4 ms·
Have you ever worked in Maintenance? I worked on industrial maintenance for 7 years. While some of what you say is true, there's a lot wrong. > They are usual
by brabel 4y ago
Have you ever worked in Maintenance?
I worked on industrial maintenance for 7 years. While some of what you say is true, there's a lot wrong.
> They are usually lowly paid and have low moral because what they work is chore.
Not the case for me or anyone I worked with. The pay was very good. We had skills that were very hard to replace (PLC programming, high-tech press fitting, experience on very large machines that were basically one of a kind, so you can't just take people from other companies that have the same thing or even close). Morale was high because even though engineers and managers don't respect us, we didn't respect them either so we could almost do anything we wanted! Which was ok because we were more needed than they were... one day off for us cost millions to the company if a machine stopped working (an engineer could take a week off and no one noticed).
> They also do not get to enjoy creating new things.
In some shitty companies maybe... I was able to design from scratch large machines that we then proceeded to build and use in production. Really cool stuff that I really loved.
My last job in maintenance let me spend most of my time writing software for the maintenance inventory, which was hard to keep up-to-date and off-the-shelf software for that was very expensive... despite us having fairly simple needs (which is why was able to write it myself using a mix of VBA and MS Access... this was a long time ago). After that, I noticed I could do software and started going to uni for a Compute Science degree. Which I attended WHILE working in maintenance as the job was mostly waiting for shit to happen so I had lots of "free" time. Took me around 10 years in software to start earning substantially more than I used to in maintenance.
I did it mostly to avoid the shit parts of the job: cleaning shit, changing oil, greasing gears and what not... that part was not fun.