the hank hill emoji is one of those that has a weird hard-to-associate name
it's not 'wut'... god dammit Bobby
Mechanical engineer. I design machines that package foods. It's cool, the machines are big chonks with tons of servos and conveyor belts flinging things around (doing stuff like gently touching sausage, or cramming 10,000 cans an hour of beer into boxes). My company is a worker co-op, so we actually have financial and decision making power in the company, and we're not making some rich asshole even richer.
I used to be a Little Eichmann working in the military industrial complex, literally designing missiles for a company who's name you definitely know. My younger self didn't reflect on the implications of that for years, despite being an anti war :LIB: .
Homeless services, mostly low-barrier shelters. Pay isn't great and the work is grueling and sometimes dangerous. And you go through each day knowing that your work will never really have an impact on the actual causes of homelessness. Also all the structures you deal with are ineffective public-private partnerships led by performative white liberals who are afraid to actually work a day in low-barrier.
But if I'm gonna have to give up my labor to live, I can't really imagine doing anything else.
Salting is the practice of having a person who is part of a union get a job in a non-unionized workplace to help organize/unionize within it.
I work at the dicksucking factory.
I recently got a promotion. Every dick sucked is now worth $2 instead of $1.
I do tech support / programming for an incredibly niche b2b software product used by like a dozen companies
It's boring as fuck but the pay is obscene
As for how I got into it - I went to film school. I worked in the film industry of a foreign country for a minute after going there to study the language. It didn't work out and when I came back to the US I was very unemployed.
My downstairs neighbor in the down-and-out apartment building I found lodging in was Mel, of Mel's Hole fame (yes, really). He brought me along on some gigs to install cat5 cables in various offices. I managed to parlay that into some part time tech support and sysadmin jobs at those offices. Generally there was no budget for IT so I learned Linux and programming to be able to solve problems with free software or homegrown tools. I had my hands on basically every kind of office system there was - domains, file/print serving, SMTP, web sites, security systems, etc. Learning what I needed to be able to reimplement expensive commercial software from scratch. No budget for Exchange? Then I'll cobble something together out of SMTP, IMAP, and Caldav servers with Thunderbird and a smattering of extensions. We need a real firewall but Cisco is out of our price range? Guess I'm building a pfSense box out of a retired desktop this week. That sort of thing.
When those jobs fizzled out and I was unemployed again, a friend hooked me up with an interview at my current company. Despite my... interesting resume. But it turns out that there are very few people in the IT world who actually know anything (this has been confirmed over and over again by my own hiring efforts), and there are even fewer with knowledge across a broad spectrum of topics, which turns out to be important for the tool I work on. So I was able to stick around, become an indispensable expert on this (again, incredibly niche) tool, and eventually become a team lead.
I'm a professional trans propagandist. Hillary showed up on my doorstep one day with pills and a gun and told me to get working or shed adrenochrome an African village
Realistically? Learn to be a freelance copy writer, you'll end up just writing fake reviews and social media posts for the SEO "gurus" to copy paste and boost the signals to their shitty drop shipping/boomer scam website.
Industrial maintenance at a 24/7 facility, so shift work. Basically I spend 8 hours browsing the internet unless something breaks. I don't recommend it, shift work is killing me (literally, it lowers your life expectancy by around 7 years IIRC). I got the job via nepotism and by having a college education in a close-enough field.
Without getting into the minutia of the schedule, yeah, I rotate through from mornings to days to evenings to nights (with weekends in between each). The shifts overlap in a weird way that's really difficult to explain to people lol.
Yeah my work load's light compared to most (I don't even put on my steel-toes most days), and I have good job security due to offensively low starting pay meaning we're chronically understaffed (used to be pretty good when I started but hasn't increased in a decade+). Anecdotally, the only people I know making "good" money are programmers, but about half of them hate it.
If you've got any sort of computing background, might be worth looking into learning to hack and getting into bug bounty programs. Programming is a useful skill, but hacking is way more useful where we're heading.
Nahamsec is a pretty decent youtuber on the topic. He just did a beginner video covering how to get into it.
The Bug Hunter's Methodology by jhaddix is kind of the gold standard checklist for bug hunters.
I don't do it myself but I had a compsec background back in the day and was thinking of getting back into it when I have some time.
Union but it's one of those bad unions you've heard so much about. Very non-radical, and they do not take kindly to people suggesting we eat the owners.
I've noticed that most union manufacturing jobs "make up" for their great wages and benefits by running insane schedules and I don't understand why the unions haven't fixed this.
I'm in a similar field and that's the only reason I haven't sought out a union job.
I think it's a combination of american brainworms where everyone thinks they're petit-bourgeois and a lot of the senior members/leadership being very financially comfortable. Some of my coworkers that are now near retirement raised a family on a single income just from this job and now are going to sell their houses for insane amounts of money.
Sadly the 24/7 schedule is necessary, so even under communism this job would still exist in some form, and be bad. Ideally we'd get the shift compensation up, though, as it's currently only around 10% extra.
Well yea 24/7 may be necessary but the scheduling I'm talking about includes things such as 60+ hours a week, on call 24/7, no weekends etc.
Ah, yeah, it's not that bad here. While The Schedule sometimes has me working 50+ hours, it averages out to ~35.
I also work in a factory, but it’s a cleanroom facility. I’m fortunate to be a vendor maintenance/repair person, hourly, and working only on day shift (+overtime). I still hate it, though. Just less than if I was on shift work.
As far as how I got into it, I had relevant experience from my time as a cog in the imperial war machine.
Delivering mail with the USPS. I'm good enough at it, it gets me outside, I can mostly avoid people, and they accepted my application. Holiday season and elections suck ass, though
Ambulance. Got into it because it was a few months of night classes to get a job that is an entry level job in thr medical field. If we think about the American system of organization it is on the top end of "working class jobs" pay is okay, working conditions are pretty good. It will however break your body, and soul. Definitely radicalized to see how the world works by no longer being a part of it.
Yeah I work as a paramedic as well, I think every member of the public should do a few shifts on the ambulance or in the ED just to see what its like out here.
Going into people's homes who need medical attention is a very eye opening class conscious experience.
You know who calls the ambulance? Poor people.
I live in a country with a type of universal healthcare, and still its wild to see how much of a difference having money has on someone's health, just by being preventative, or earlier intervention.
Living off disability and gaming government assistance now but my last job was USPS as a carrier. Decent pay and a strong union, you can get dicked around a lot when you start but after getting promoted to full time you're set for life if you feel like staying.
