Easiest job I ever had was the most prestigious by far (a fake assistant professor). Hardest job was as a parent, for which I have never received a dime. Unpaid domestic labor in the US alone is worth about $10 trillion.
I don’t have an advanced degree so I felt hardcore imposter syndrome for the six years I was there, really until the day I (extremely foolishly) told the administration I was quitting to move back to amerikkka, where I have been almost continuously unemployed since. The job was teaching ESL in an East Asian vassal of the USA, usually about fourteen hours a week (twelve in the classroom with students who were pleasant 99% of the time) with every weekend being at least three days. It was a part-time job for full-time pay, massive prestige, and no publications required, all brought to you by American imperialism.
People would be visibly impressed when I told them what I did. All kinds of people. It’s never happened before or since.
absolutely. the job where i worked the hardest and felt like i was providing the most value to people around me probably had me getting something like $4/hr. an incredible amount of agricultural labor is exempt from minimum wage protections in the US, if you did not know.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) does require that most agricultural workers receive at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. However, specific exemptions to the minimum wage requirement include employers who did not use more than 500 “man-days” of agricultural labor in any calendar quarter of the preceding calendar year. Additionally, agricultural employees who are the employer’s immediate family, employees primarily engaged in the range production of livestock, and certain hand harvest laborers are exempt from the minimum wage requirements.
i ended up "snapping" because some very wealthy, leisurely feudal lords tried to squeeze me just a bit too hard, too many times in one year. so i went back to school, took all the loans, and do reputation laundering for academia that only occasionally allows me to help people in a meaningful way. i make so much more it makes me dizzy sometimes, because i'm not afraid of my car needing a replacement part or losing the food in my fridge due to a multi-day power outage. and the people above me make sick bank for absolutely indefensible nonsense.
being around it is toxic.
You think picking vegetables with your hands in the 100 degree heat and getting skin cancer is hard and warrants minimum wage? Try merging two lists in excel, buddy.
No that's the interns job, you just ask them to do it and reply to emails with chat gpt
This is exactly what I tell people all the time. It's absolutely 1:1 for me.
We should upload to TikTok videos of David Graeber speaking about bullshit jobs with some gameplay on half of the screen.
Means TV do this on Instagram.
I hate it but I get why it's being done.
Class Consciousnesses Level 100
but seriously, people are fighting tooth and nail to protect that lifestyle and are very afraid of it going away.
It's absolutely true.
The great Capitalist lie is that people earn more money by working harder, and that they earn more respect by working harder.
Actually, all three things - the money, the respect, and the lack of severe exploitation - all arise simply from your bargaining position. They're tied together - you always tend to get more money, more respect, and less work the higher your bargaining position.
there's a passage from Marx where he says this but it's phrased in terms of who produces the most suprlus value I think?
The tweet I found it from is filled with misogynist replies. :angery:
spoiler
Do people have real jobs? Yes, they’re called men.
The job she needs is being a mother
Alot of women choose to do nothing at their office jobs lol. I worked in an office always had something to do. This woman is showing she cant work autonmously and was better suited to unskilled labour.
she seems unpleasant, would not tip her.
It looks like she's posting this under her face and maybe real name in her username? It's a bullshit job yeah but I still hope she doesn't/didn't get fired for posting this. :sadness:
Come work the trades. Living wages. Decent benifiets. Relatively recession resistant. Unions. Actually doing stuff that matters.
But yes - the more the pay the less actual shit you do. How else can these rich idiots be CEO of 3 companies and be on half a dozen philosophy boards.
It's super cool that making food, despite having all the shitty parts of a trade never got any of thr good parts despite being no fucking different. We turn raw material into a product.
Sucks for everyone else too, you could be eating way better food.
If cooks were unionized and got paid good and stuff you would get way higher quality food than from someone who is overworked and despite really wanting to make sure every meal fucking rules, most do sincerely want to make you a great meal, instead of needing to crank out product under massive time crunches that force you to half ass food.
ok yeah that makes sense. It was the same thing at my starbucks. The pressure to make drinks fast was so intense that most drinks had some sort of major flaw. Dead shots, wrong amount of sweetener, ect. There were only a few baristas that could make drinks both quickly and with any kind of quality. But everyone compromised quality for quantity to some extent.
A good drink was a drink that didn't get sent back. That's all. At least half of drinks had something wrong with them. It was depressing to realize that all you would ever be judged on was speed and whether your drinks got sent back.
It was depressing to realize that all you would ever be judged on was speed and whether your drinks got sent back.
There's another thing going on here, which is that many people in these jobs feel stuck, and do not like their jobs. The only way they can prevent their mind from focusing on this resentment is to push themselves as fast as possible. Also, many workers, alienated from the fruits of production and with scarce sources of pride in the quality of their work, find their only pride in rushing to see how fast they can get something done.
This dynamic was something that made a food-service job very unpleasant for me, other workers would get very openly hostile about me not cutting corners to go as fast as them. Then I got a vaguely factory-style job in a different industry, and ran into the exact same thing.
@GalaxyBrain is this something you've witnessed too?
For real! I worked at one in a college town when the 20% hours reductions hit last Spring. The whole sequencing thing is nuts. I was talking to another friend who is a barista somewhere else and they were shocked you don't even need to pack the espresso at starbucks.
You're right. I fully support food workers making over $20 /hr and not having to be dependent on tips. I want the people making my food to be content and secure so they can focus on their craft rather than be stressed about basic human necessities or working multiple jobs.
Food service workers are criminally underpaid. But the role of food service workers in the economy is different from most other trades. Food is necessary for workers to keep working, but making food does not directly produce a commodity which is a store of value. So the bargaining power of food service workers is less which is another reason why there isn't the same benefits despite being an equally skilled and demanding trade.
this is what Lenin actually meant whenever he'd talk about labor aristocracies
Lenin was just mad that the Plumbing King and HVAC Duke was banging his wife while he wrote his "theory" in the closet while silently sobbing as to not disturb their activities
The industry is slowly changing as the old guard retires out. They are aware. Doesn't make that fast enough or right but yes it has been gate kept for a long time. As boomers age out there are more open slots becoming available. Keep trying and apply for different positions. You'd be suprised the diversity of skill sets they'll take - even if it isn't what you went to school for or even right out of high school. They are more likely to pay for your license and training than say a factory drone.
followup, if you can't handle the physicality of working in a trade (or just don't wanna), support roles for the trades are good too. i process invoices and shit for like $65k a year
Are there any trades that don't have insanely long hours? It seems that the U.S. response to realizing that they can't bust the unions is to work everyone for 50+ a week.
this is the main reason i'm still in my "trade-adjacent" retail job. well that and my record
Serious question to all the people who have held a high paying job (if you have to ask it's high paying) where you do little work, what is your job title?
What is your role supposed to accomplish? What does a day to day look like?
I thought I would be doing one of these bs jobs but I somehow ended up in a high paying job where I'm busting my ass all the time
senior software engineer. I'm write web apis to provide some data to another internal team. I work about 1 hour a day + a few 30 min meetings, the rest I spend working on hexbear or various things that interest me. The company is pretty big and for some reason they keep hiring, even when its actually getting difficult to find work for team members to do. If I wasn't slacking off, no one else on the team would have tickets to work on lol.
(if you have to ask it’s high paying)
well if you say so, but I make less than fast food workers in other parts of the country :shrug-outta-hecks:
my job title is "unarmed guard" and i sit in front of a screen of cameras all night. the facility im at uses me as a shipping department so i have to handle paperwork for trucks coming in and out but this is maybe 30 mins to an hour of work per night, and i have to patrol the facility once a night which is another half hour or so. aside from that i am sitting and playing video games or watching anime.
the reason i consider it kinda sorta "high-paying" is because i used to make not much more money in an absurd physical labor job which was killing me
Won't doxx myself by stating title, but even among the same job title there's a huge variation in the amount of work the company expects you to do.
Previous company made me do constant overtime (like 12+ hours at work a day, 4 to 6 days a week). Took a new job with more pay and same title, and now I take a nap after lunch and the head of department tells me to stop working and go home if I try to stay past 5.
Idk if it counts but I work as a clinician in a drug rehab program and I get paid around 78k a year which is decent money for me and I love the work. I routinely have days where I don't take lunch breaks because I can squeeze in another counseling session, get someone's parole officer to reconsider some action, send out a letter of recommendation to a judge for leaner or shorter legal recommendations, or shit just sit down and shoot the shit with someone who just needs to rant about life.
I might be underpaid for the job role I have (private rehabs pay A LOT more for people of my education and experience) but I'd rather be counseling a crip gangmember and helping them get sober and their kids back, than have to do headpats for some rich asshole in Malibu just to get paid an extra 40k a year.
And I gotta say a lot of Marxist ideology and theory really REALLY helps with therapy, I affirm when people say that the system is fucked and unfair, and try to get them connected with the meager resources I can think of (before I was a clinician I was a case manager and I could get someone's food stamps approved and running in 1-2 days without visiting an office) instead of just trying to get them to "cope" with the bleak realities of capitalism.
Under communism I would likely do the exact same work but I'd likely have a lot more post-step down successes for my Patients since their material benefits would be more greatly addressed and the material reasons behind some people's addiction would be heavily addressed.
I'm a software engineer for a small company that makes and sells electronic gadgets. I almost exclusively do new product development
Day to day, at a base level it's an average of 30 minutes of meetings per day, plus looking busy and being "available" to answer questions about something they think I might know about (this winds up only taking up around 1 hour per week). On top of that is about 4-30 hours per week of coding depending on what the bosses are expecting and my mood. The hours aren't distributed in any particular way; some days I don't do anything aside from the meetings, others I might do multiple 10-12 hour days back to back. But tbh it probably lands at around 15 hours of coding most weeks, it only gets to 30 if it's crunch time or I'm genuinely interested in what I'm assigned to do, and only gets down to 4 during the holiday season or if I'm working on some internal tool there isn't urgency for.
Database administration is the best, least work position, I was doing it for two places - then one of them had to come along with an engineer position with options that does machine learning shit. As long as they get bought or go public :spongebob-party:
I am an engineer in a large (10k+ employees) industry metal supplier. Got a M.Sc in some science.
I do have a pretty cushy German union contract, 35h per week, no overtime, around 70k € (probably difficult to compare to US incomes due the different tax and social security systems, but it's plenty where I live), 30 days vacation + bank holidays.
I am relatively happy to say that I actually do things. We produce actual stuff that probably many of you see or touch in your daily lives and I have a relatively important part in it. Work varies heavily, some weeks I'll be super busy, traveling, tons of meetings and development, some weeks are slow and I can essentially jerk off at home, but my boss doesn't mind as long as shit gets done. Really it's about 90% thanks to my boss who keeps us fairly independent and let's us do our jobs without getting bothered by management.
The "lean -> clean" mindset is absolutely insane to me and I would probably quit (if I could) asap if someone just made me work for works sake.
Another software engineer/consultant (these seem to be overrepresented on Hexbear), but I also ended up in a position where I'm busting my ass all the time too. It's relative of course because I can still find time to post. The work comes in waves, basically I'm just given a mountain of huge deadlines 5-10 months out, and every moment I spend not doing it is shooting myself in the foot. If I work harder then I get more work as a reward. But again it's relative, my days are usually 9-10 hours 5-6 days a week.
Does my job help people? I'm not sure, I guess so, a few million people would start to be affected by various services going down if I didn't help build/maintain them. But it's very indirect. I don't ever see who I've helped, except for early in my career when I got to visit a location and talk to end users.
I work repairing production tools in the electronics industry and my job has the word "engineer" in the title, although I have no degree or high school diploma (but I don't advertise that on my resume. In my teens and 20's I just listed my class year and school on my resume, and no one but the feds or universities will actually check your education credentials back to high school, but now I just don't even list my high school because I'm over 30 and no one cares).
I got the job by having some relevant experience gained by selling my soul.
A normal day for me is waking up like fifteen minutes before I clock in, checking my phone to see if I got overnight messages that something broke, showering, playing video games, and posting until the end of the day, then sending out an email telling everyone that nothing's broken. If something breaks, then I travel to the customer site and work until it's fixed or until the end of my contracted on call time (a few hours later than normal workday end time), continuing work the next morning until it's fixed (minus meal times and breaks).
I'm hourly, so I get overtime, and I would absolutely quit before giving up overtime pay. Some weeks I max out overtime (so, 60 hours), but most of the time I'm posting in my underwear.
Yes it really is all hazing by aging boomer narcissist primates who never thought they were going to die and were going to sit at the top forever
The work they make Sales Associates do is to prevent them from talking. They know you're faking it. They're just worried that if you start talking to your co-workers, you guys will realize that you're both barely scraping by on 18/hr and unionize.
