low-income-families-...
- Beltalowda 4y agoI think these kind of problems exist in a lot of countries; it's certainly similar in the Netherlands too, and has been for quite a long time: if you're a low-income earner you get social housing, rental assistance, health care assistance, and all these things. But then you start earning too much a lot of these things just drop away and you end up paying a lot more. This is why we should maybe rethink the way we do a lot of this social security; right now it's a lot of complex pushing around of money to compensate for the fact that people just don't earn enough money to actually make ends meet, which developed over the decades as a solution for this problem and then that problem and such, and we've ended up with a rather crazy system where private companies are effectively subsidized by the state so they can keep their wages low. I don't have any solutions as it's all pretty complex and far outside of my expertise, but it's pretty bonkers.
- kazinator 4y agoA simple way to fix the mathematics, so that poorer people aren't effectively in a a 70% marginal tax rate, is to give the low income handouts to everyone, regardless of income. Universal Basic Income is in this vein. I'd also fix other things. Instead of having "non-refundable tax credits" that operate at the lowest bracket, people should just be able to write reasonable expenses right off their income.
- dionidium 4y agoThe opening comments resonate with me quite a bit. I’ve been food-stamp and Medicaid poor. My wife has always been upper-middle class. Her idea of tightening her belt is quite a bit different from mine. I think on some level she really can’t believe there are people who simply forgo things that she perceives to be basic necessities. (This is how you get those NY Times articles about people who make, say, $250k year claiming that it’s not that much money, really, once you account for all the spending on basics (private school, two vacations, violin lessons, two new cars, maxing-out the 401ks, etc, etc)).
- GoodJokes 4y ago
- raincom 4y agoI had such jobs for four years. Because of low-pay (low-pay due to low-skill), because of odd-schedules, there is no way to get out, without some external help. Basically, people keep these shitty jobs as they need to pay rent, and rent needs that job. In 2001, I was making $8 per hr in Cali, worked there for 1.5 years, jumped to another sh!tty job that paid $12 per hr in 2003, stayed there for 3.5 years. Then a friend I met online offered a way out: a guarantee job with some training. Yes, when you work in sh1tty jobs, even $2 per hr more means a lot.
- yegle 4y agoCan you give us a couple examples on these external help? Also is there any nonprofit working in this area to provide this kind of help?
- protomyth 4y agoI will say that I would rather pick cans in the ditches (did that as a kid in summer) or dig ditches than do a fast food / customer service job like my brother in his youth. There seems to be a large concentration of entitled a-holes in a food service line or at a store. My one brush with customer service was being the score board kid at a softball tournament. Drunk middle aged softball players cannot count. I do say my brother was much better prepared to gather software requirements when we both entered our careers.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoUnfortunately, if you pick cans, you quite probably will have an a-hole boss, and, unlike an a-hole customer, she will not go anywhere.
- protomyth 4y agoDidn't really have a boss. By and large, I've met more a-hole bosses in enterprise than vocational.
- angarg12 4y agoI love the nuance and "see both sides of the story" tone of the article. We need more of that. The first half of my career was in a <$20k, paycheck-to-paychek job. Now I make > 8 times the median US salary, and still feel underpaid. What I try to convey to people is that I can be grateful and privileged, and feel fairly unpaid at the same time. For the one side, you need to recognize your privilege. People who say they can't live on incomes >200k should know life could be so much worse. For the other side, one can still feel underpaid and unfairly treated. If colleagues similar to me jumped companies doubling their income, that's a signal I'm probably underpaid. And the one benefiting from that disparity is not me, but the company taking advantage of it. Bottom line great read for all of those tech worker making 6 figures and complaining about how crappy their life is.
- foogazi 4y ago> Bottom line great read for all of those tech worker making 6 figures and complaining about how crappy their life is. Complaining is free for everyone - it’s when you shut up and take action that you can change
- oblib 4y agoThis piece describes issues I experienced in my younger years. I started working when I was 14 years old learning to build custom cars. By the time I was 18 I was good at it because I paid close attention to the old timers I was learning from. From the very beginning I was paid a flat rate, and because I was good, and fast, I made a good wage, but the work was not full time. When there was no work I'd take an hourly wage job. If the job was doing custom car or body work, because I was young I was told I had to prove I could do the work, and promised that if I did prove that I'd get a raise, but the raises never came, I got excuses instead. In all of those cases the person I was working for made a lot of money off of my work, but just couldn't bring themselves to keep their promise of paying me what I was worth after I'd proved I could do the work. Everyone of those cheapskates despised me for demanding they keep their word and pay me a journeyman's wage, and despised me for quitting. I got real good at quitting. I'd wait until they bid a job to do custom metal work and took a down payment and then I'd demand they keep their word. But their greed was far more powerful than their sense of their situation. In two of those cases I later found out they were spending the money I was making them on cocaine. Looking back, I think there were probably others that did the same. I called those "the blizzard years" In most of them they went out of business because they took on a job they didn't have the skills to complete and/or snorted all the money.
- riazrizvi 4y ago> I’m very admittedly a fragile sort of personality and neither lasted long. But it still took blood-in-the-toilet level stress to get me to quit either job Describes self as fragile, can hold on to job until pissing blood.
- softfalcon 4y agoI’m not going to pretend I lived through the hardships of low pay work like the author, but I have some idea of what they mean when they say their is a mental gap between the people who live a low pay life and those who have never had to experience that kind of existence. I grew up in a well off household, but my Dad did one thing that in my opinion, made me very different from my brother. My Dad made me work, while my little brother always got to stay home and play video games as long as his grades were good. My Dad was strict about money and demanded I needed to get a job if I wanted to buy things as a teenager. My uncle was high up on a golf course and got me a job essentially working under the table for less than minimum wage. He was a nice man, but his kids who helped run the place must not have liked me very much. I got put in janitorial duty cleaning all manner of filth at the pro shop. All the jobs no one else would bother doing, I did it, cause I wasn’t going to make my parents who helped me get the job look bad. Cleaning the toilets was the worst, people do unspeakable things in public restrooms. When I saw opportunities to get into software development as work instead, I took it. I was working a software job by the time I was 17 and still in high school. I didn’t want to clean up shit anymore. I say this as context of me doing this low pay job as compared to my brother, who stayed home and was showered with gifts. At the end of the day, I’m married with my own home, I make good money and provide for my family. My brother has never worked more than a summer position his entire life, is highly educated, but completely unemployable. He constantly thinks the world is too hard and difficult and that working would be “too much” for his sensibilities. He’s married to a woman now who does one of the author’s described high turn over jobs that are incredibly stressful/undesirable while he stays at home and lets her care for them both. They have no kids so my brother stays home and plays more and more video games. People who live the “good life” are completely unaware of the reality many folks live to make ends meet and the troubles they go through for it. In my mind, I got a taste of what life can be like if you’re “nearer” the bottom. The dichotomy between my brother and I is very shocking to me.
- lr4444lr 4y agoIf you are $120k a year SE and play your cards right, you can sometimes maneuver into a situation where your coworkers aren’t just competent-on-average but actively bright, sometimes brilliant people. At $35k, usually you are trying to identify the one other person in the office who also got unlucky so you can be friends with someone who isn’t getting remarried a month after their fourth divorce. This can't be understated. Sometimes I've been in my successful dev bubble for so long that I forgot my low level preprofessional job interactions. It was miserable. Not because the bosses treated people badly, but because there was literally no kind of incentive that could get a lot of my colleagues to be any better. They only responded to the whip.
- ng12 4y agoThis reeks. There are a lot of good, honest, hardworking people out there without Bachelor's degrees.
- erikerikson 4y agoAgreed. And I've also been a part of such systems where the defection on every person's part created a terrible environment over the very smallest of stakes. Most of my favorite people are those you reference but it doesn't make how bad it can get go away and I read the GP as indicating some rather than all.
- Mezzie 4y agoThere's no contradiction between what he says and what you say. My mother is a hardworking, intelligent person (good and honest? Eh...) without a college degree. She'd probably be identified as the person GP would bond with as having gotten unlucky; her parents wouldn't let her go to school for engineering since she was a girl/she had to run away due to being abused, which stuck her in low level jobs. Then she tried to get an associate's in ultrasound technology but the economy crashed and she couldn't cast her net widely enough to make use of it. Which is its own issue: Even if you meet people who are competent in those positions, they also tend to be very cynical and pessimistic + burnt out. That type of relationship can also be poison, but at the same time the only thing keeping you sane. It's hard.
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- oceanplexian 4y agoI don't agree with this writer on any of these points, it seems like he's trying to come up with some efficient market hypothesis describing how low-level workers are "different" than those of us in tech, when no such thing exists, in fact it's incredibly narcissistic. My first job was making $7 an hour at Best Buy, then Staples, then a local company for a few years. Now in the mid 6-figures in tech. The thing about all my former co-workers was the vast majority of them were normal and intelligent people. In fact they were a lot less 'oddball' types than half the people I've worked with who want to tell me about a Soylent diet or how they were enlightened by taking recreational drugs in Peru for the 15th time. The reason people are high earners a combination of Luck + Supply and Demand + Right place at the right time. Grit plays a part too, but not in the sense of pulling all-nighters or working yourself to death. Grit means being in more "right places" at more "right times", working hard on skills that have ROI, and increasing the chances you get lucky.
- Tozen 4y agoSadly, most jobs meet the definition of "shitty". Likely only the top 20% or so of any industrialized country will have people working jobs that could be described as satisfactory and enjoyable. It is a reflection of modern societies, where a significant percentage of their populations are considered disposable trash or the majority of its citizens are dissatisfied with what they must do for a living.
- Bukhmanizer 4y agoAt 22, right out of college, I probably would have done basically anything to get a $40k a year job. I applied literally everywhere I could. Still, after 8 months and thousands of applications, I was working for $13.50/hr as a cook. This forced me to rethink my strategy, and I decided to take a program in CS, which changed everything for me. I often think about how my life would have been if I had got one of those jobs that I applied for. Most were low level admin work for corporations with terrible reputations. Likely I wouldn’t have been able to go back to school (working in a kitchen from 5pm-1am means you can take classes in the day). I would have made just enough to live, but I couldn’t have advanced past a certain point. My friends who got these jobs either left them to go back to school, or got cost-of-living wage increases and are now “senior <low-level-administrator>“ people. It’s a trap. One that I was set and willing to fall in, had I been slightly more competent.
- honkdaddy 4y agoNow at 27, I see some of my oldest friends have fallen into the exact trap you're describing. Unmarketable degree combined with minimal college work experience makes for a very limited job market upon graduation. I watched several of them get sucked into similarly low paying and unfulfilling work largely because it was in an office and therefore made it a "real" job. Any tips on how to to encourage them to bite the bullet and change industries, ideally into tech? I firmly believe that anyone with an above average IQ can make it as _some_ type of tech worker, even if it's something as simple as spinning up Wordpress sites.
- jasonladuke0311 4y agoMy wife and I met working retail many years ago. We both had a string of shit jobs for years and as such, feel tremendously fortunate to be where we are (she’s an accountant and I’m a security engineer). Reading Team Blind or /r/cscareerquestions makes me want to smack some of these entitled little shits for their pathetic whining. No perspective whatsoever.
- throwawayHN378 4y agoAs a former drug addict with a DWI felony I often wonder what my life would be like if I hadn’t gotten into tech at a young age and somehow managed to graduate from university. At 200k a year in a medium COL city I can just barely afford a house, car, and girlfriend while adding some money to savings every week. I don’t understand how people can live on 45k a year let alone 30k a year
- Beltalowda 4y ago> I don’t understand how people can live on 45k a year let alone 30k a year At these kind of wages you get quite a bit of government assistance: medicaid, social housing, food stamps, all sorts of tax credits, etc. The US does have a social welfare state. Whether it's "good enough" is something I'll leave up to the reader, and it certainly does seem a confusing hodgepodge of different federal and state programs, but it does exist. It's the same in much of Europe really; if you earn minimum wage you simply cannot survive without the social welfare programs.
- rurp 4y agoHaving worked a variety of skilled and unskilled blue collar jobs before working in software, this article was spot on in many ways. One eerily relatable part was the example about: >someone who isn’t getting remarried a month after their fourth divorce. At a past job I heard that a recently married coworker had used a drive through chapel for the service. I was pretty surprised and asked him about it. His memorable reply was to shrug and say, "Well when it's your third time you mostly just want to get through it quickly". As it happens I ran into the couple five or six years later, after having left the company, and they were still together and seemed happy.
- acomar 4y agoit's a synonym for "job", in most places. the repetition serves to reinforce the point: enforced waged labor is destructive to the person.
- lordnacho 4y agoMain thing I'd say characterizes the shitty job is that it leads to nowhere. People like to say that it builds character, especially if they dug themselves out, but it doesn't. I also cleaned toilets and bussed tables as a kid, and I can tell you unequivocally it did nothing to get me to where I am today: - I had less time to do things I actually wanted to do, like studying. - Didn't make me better at coding, how could it? - It didn't teach me anything about finance, how could it? - Didn't make me better at "time management" and other pseudoskills. Yes they are pseudoskills, people throw them in the conversation to pretend you are getting something. You know what makes people good at their job? Doing their job. This is why you run into the people he mentions, they are ok at some other thing but they are spending their time doing a shitty job instead. They are running to stand still, and then running some more to leap off the treadmill. This is also why plenty of not-particularly-bright kids grow up to grab the prestigious jobs. They didn't have to do shitty work for no pay, they used their comfy middle class upbringing to connect with the right entry-level roles, and took it from there. So then you get people who somehow manage to do it. They work at McDonald's flipping burgers during the day, and then they somehow learn how to reverse a linked list at night, and lo and behold it pays off and they get a job at Google. Everyone points at them as says "look, it can be done". Don't be fooled. If you do two jobs (flipping burgers and learning to code) you are putting everything on the line in for a better future. If you get run over by a car, you will be lying on your deathbed thinking "why didn't I go out with my friends instead of memorizing quicksort". If you make it, think of all the disillusioned people who gave up whatever little free time they had for a dream that almost never comes true. This is of course if you think of jobs as a pure money thing. If you like doing algo stuff (I like it a lot somehow), maybe you don't see it as a second job and you actually get some kind of satisfaction from it, which is what I'd hope for most people. But for shitty jobs, most people simply do not think they are satisfying. They are exactly what we should work on automating out of existence.
- incanus77 4y agoSome yardsticks for when I think about jobs I once had or that family members have had, compared to the relative comfort of a job (self-employed or otherwise) in technology. Just some things that give me perspective. - Does someone come in to do it, or does your job involve you taking your turn to clean the toilet and bathroom? - Are you required to wear a name tag? Does this affect the perceived power dynamic in your day to day interactions? To wear a work uniform? To take home and clean your own work uniforms? - Are you likely to get physically injured at work? Would you lose the ability to work or get pushed out of the schedule if this happened? - Do you definitely or essentially need a vehicle to do your job — your own vehicle — operated and maintained at your expense, without which your job would be in jeopardy? - Are there elements of your job that are undeniably hazardous to your health, but which you must not complain about to keep your job?
- blisterpeanuts 4y agoThis article focuses on jobs, rather on careers. It’s a sad failing of American education that people are completely detached from the concept of starting and running a business, as well as the career path of learning a trade. People in the trades are doing pretty well, though. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, general handyman, landscaping, automotive repair, welding, truck driving… these are all highly lucrative fields that don’t require a college degree (though many require some trade schooling and/or apprenticeship). There’s a desperate shortage of people in all of these areas, partly because high schools push kids to go to college rather than trade schools. Regarding the notion of soul-killing jobs such as the author described, it’s always been this way. Imagine the dreary life of a factory worker around 1900 or so, compelled to labor 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. And if you lose an arm, or fall in a vat of chemicals… tough for you. Or a farm laborer, working in blazing heat many hours a day, or a textile worker, seated at a machine, sewing buttons 60 hours a week. Life has always been hard. The difference today is that people want and demand a much higher degree of comfort and autonomy in their lives than ever before, and are far more vocal about it.
- egberts1 4y agoshitty job is where my teenage son was a lab keeper of rats and rabbits at a medical research center. Enough said.
- mbrodersen 4y agoThe reason why doing-well-financially people are stressed/complaining is because they live beyond their means. It doesn’t matter how much you make if your lifestyle is more expensive than your income. That’s why you have crazy situations where people making $500k are complaining about how expensive things are and how badly they need to make more money. The key problem is a lack of financial literacy.
- horns4lyfe 4y agoNot entirely on topic, but the original article the writer references in the beginning was fantastic, honestly changed my outlook on the world.