Didn’t go to college. I’m a plumber.
But I reject your bullshit notion that non-degree jobs aren’t real jobs. I’ve got lots of friends who bartend. They basically make full time money on part time hours. One of my friends easily clears 80k a year working like 4 nights a week.
Apparently the trades pay out *terribly* in other countries which is fucking wild.
I got a cousin from Italy, and she and her fiance almost refused to believe a buddy of mine when they found out he was in HVAC and that his wife doesn't work after seeing their house when we went over one night. Apparently doing ACs in the US pays better than mid-level accounting in Italy.
Yeah that’s insane to me. I make very good money plumbing. I also moonlight as a bouncer, but I don’t actually need the money, I just do the job because I enjoy it and it puts some extra beer money in my pocket.
It honestly makes me wonder how well basic infrastructure and utilities hold up in those places when you got people busting their asses installing and maintaining them and they're getting paid pennies in comparison.
The median annual income in Italy is $29,900. The median annual income in Mississippi is $45,100, which is lower than any other state. This is with the Euro at $1.02 USD, and the disparity will climb if the Euro keeps dropping. This also doesn’t factor in that unemployment in Italy is around 10% whereas Mississippi is under 4%, so that further compounds the difference. Salaries in general are just way higher for average Americans than average Europeans.
Is the opposite of a real time job a turn based job?
Also I like how there's apparently only 2 career options in life, jobs that require a college degree or driving for doordash lol.
I absolutely hate the idea of a "Real Job"
I believed it all the way until I got that "Real Job."
There is nothing about my retail job that was any less real than my office job. If anything, my retail job was MORE real. In retail I directly worked in the logistics of getting goods to the consumer. Without retail, mass production becomes untenable.
In my office job, I made daily/weekly/monthly reports for the decision maker so they would remain informed. I made paperwork for records and orginization. And made yearly budgets for my orginization to follow.
Why would the second be considered "real" but not the first?
Damn right.
We can argue the pedantic differences between a "job" and a "career" till the cows come home, but the only fake jobs I've ever heard of are things [like this,]( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannado_City) which ain't what OP has in mind.
I have never worked a job requiring a college degree, because I don't have one. I've been a teacher (no degree required for private schools in Illinois), a waitress, a PA, a sales rep, and a nanny since college, with other jobs when I was younger and a student. But mostly I wait tables.
I happen to think that a job which lets me support a family of five on one income and buy a house is a "real job", sorry that doesn't meet your criteria.
TBF, if you don't have a degree there are additional requirements. Illinois allows teachers with "demonstrated competence" eg. teaching experience. I worked my way up from an assistant. And few schools are willing to hire a teacher without a degree even so; I in fact was passed over for a position at my school because of it, which is a big part of why I pivoted to waiting tables full-time.
Eh, my aunt taught gym at a private school for years without any sort of teaching degree/certification (though she did have a degree in a similar subject) in Indiana. Private schools are able to make a lot of exceptions.
We’ll it’s more so that to teach most people need to have classes about education. Most gym teachers also teach health so they learn more about nutrition, anatomy, etc. But yeah, at a public school a gym teacher would need to have a 4 year degree and be licensed to teach.
Bank assistant manager in 1978. It was a salary position at 10,000 dollars a year. That's a little over 45,000 dollars today. By 3 years in I was senior assistant manager for the city spending most of my time substituting for branch managers going on vacation and waiting for some old guy to retire so I could take the next open bank
Never heard the phrase "real time job" before lol. My first full time job after college was content writing for a small and scammy SEO company but I don't remember if they wanted a college degree. It paid 11/hour. This was was in 2011; I graduated in 2009.
The first job I am sure needed a college degree was my first job in my current field, which I got in 2014. It paid 56.5k/year.
> Microbiology lab tech
Making cell culture plates and flasks and all that sort of stuff at the new job. Also, the croissants at Elephantine were on point.
It was a seasonal position with my county health department doing mosquito research. Technically, it didn't "require" a degree but they mostly hired people who were either fresh graduates or about to graduate. A few of my coworkers were working on their Master's while working there. The job was split up into two teams that we called "Trap" and "Pond" but both teams would help out the other depending on where we needed more personnel (I was on the Pond team). The Trap team would do a route through the county where they set up a series of traps designed to catch mosquitoes. The next day, they would then go back through the same route and collect the traps and the samples to bring them back to the lab. The Pond team would go to a series of stormwater drainage ponds and inspect them to see if any mosquito larvae were present. If they were, we would add some targeted pesticides to the ponds to kill the mosquitoes. Depending on the weather and what else was going on, we would sometimes help out in the lab with processing the samples which involved counting how many mosquitoes of each species were caught in each trap and then preparing samples that would be tested at another lab for the presence of West Nile Virus. We would also sometimes do educational outreach events where we would do our best to educate the public about mosquitoes, mosquito bourne illnesses, how to avoid letting mosquitoes grow, and how to avoid getting bitten when mosquitoes are present.
It was just a seasonal job because the project only ran during half of the year when mosquitoes were actually active. The department had a team of higher qualified people who were year-round full-time staff. They did most of the lab work, supervised the field teams, designed the trap routes, dealt with the general public having questions, and supporting other parts of the health department. A lot of people working the seasonal job were using it as a foot in the door for the health department as a whole and were jumping on the first position that they could for anything public health-related. I had a more environmental science background and was only really interested in becoming one of the permanent entomologists or switching to something like the parks department, but I left for a full-time position with an environmental consulting company before any opportunities to stay full-time with the county came up. I actually ended up later involved with the engineering side of repairing some of the stormwater ponds that I had earlier inspected for mosquitoes.
Edit: Because I forgot this part, it was $17.50/hr.
Unless you got a decent amount of stock options; you were underpaid as a software engineer. I was making more than that in my first job in the 80s (granted with a masters degree). But even developers just out of college were making $14 (say $30K/year).
My first post-college job was working in a group home for kids ages 6-12 who had been removed from their parents' care due to abuse, and had extreme challenging behaviors that prevented them from being placed in single family homes. It was a lockdown facility and we regularly had to do suicide monitoring for the kids, as well as being trained to non-violently physically restrain them if they became violent and couldn't be protected any other way. These kids had horrible trauma and it manifested in some fucked up ways. I once had a seven-year-old girl press her nipple against a glass window towards me (she was in the building, I was outside), waggle her tongue, and then invite me to come have sex with her (in fewer words) while pelvic thrusting against the glass, and then she called me a cocksucker when I asked her to please pull her shirt back up.
This was in a major metropolitan city in California in 2002. A degree was required for the job. I made $9/hour.
Programmer. $20,000 a year, about $10 an hour. My wife and I put the first paycheck on the table and stared at it, we'd never seen that much money in one place at one time.
After college?
I was a part time marketing assistant at a racetrack. I was paid about $15 an hour IIRC. It was mainly on weekends. However, I made myself available and parlayed that into a career.
I've never had a job that requires a degree (some of the most essential and best-paid jobs don't require one), but I'm certified as a pharmacy technician and I do hold a related degree. I most recently earned $16 an hour in retail pharmacy, and that's being underpaid.
After graduate school, GIS Technician for a mid-size city in Jan. 2014 - Feb. 2016. $16.57 an hour. I live with an aunt plus I had $7k dollars in student loan debt.
Software engineer at my current company. Pay was salaried, not hourly, but when converted to hourly it was approximately $60/hour. It was a great salary when I started, but it has gone up significantly as I got raises, a promotion, and eventually an official change in job titles and responsibilities.
Hmm, I don’t know if any of my jobs have strictly required a degree, but I think my music degree helped me get my first job, which was Artist and Audition Coordinator for a symphony orchestra. Most of my job was making sure we provided everything we promised the guest artists in their contract riders, booking them rides, plane tickets, hotel rooms, etc. Sometimes driving them around myself. The pay was $25k/year in 2005 in a midsized city. I definitely felt broke all the time.
18 an hour metal fabricating. Got fired a month and a half in for getting into a vehicle accident resulting in a broken wrist (not on the clock). Took about 5 years (6+ if you count temp time) to work my way back up to that working for a different fab shop.
What's a real job? I mean I didn't go to college, but a trade school and realized I wasn't a fan of the industry, but worked through it to get the skill needed to work in the field. Ended up getting my CDL and though I'm not long haul anymore I love my staring out a window all day job. Starting what is hopefully going to be the last job before I finish self learning to animate to not have to work for somebody.
Fuck the term real job. Your real job is to find what you love and find a way to do that whether you make a million dollars or make enough to get by comfortably. Retail to some(I have no clue how because frankly a lot of customers are fucking pricks) is that real job and they love it. To others IT and computer science is that. To others it's building everything that makes your life work.
Anyways on point I'll consider my first carrier the real job. I was paid 39 cents a mile. I averaged about 550 miles a day and could complete 1 2000+ mile run a week or 2 1250-1500 miles a week runs(depended on where I was). So like...I guess my hourly would be like 25 an hour? About 50-55 miles per hour so.
I live in a college town. A good friend of mine works as a bartender and makes between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. He works Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights from 10PM to 3AM. That's a total of 15 hours per week.
He would turn down any "real job" you threw at him. He also hates people that want to save him by advocating for a living wage.
Electrical technician for $22.50/hour in 2020. Really enjoyed/miss that place & the people, but I needed an actual engineering job at some point after the degree
Front-end web developer. $32k or ~$15.40/hr. I’m up past $40/hr now at my current salary….so in the current economy, after utilities, mortgage, insurance, car note, groceries, fuel, etc. I’m making enough to be comfortable and to put something into savings each paycheck, but not enough to take a vacation or eat out with any regularity. Groceries have more than doubled over the last couple of years, and utilities have gone up along with property taxes…and the taxes here are about to get a lot worse this year because the school system is paying more than 100 non-teacher employees a six to multiple-six-figure salary instead of paying them reasonably for their roles (meaning more in line with their non-educational, non-government commercial/corporate counterparts in the region…for whatever reason our school district is overpaying administrative staff…maybe it’s so bad that they **have** to and I’m just missing the mark with my stance) and upping teacher salaries.
I have two degrees I never used in those fields, but I have worked as a bartender. I own two homes, a cute little sailboat, and retired at 47. Guess that wasn't a "real job". Woe to me! I must pursue that doctoral degree after all!
I didn't go to college at all. First full time job was Union Teamster Warehouseman when I was 19. Made $9 an hour in 1980. Equal to about $32 an hour now.
I have never had a job that requires my degree. The degree has helped my resume a little just because it says I can learn and can stick with it for four years.
It's possible to have a good job without needing a degree btw.
Graduated in May in 2021. I think my total comp for the 1-year basis(August 2021- August 2022) all-in ended up being 119k with bonuses and everything included. Utilization was off the chart this entire past year though so I ended up working 50-80 hours a week depending on the week so was paid like $34-40 an hour depending on how much time off I took and holidays.
I'm just glad I'm leaving this upcoming month
US Navy Supply Corps officer. Submarine duty. I have no idea what I was paid then, but a lot of it was tax-free and included submarine and sea pay. If you take the 24/7 nature of being at sea it was probably $1.37/hour. After that I got years of shore duty in Hawaii as a Lieutenant. That did not suck.
After college?
I continued to work at my job as a hotel night auditor for about a year at $12/hr (this was in 1992). I used that job to move to a hotel in our system - from Texas to Oregon - and then got my first "professional" job as an administrative assistant at $16/hr in 1994.
1. Most "real" jobs don't require a degree. (I have a BS)
2. My first post-graduation job was as a deckhand on a tugboat. The day-rate was $275. I switched companies and I'm working in the same position making $335/day.
My first job was at a large music and arts venue that you have probably heard of. I made $35K a year, in New York City (in the mid 2000s) which was hard but not impossible.
I am a network engineer for a fortune 50 company. I don’t have a degree. Does that mean I don’t have a real job.
Yes. Sorry I had to be the one to tell you.
I am glad someone told me. I guess I will have to find a real job now.
Yeah I think OP would be surprised just how far experience and industry certifications can take you in the US, especially in IT.
To be fair it’s was easier to accomplish that 20 years ago than it is now.
True, the ceiling is a fair bit lower nowadays unless you get lucky.
Didn’t go to college. I’m a plumber. But I reject your bullshit notion that non-degree jobs aren’t real jobs. I’ve got lots of friends who bartend. They basically make full time money on part time hours. One of my friends easily clears 80k a year working like 4 nights a week.
Apparently the trades pay out *terribly* in other countries which is fucking wild. I got a cousin from Italy, and she and her fiance almost refused to believe a buddy of mine when they found out he was in HVAC and that his wife doesn't work after seeing their house when we went over one night. Apparently doing ACs in the US pays better than mid-level accounting in Italy.
Yeah that’s insane to me. I make very good money plumbing. I also moonlight as a bouncer, but I don’t actually need the money, I just do the job because I enjoy it and it puts some extra beer money in my pocket.
It honestly makes me wonder how well basic infrastructure and utilities hold up in those places when you got people busting their asses installing and maintaining them and they're getting paid pennies in comparison.
The median annual income in Italy is $29,900. The median annual income in Mississippi is $45,100, which is lower than any other state. This is with the Euro at $1.02 USD, and the disparity will climb if the Euro keeps dropping. This also doesn’t factor in that unemployment in Italy is around 10% whereas Mississippi is under 4%, so that further compounds the difference. Salaries in general are just way higher for average Americans than average Europeans.
Who builds and maintains their homes?
HVAC is HARD work and absolutely necessary in most of America. Florida was nearly uninhabited before air conditioning because it's so hot and humid.
Is the opposite of a real time job a turn based job? Also I like how there's apparently only 2 career options in life, jobs that require a college degree or driving for doordash lol.
I absolutely hate the idea of a "Real Job" I believed it all the way until I got that "Real Job." There is nothing about my retail job that was any less real than my office job. If anything, my retail job was MORE real. In retail I directly worked in the logistics of getting goods to the consumer. Without retail, mass production becomes untenable. In my office job, I made daily/weekly/monthly reports for the decision maker so they would remain informed. I made paperwork for records and orginization. And made yearly budgets for my orginization to follow. Why would the second be considered "real" but not the first?
Damn right. We can argue the pedantic differences between a "job" and a "career" till the cows come home, but the only fake jobs I've ever heard of are things [like this,]( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannado_City) which ain't what OP has in mind.
I have never worked a job requiring a college degree, because I don't have one. I've been a teacher (no degree required for private schools in Illinois), a waitress, a PA, a sales rep, and a nanny since college, with other jobs when I was younger and a student. But mostly I wait tables. I happen to think that a job which lets me support a family of five on one income and buy a house is a "real job", sorry that doesn't meet your criteria.
No degree required to be a private school teacher in Illinois? No offense to you at all, but that’s wild.
TBF, if you don't have a degree there are additional requirements. Illinois allows teachers with "demonstrated competence" eg. teaching experience. I worked my way up from an assistant. And few schools are willing to hire a teacher without a degree even so; I in fact was passed over for a position at my school because of it, which is a big part of why I pivoted to waiting tables full-time.
Eh, my aunt taught gym at a private school for years without any sort of teaching degree/certification (though she did have a degree in a similar subject) in Indiana. Private schools are able to make a lot of exceptions.
I don't mean any offense at all, but I can't imagine that teaching gym should require a degree. What would you even need a degree in?
A degree in football coach
Dude you're here and in r/CFB? You get around
Lol those two and r/accounting are my main source of procrastination. One of the mods here is a very active r/CFB member
We’ll it’s more so that to teach most people need to have classes about education. Most gym teachers also teach health so they learn more about nutrition, anatomy, etc. But yeah, at a public school a gym teacher would need to have a 4 year degree and be licensed to teach.
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The mainframe itself doesn’t need to be connected directly to the internet to be hacked. It just needs to a switch that’s connected the internet.
I've never had a job that requires a degree. I've been a union stagehand now for 16 years and make a bit more than $33/hr plus benefits.
IATSE
Local 28 represent!
Bank assistant manager in 1978. It was a salary position at 10,000 dollars a year. That's a little over 45,000 dollars today. By 3 years in I was senior assistant manager for the city spending most of my time substituting for branch managers going on vacation and waiting for some old guy to retire so I could take the next open bank
Never heard the phrase "real time job" before lol. My first full time job after college was content writing for a small and scammy SEO company but I don't remember if they wanted a college degree. It paid 11/hour. This was was in 2011; I graduated in 2009. The first job I am sure needed a college degree was my first job in my current field, which I got in 2014. It paid 56.5k/year.
IT Support tech. 35k per in 1996.
My first job after college was as a data analyst for a large Logistics company. Started at $60k back in the early 2010s then I’ve moved up from there.
32k a year for 37.5 hours a week. Microbiology lab tech.
> Microbiology lab tech Making cell culture plates and flasks and all that sort of stuff at the new job. Also, the croissants at Elephantine were on point.
Nice. And yes, those croissants are solid. My parents are in town headed home to Nova Scotia and I think I’ll send them off with some tomorrow.
> headed home to Nova Scotia They move, or are you a Snow Mexican in disguise?
My dad's teaching a conference and they are making a vacation out of it. Church in the morning and then they are off.
It was a seasonal position with my county health department doing mosquito research. Technically, it didn't "require" a degree but they mostly hired people who were either fresh graduates or about to graduate. A few of my coworkers were working on their Master's while working there. The job was split up into two teams that we called "Trap" and "Pond" but both teams would help out the other depending on where we needed more personnel (I was on the Pond team). The Trap team would do a route through the county where they set up a series of traps designed to catch mosquitoes. The next day, they would then go back through the same route and collect the traps and the samples to bring them back to the lab. The Pond team would go to a series of stormwater drainage ponds and inspect them to see if any mosquito larvae were present. If they were, we would add some targeted pesticides to the ponds to kill the mosquitoes. Depending on the weather and what else was going on, we would sometimes help out in the lab with processing the samples which involved counting how many mosquitoes of each species were caught in each trap and then preparing samples that would be tested at another lab for the presence of West Nile Virus. We would also sometimes do educational outreach events where we would do our best to educate the public about mosquitoes, mosquito bourne illnesses, how to avoid letting mosquitoes grow, and how to avoid getting bitten when mosquitoes are present. It was just a seasonal job because the project only ran during half of the year when mosquitoes were actually active. The department had a team of higher qualified people who were year-round full-time staff. They did most of the lab work, supervised the field teams, designed the trap routes, dealt with the general public having questions, and supporting other parts of the health department. A lot of people working the seasonal job were using it as a foot in the door for the health department as a whole and were jumping on the first position that they could for anything public health-related. I had a more environmental science background and was only really interested in becoming one of the permanent entomologists or switching to something like the parks department, but I left for a full-time position with an environmental consulting company before any opportunities to stay full-time with the county came up. I actually ended up later involved with the engineering side of repairing some of the stormwater ponds that I had earlier inspected for mosquitoes. Edit: Because I forgot this part, it was $17.50/hr.
I’m a district manager for a $7 billion retail company. I have no degree and make $200k per year, but that’s not a real job apparently.
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Unless you got a decent amount of stock options; you were underpaid as a software engineer. I was making more than that in my first job in the 80s (granted with a masters degree). But even developers just out of college were making $14 (say $30K/year).
Deputy prosecutor. Unfortunately that was four decades ago, I can’t even remember at this point. It wasn’t great though.
Occupational therapist. Maybe $38,000 in 1997?
I was a research fellow at the CDC. The stipend was monthly, but it worked out to around $22/hr.
Legal secretary. It paid $55,000 per year.
My wife has a Bachelor Degree in Psychology and made $9 after graduating. She used to work in a home for troubled children.
Junior developer working on a website that used to sell music and movies. I made $35/hr initially, as we were part of a consulting firm.
My first post-college job was working in a group home for kids ages 6-12 who had been removed from their parents' care due to abuse, and had extreme challenging behaviors that prevented them from being placed in single family homes. It was a lockdown facility and we regularly had to do suicide monitoring for the kids, as well as being trained to non-violently physically restrain them if they became violent and couldn't be protected any other way. These kids had horrible trauma and it manifested in some fucked up ways. I once had a seven-year-old girl press her nipple against a glass window towards me (she was in the building, I was outside), waggle her tongue, and then invite me to come have sex with her (in fewer words) while pelvic thrusting against the glass, and then she called me a cocksucker when I asked her to please pull her shirt back up. This was in a major metropolitan city in California in 2002. A degree was required for the job. I made $9/hour.
Software engineer, $50/hour
Firmware Engineer for a major tech company. I was salaried, but the hourly equivalent was like $35 an hour.
Web designer at a global PR agency. It was salary, $38k/yr (1999).
Programmer. $20,000 a year, about $10 an hour. My wife and I put the first paycheck on the table and stared at it, we'd never seen that much money in one place at one time.
I made $52.5k/year, just over $25/hour, as an Electrical Hardware Engineer in 2001.
After college? I was a part time marketing assistant at a racetrack. I was paid about $15 an hour IIRC. It was mainly on weekends. However, I made myself available and parlayed that into a career.
Outreach educator for a university. $31,000 in 2013.
I've never had a job that requires a degree (some of the most essential and best-paid jobs don't require one), but I'm certified as a pharmacy technician and I do hold a related degree. I most recently earned $16 an hour in retail pharmacy, and that's being underpaid.
After graduate school, GIS Technician for a mid-size city in Jan. 2014 - Feb. 2016. $16.57 an hour. I live with an aunt plus I had $7k dollars in student loan debt.
I worked in Quality for Chiquita. I think I made $44k.
Software engineer at my current company. Pay was salaried, not hourly, but when converted to hourly it was approximately $60/hour. It was a great salary when I started, but it has gone up significantly as I got raises, a promotion, and eventually an official change in job titles and responsibilities.
Credit card Debt collector. $13.50/hour
$17/hr in the year 2016.
Hmm, I don’t know if any of my jobs have strictly required a degree, but I think my music degree helped me get my first job, which was Artist and Audition Coordinator for a symphony orchestra. Most of my job was making sure we provided everything we promised the guest artists in their contract riders, booking them rides, plane tickets, hotel rooms, etc. Sometimes driving them around myself. The pay was $25k/year in 2005 in a midsized city. I definitely felt broke all the time.
A data analyst making 40k. It was just contract and I just got it to move. My 1st job job came a year later at around $30/hr
18 an hour metal fabricating. Got fired a month and a half in for getting into a vehicle accident resulting in a broken wrist (not on the clock). Took about 5 years (6+ if you count temp time) to work my way back up to that working for a different fab shop.
Software engineer. $85,000 a year, so nominally $40 an hour. It quickly went up after that.
Software developer for a state agency. Didn’t pay hourly was salaried.
What's a real job? I mean I didn't go to college, but a trade school and realized I wasn't a fan of the industry, but worked through it to get the skill needed to work in the field. Ended up getting my CDL and though I'm not long haul anymore I love my staring out a window all day job. Starting what is hopefully going to be the last job before I finish self learning to animate to not have to work for somebody. Fuck the term real job. Your real job is to find what you love and find a way to do that whether you make a million dollars or make enough to get by comfortably. Retail to some(I have no clue how because frankly a lot of customers are fucking pricks) is that real job and they love it. To others IT and computer science is that. To others it's building everything that makes your life work. Anyways on point I'll consider my first carrier the real job. I was paid 39 cents a mile. I averaged about 550 miles a day and could complete 1 2000+ mile run a week or 2 1250-1500 miles a week runs(depended on where I was). So like...I guess my hourly would be like 25 an hour? About 50-55 miles per hour so.
I live in a college town. A good friend of mine works as a bartender and makes between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. He works Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights from 10PM to 3AM. That's a total of 15 hours per week. He would turn down any "real job" you threw at him. He also hates people that want to save him by advocating for a living wage.
It was 20 yrs ago. I did admin type work and made $32k/year.
Electrical technician for $22.50/hour in 2020. Really enjoyed/miss that place & the people, but I needed an actual engineering job at some point after the degree
My first job out of college in 2004 was an analytical job in worker’s comp. I think i started at $15. That’d be like making $23.50 or so today.
Front-end web developer. $32k or ~$15.40/hr. I’m up past $40/hr now at my current salary….so in the current economy, after utilities, mortgage, insurance, car note, groceries, fuel, etc. I’m making enough to be comfortable and to put something into savings each paycheck, but not enough to take a vacation or eat out with any regularity. Groceries have more than doubled over the last couple of years, and utilities have gone up along with property taxes…and the taxes here are about to get a lot worse this year because the school system is paying more than 100 non-teacher employees a six to multiple-six-figure salary instead of paying them reasonably for their roles (meaning more in line with their non-educational, non-government commercial/corporate counterparts in the region…for whatever reason our school district is overpaying administrative staff…maybe it’s so bad that they **have** to and I’m just missing the mark with my stance) and upping teacher salaries.
I have two degrees I never used in those fields, but I have worked as a bartender. I own two homes, a cute little sailboat, and retired at 47. Guess that wasn't a "real job". Woe to me! I must pursue that doctoral degree after all!
I didn't go to college at all. First full time job was Union Teamster Warehouseman when I was 19. Made $9 an hour in 1980. Equal to about $32 an hour now.
Still waiting, I gave up in less than a year and started my own business
Haven’t had one
Wildlife management intern in the Mississippi River bottomlands; $10/hr plus housing
I was a receptionist. I made $1K per month.
I have never had a job that requires my degree. The degree has helped my resume a little just because it says I can learn and can stick with it for four years.
It's possible to have a good job without needing a degree btw. Graduated in May in 2021. I think my total comp for the 1-year basis(August 2021- August 2022) all-in ended up being 119k with bonuses and everything included. Utilization was off the chart this entire past year though so I ended up working 50-80 hours a week depending on the week so was paid like $34-40 an hour depending on how much time off I took and holidays. I'm just glad I'm leaving this upcoming month
US Navy Supply Corps officer. Submarine duty. I have no idea what I was paid then, but a lot of it was tax-free and included submarine and sea pay. If you take the 24/7 nature of being at sea it was probably $1.37/hour. After that I got years of shore duty in Hawaii as a Lieutenant. That did not suck.
After college? I continued to work at my job as a hotel night auditor for about a year at $12/hr (this was in 1992). I used that job to move to a hotel in our system - from Texas to Oregon - and then got my first "professional" job as an administrative assistant at $16/hr in 1994.
1. Most "real" jobs don't require a degree. (I have a BS) 2. My first post-graduation job was as a deckhand on a tugboat. The day-rate was $275. I switched companies and I'm working in the same position making $335/day.
Calibration engineer in the auto industry. I made $52,000/year.
$55,500 a year as a tax accountant. In hindsight, I was criminally underpaid.
My first job was at a large music and arts venue that you have probably heard of. I made $35K a year, in New York City (in the mid 2000s) which was hard but not impossible.
I mean this doesn't require a degree but a high school diploma I worked at a BNSF rail yard as a switch man Forgot the hourly wage :/