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.

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.

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.

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.

Most small businesse owners I met were just as shitty as the ones of big businesses, they just weren't as smart as them.

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...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

[3] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confronting-managerialism-9781...

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.

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.

https://dw.com/en/india-manual-scavengers-continue-to-remove...

https://thewire.in/labour/manual-scavenging-sanitation-worke...

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.

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.

- 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.

- 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?

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).

I do say my brother was much better prepared to gather software requirements when we both entered our careers.

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.

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-...

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.

>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.

Describes self as fragile, can hold on to job until pissing blood.

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.

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

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

Here's a larger trawler - again - sometimes the fish will be stacked to the ceiling 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.

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.

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.

Please don't equate healthcare workers with law enforcement. Healthcare workers have an astronomically harder job and actually make society a better place.

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?

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.

I get your point but the personal development can only happen if the primal needs are covered.

I know plenty of software developers that frequent this site and make around 20-30k a year in Europe.

It's not the poverty that makes it hard to relate, it's that they seem to almost live by instinct and emotion. I wish them well but don't know what's wrong in their heads or have the slightest idea of how to durably improve their lot, apart from setting an example of worldly rationality (aye, there's the rub).

Its not only this, its also the fact that the way your employer abuses you begins to over time subconsciously convince you that this is normal and that you deserve this kind of treatment. This is one of the great tragedies of how unnecessarily cruel modern work is in the US for most people, it forms people into the smallest version of themselves possible. This has happened to me and countless people I have known and you can say "well just snap out of it, make your life better" but when you face a job that grinds you down everyday that isn't necessarily a psychological regime a lot of people can escape. It is similar (but not equivalent, I am not trying to down play abuse here) to the way that from the outside it looks absurd how people get trapped in abusive relationships with partners.

It also means people might be more willing to go into those trades if they were ensured of better labor law enforcement, health care, safety net, and so forth.

But I don't think that undermines the core motivation behind "buy local": all else being equal, buying local is still a way to improve the resilience and diversity of your local economy. We shouldn't let the fact that managment/ownership appears to be generally morally corrosive taunt us away from doing something that's otherwise just.

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.

What does make something good, then? The top level comment implies that having to work at all is indentured servitude. Does that mean any sort of work to sustain oneself is not "good"?

[0]: https://abc7.com/rent-prices-apartments-cost-of-realtorcom/1...

And you're approaching this subject as if Amazon warehouses are uniformly distributed throughout the country, such that median rents _matter_. They aren't, and they don't. Amazon warehouses are typically just outside of (or even within) population centers, where rents exceed median, often substantially.

How far should a person commute for a $15/hr warehouse job? How far _can_ they commute?