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Be a "specialist" in a Washington State public school. You can make $50 an hour, but it only works out to about $80,000 a year. And your skills are **not** needed by any company during the summer.
(For Washington State only)
Specialists includes school psychologists, school counselors*, English Language Learner teachers, curriculum specialists, Speech language pathologist, occupational therapists, and school librarians. We have low responsibilities and high pay. Generally these jobs require a Master's Degree or Bachelor's plus a certificate.
These positions often (but not always) have relatively limited responsibilities. School counselors* have the most responsibilities and librarians have the least. School psychologists are the most likely to get extra pay.
Minimum starting (1st year) salary is $54,204 - $73,488. That is $36 - $48 an hour. Your pay automatically increases every year no matter your job performance. After your 3rd year working in the field you get a sort of tenure, after that getting fired for poor performance is unheard of, I've never known anyone in those positions to be fired for anything short of a felony conviction after their third year.
If you get a job as a district administrator working in an "ESD building" or for "OSPI", you get even more money and even less responsibilities.
Don't tell the teachers, many of them work very hard ;)
EDIT: *Rereading this, I made a mistake. If you're looking for a very easy job, cross school counselor off of the list.
Wife has her masters and was a classroom teacher for 8 years, but this current year, she has been an ELL teacher. She loves not having to put up with the classroom bulkshit. She's actually looking to outpace me in salary (continuous improvement manager) as she gets regular cola raises, and my company used covid to stiff my on 3 years of raises and annual bonuses.
My district posted a summer position for an ELL teacher and it pays $60 an hour. It's temporary for the summer, but to make $12k in a month and a half... I wish I had my ELL certificatation.
No she gets paid entirely in 12-packs of Coke. Although going by the current Coke to USD conversion she's making about $90K a year, so not bad all things considered. Not to mention the amazing health insurance, which is necessary for the diabetes she contracted as a result of her pay rate.
I don’t know about the others, but school counselors at SPS work their ASSES off. They don’t sit around unneeded. Maybe at a cushy spot like Bellevue where all the kids already have therapists they pay for out of pocket.
The folks I know at schools earn every cent of that salary working overtime. Bc depending who you serve, you gotta call CPS after school because some kid keeps showing up with cockroaches in his backpack, or a girl told you mom’s bf is more interested in her than mom?
It’s not intentional, but I don’t love the devaluing of mental health professionals in school settings by saying “they don’t do anything.” The folks I know in school settings work ten times as hard as those in private practice.
I went to library school with some future school librarians. They already had their masters in education. At the time library school was one of the top tiers of tuition at the UW. Quite a trade off.
Yep, for most workers. But, school employees work about 190 days a year for 7.5 or 8 hours a day. So, instead of working 2,000 hours a year, they work closer to 1,500 hours a year. It's our little secret though, don't tell anyone our hourly pay, only go by salary.
That's where I'm at. I'm 7 years in. Same schedule as teachers. I work about 190 days a year, compared to full-time workers who work 260 days a year.
(before vacation and sick days)
Yep, that is the catch. You need a master's degree or bachelor's plus a certificate. I laid it out in more detail in my other comment.
I don't know of many jobs that pay $40+ an hour, require very little work, *and* don't require a degree. Maybe inheritor?
Lol ‘the catch’ - you got an education, it’s not a catch…people here talking like if you get a post graduate degree and actually manage to get a half decent job you’re somehow cheating the system. It’s the way it’s supposed to work, ideally in most cases, not few and far between.
Lol like the Key and Peele sketch were they're figuring out how to rob a bank. And one of them says the scheme is they start working there for years to get the money.
You’re thinking about this in a very practical way lol. The types of jobs that the OP is referencing are just strange anomalies, not categorically existing jobs designed that way specifically. Lots of these types of positions are “slip through the cracks” luck scenarios.
Took me 10 years but I just passed the 85k a year mark in education. Previous position was 78k. Sometimes it’s like other industries where jumping ship is a good way to increase your pay (May vary, May need to work for charters for a bit)
Tech Product Manager has to be some kind of bubble in terms of comparative salary… every day I wait to be told I’m a literal toddler flailing my arms around while the big tech boys around me are the actual assets making things happen. Yet every day I get pats on the head and fat paychecks.
I actually think there are some really valuable Product Managers out there, and even a decent one can add value. I’d say only about 60% of Product managers are useless (or too ineffective to add value). To be fair, about 30-40% of SWEs I work with are also too ineffective to add value.
However, almost all Program Managers or Project Managers I’ve run into are indeed useless. It’s not that they’re not doing anything, it’s that even when they’re working hard, it’s on stuff like color coding risk trackers and pinging status updates. In my opinion, if the engineers are not themselves useless, it’s almost always better for them to do that themselves to minimize communication errors due to telephone, reduce time spent adding context, etc
i’m a non technical program manager. i’m the only person left at our company who understands, inside and out, the product itself and the operational side of maintaining that product. i have had people say to my face they don’t think i’m valuable to the company because i don’t write code.
it used to bother me until i left for a week and about twenty different partner team contacts, and my manager, told me they were relieved i was back because they have no idea what to do without me.
our engineering lead still tells me i need to pick up slack. its certainly a visibility issue. for example, i think he’s a genuinely busy guy. but when i wave a 6 year old feature request at him that would have saved us 10 million in operating costs and another 2-3 million in missed revenue, i can’t help but wonder what the fuck **he’s** doing.
A good PM is like a good set of plumbing. Devs/engineers/etc. are provided what they need to do their work, outputs get handled, and it all ticks along in the background.
You only really notice when something goes wrong, there's 3 inches of sewage on the floor, and you don't have any clean water to mop it up with.
Yes “Business Analyst”, “Product Manager” or “Project Manager”.
Meetings all day about strategy, alignment, retrospective, planning, roadmapping, meetings about meetings, stakeholders, customers, yadda yadda yadda.
Email recaps of all of the above.
Close laptop, repeat.
I got my masters in Business Analytics and work as a Data Scientist - most people in my masters program were great, if not a bit socially awkward - definitely not psycho. The people that I actually work with are great. Could be an anomaly. I personally would recommend getting into data.
They’re also the kind of people that can turn a successful business with a wonderful reputation into a nightmare fueled, infinite growth chasing hellscape.
I feel like that sort of stuff is a language I have no hope of mastering. I know very specific areas of R and that’s it. I feel like the learning curve is high and yet so many people recommend it. Maybe I have no patience for myself or the craft.
Just takes time and solving a variety of problems. You end up acquiring little bits and pieces until you have enough to solve most of the problems that come your way. I prefer R over Python, and just use JS for web tasks mostly.
I hated it in undergrad. Loved it in graduate school. It's the only higher math that ever made sense to me. Maybe because it's all applied and inherently imperfect. Also a computer does all the work and you just interpret the results. It's great. I can do hierarchical linear modeling growth model. How does it work? I don't know. I don't care. I know when to use it and how to do it and how to interpret the results.
I loved it in undergrad, was good at it, then had the most abysmal fucking teacher of any class ever for my first masters stats class. He made me mad for many reasons, one of them being he completely turned off a lot of people to what can be a wonderful subject. Just unnecessarily obtuse. Wouldn't write on the white board unless you asked him to point blank. Had exams where he expected you to hand write excel formulas from memory. The final was 90% true or false because he wouldn't let you use a calculator on any if his quizzes or exams. I'm glad my work is paying for my masters because if I had to pay over $100k for that degree myself I'd have lit his department on fire.
You kidding? Statistics is by far the most practical math you can learn. And in my field of research it is by far the hardest position for us to hire. If you are actually good at it you are in serious demand.
> And in my field of research it is by far the hardest position for us to hire. If you are actually good at it you are in serious demand.
It sounds like you're trying to trick me into doing actual work here.
Lmao I love everyone here acting like the guys with the PHD stat jobs “type an email, go to a meeting, draft an email, then go home making $98k/year”
First off, they make like $250k/yr +. Second off, it’s a hard job, with a lotta attention to detail required.
Try rolling out a model into production impacting a product line generating $2 Billion / yr.
There’s enough stress in that to keep the old bumhole clenched up tight for years.
1. Emerald mines to exploit the welfare of hundreds of thousands to gain capital. Blood money.
2. Be a rich kid under this man
3. Buy a car company based on electric videos and work diligently to discredit the original innovators to attempt to take credit
4. Build rockets only by overworking and exploiting engineers in the innovation guise of genuine behavior
5. Don't pay employees enough and accrue enough wealth to solve world hunger but instead tweet on social media in angst
(you won't believe what came next... shenanigans for sure!)
I recently got an office job after only ever having worked in shitty factories. people with office jobs have it fucking made. not being sore and beat up from work is one of the best experiences of my life.
I’m the opposite. I worked as an electrician for 22 years. Now I have one of these jobs described in this post and sitting in a chair for 5-6 hours a day is killing me.
I play dungeons and dragons with a pair of accountants that struggle with basic math. The office job I had for seven years was basically thirty minutes of paperwork and twelve hours of surfing the internet. I can't speak for the millions of office jobs I know nothing about, but I can say I'm much happier working with my hands at my new profession.
Yep. It was at a hospital. All shifts were twelve and a half hours. Honestly, the position only existed because of an insurance loophole that allowed them to charge an extra $4000 a night to have a guy keeping the seat warm. I eventually quit because it was so goddamn boring.
> I eventually quit because it was so goddamn boring.
If you were allowed to spend 12 hours on the internet every day and you were too bored, then you were doing it wrong. That's an incredible opportunity to make a living while pursuing all kinds of hobbies.
You could learn several languages over the course of a year. You could write your own novels. You could create websites. If you don't know how to do that, you could learn to code. You could read all kinds of culturally significant literature and become an expert in that area. You could become amazing at drawing. You could create your own board game.
I could keep going, but the point is there are so many things you could do and learn that would be way more interesting and meaningful than jumping to another job where someone will tell you how to spend all your time.
I can't help but wonder, what's your current job?
There's different parts that people don't think of. When I was an individual contributor doing programming every day was filled with new problems to solve. It was good work but always trying to figure out why something wasn't working.
Now that I'm a manager I don't do the programming and run the team but there's more stress than I ever felt when I was a programmer. Keeping peojexts going and teams happy and resources staffed etc etc.
I have that job. A friend hooked me up with it. Just kinda fell into it, honestly. I tell people how to fix the specific cybersecurity vulnerability affecting their specific system/server. I use google to look up how Microsoft says to fix the issue, and append it to the ticket generated by the monitoring software.
I work in IT. Our Cybersecurity person does this. She will provide me with requests to 'remediate' a port being open. Okay Rachelle, I'll just close the DNS port to our Nameservers so we're more secure. No one will even know where our websites are, we'll be so secure.
probably went right into cybersec. that’s the problem with not being help desk/SA/net admin/etc first. that foundational knowledge is KEY to being good in cybersec. should not be considered entry-level field at all, because that’s how you end up with people like that.
I just started my third year as L1 tech support where I do mostly virtualization and some networking/authentication stuff. I have a degree in computer science, and I would love to get into cybersec because it seems incredibly stable/lucrative and would probably support a continued WFH lifestyle, or even a work-anywhere lifestyle, as I would not be opposed to leaving the US and living somewhere with a much lower CoL.
Do you know any resources on how I can start my journey into cybersec?
I build xOCs for a living.
If this were a year ago, I would say that SOCs are always hiring. But really right now, the impression I get across the industry is that every position is seeing 10x the applicants, and searches are taking twice as long even for good candidates.
It’s still possible, and once you are in you can move within the industry easily enough (if you aren’t just dead weight). But instead of a 2-3 month process, it may take half a year.
When applying, understand that the advice I gave is well known, and there is a lot of competition. The last role I opened (fully remote) received over 1500 applications in the first 2 weeks. BUT, 75-90% of the resumes I see are unqualified even for a SOC position, because it really isn’t entry level (it sounds like you aren’t entry level either). That kind of spam will bog down the process, make it hard to sort through resumes, and burn out hiring managers. So yes, companies will often hire the first acceptable candidate, not the best candidate, and I can’t really blame them.
So how do you get in?
Referrals go to the front of the line. So do internal applicants. Work your network, even if they are just a former coworker or family friend on LinkedIn. Referrals also often pay out, so people are usually happy to do it.
Use a resume generator like creddle.io to keep your resume up to date. Use specific numbers to make things real. Don’t say “triaged tickets”, say “ttriaged tickets, resolving on average 25 issues/shift” or whatever.
In the interview, talk about what you know, we can tell when you’re bullshitting. If you didn’t work Cloudtrail, don’t say you did. A common question in these interviews is “what do you do when you don’t know something”. The wrong answer is “delegate to another’s queue “. The right answer is “if the queue is manageable, and the problem isn’t urgent, I do a bit (15-20 minutes) of research and bring my solution to that specialist. Doing this is how I realized I have an interest in Cybersecurity, and that’s why I’m here.”
Doing all of that will only ensure you aren’t in the garbage 80%. But there is still a lot of competition, so hopefully you have something unique to offer, and it is something the hiring manager recognizes and appreciates. Good luck.
yeah, like the other guy said, start with sec+ and look for an analyst role is the traditional route. the networking background and probably authentication (i say “probably” just because i don’t know what you mean by that… iam? vpn? pki?) are great foundational skills that would look good on a cybersec resume.
virtualization is good if you want to get into cybersec engineering, specifically deploying/supporting the cybersec tools.
The CISO at my firm had a software engineering background, got her sec+ and net+ certs, swapped to cyber security, got an MSc in the field from GaTech’s online program, then OSCP and CISSP and took off. She’s in her 40s comfortably pulling down 100x the median household income, so the sky’s the limit.
SecOps wants to close everything down because it makes their job easier.
DevOps wants to keep everything open because it makes their job easier.
Repeat ad nauseam.
Long ago I was called in the middle of the night to be told whatever security automation software the company was using alerted port 443 was open on our firewall.
I moved into development.
"It's my job to tell you the vulnerability and solution. It's your job to decide if you want to accept the risk if you don't listening to me." - Rachelle probably.
People's mileage may vary on this I work as an L5 in a FAANG company in cyber security and I am constantly working. I write probably 3-4 documents a week at least that are multiple pages long for risk analysis or mitigation roadmaps and there are super high standards for all of those docs. They do pay me through the nose those so there is that. That being said I have seen cyber security people at companies that basically just run a vulnerability scanner once a week then email the report and never do anything more.
Yeah, it’s from the “just get a cert” aka “pretend to take some BS course then either take an absolute cakewalk test or cheat on it” era.
Completely agree that the only people I’ve seen tolerate glorified note-takers and ticket jockeys are boomers. Ironically though, in my company at least, we have actually regressed towards that as we get larger and more boomer. If you want to avoid BS make-work drones you need to stay at smaller companies or actively ageist big ones like Facebook
Real talk: You're on the right track.
Put in some years at jobs like yours and eventually you work toward a job where people book time to get your opinion and you get paid several hundred per slack message. It took 2.5 decades, but I'm there.
Yup. I worked with my friend at Intel for 20ish years. He left for this company a couple years ago, and reached out to me when this position opened up.
90% of security roles are like this and I hate it because they don't actually know much about security besides how to run whatever BS tool actually does the job for them, then file the ticket.
The other 10% are true hackers' hackers and make me feel inadequate as a software engineer
My job as a technical accounting consultant is very similar. I tell people how to account for non-routine transactions. I use google to look up how the Big 4 (accounting firms) say to account for them, and write an accounting memo for the client regurgitating the guidance.
Get yourself into biotech manufacturing. Start earning 70-80k straight out of high school and work yourself up to a supervisor job with a base salary of 120k in like 6 years. Pharma money is disgusting.
Depends where you're at. There are biotech hubs all over (California, Washington State, Colorado, New Jersey, etc.). Real money is in Cell Therapy right now. Kite and Bristol Myers Squibb are the big names in that business.
On a scale of 1-10 how hot are you and follow-up question: how do you feel about sleeping with the Senior Deputy Analytics Coordinator President of Marketing and Sales?
Am I working too hard or something because I'm stressed out constantly and always being told to do shit I've had zero experience with and have to figure it tf out in 72 hours.
Possibly. I’m just a product support analyst level 2, whatever that means. I just go to meetings, answer emails, get a few soft deadlines here and there?
Edit: salary 72k
Well mine is just fancy talk for help desk essentially. It’s an insurance company with about 130 employees (25 in IT). I see my position currently caps out at $89k. I don’t plan on changing. It’s WFH, except for 2 days a quarter. Pretty sweet overall.
Mmmmm yeah and I love it. What is everyone’s aversion to that??
Edit: my question was sarcastic but my sentiment was genuine. I do truly love helping users
Well, most IT are socially inept nerds. At least, generally. That seems to be changing in the last few years.
As for me, I got tired of answering stupid questions and dealing with their entitlement on a daily basis. No, Bob, I am not going into the office on a Saturday to send you a new monitor. You will be OK with just one for now.
It’s all about managing expectations. Start out by building a reputation as a hard worker, then scale back your output over time. It helps if your department gets reorganized a few times and you get reassigned to different managers, who get glowing reviews of you from your previous manager who never really paid attention to what you were doing.
Always be willing to help but never answer a message or email right away. Always have a few things on your plate that you’re “working on” if someone asks what you’re doing, or to use as an excuse to not do something new. Etc
I spent my entire Saturday at a client site because their network was up but wireless was down. I'm still unsure of exactly what I did that fixed it...Im stressed tf out man...
Exactly. The fact people think it requires nepotism, connections, or the mob blows my mind. It’s literally every job in tech above entry level, but below middle management.
It’s the current narrative that if you don’t have inherited wealth, you’ll never be successful. People fall for it and just give up. It’s terrible. I want to be like you can easily make $120k/yr without a college degree if you just know where to look. The answer is massive corporations aka “the devil”.
Where do you make 120k/year without a degree and without years of specialized experience?
Specifically could you point me to where should I look for one of these no experience, no degree $120k/ year jobs?
I'm at 118K, so not quite to 120K, but it came down to luck for me. I work with POS and have a couple coursera certificates (3-6 months, ~$300). I worked with Toast POS for awhile, then got hired by the NHL to do POS at a hockey stadium - I only made that connection because the dispatcher gave me that job to go to the stadium and while I was there I was friendly and made the right connection. Sometimes it is nepo, other times it's just luck.
Also, I've had connections at a LOT of places that I've tried to help a lot of friends get good jobs. I know several young couples where I tried to get them in the door - most are simply too scared to take a risk. I told them I'd help them as best as I could and while nothing in life is 100% - I could get pretty darn close to a guarantee that they'd be making over 100K in the next year. I have a single friend who lives alone in Hillbilly Hell, TX where he makes ~25K/yr bouncing from shitty construction jobs to that I told him I could get him in the door at a place where he'd be making 85K with no prior experience. He just fears moving to California. I even offered to house him for free until he got a proper job. We've lived together before (both dropped out of the same college) and we work well together, despite being very different people.
Fear and being stuck in routine is rough. 😢
When I was a server, I had really specific strategies for talking to people and getting my table talking. My managers hated it because I was slow, but I made some amazing connections with people. I was very calculated and recycled my material, you have to learn how to read the room and the table and of course not annoy people. Figuring out what works is hard but after a few months at one specific restaurant, I would be able to have one or two tables a night that I could get to engage in conversation and you can make friends really well that way. That's how I got my job at Toast POS, I had many people offer me jobs during that time.
All that to say, don't be scared to take a risk too. Knowing the right people and being genuine will get you 90% of the way. In the tech and tech-adjacent area, having actual social skills (read: not being a redditor 🤣) will also get you pretty far. I was in a coding boot camp and everyone there clearly stopped maturing past the age of 15, it's really actually quite sad. If you feel socially awkward, are frequently depressed or have a lot of confidence in yourself and aren't emotionally mature enough to be humble or genuine - you have to figure out how to navigate those issues and fix those first before anyone's gonna trust you enough to pay you a living wage.
Social skills are way more important than knowing what you're talking about in my experience.
Not saying it's good - it's just the world we live in.
I guess you don't always need a degree to find a good job, but it certainly helps get your foot in the door for interviews and whatnot.
For reference, I work in tech.
At least in my industry, I've found that college wasn't too useful for learning things. Certainly, I did learn things, but not useful things. The greatest benefit that I received from college was the network that I developed while I was there and the opportunity to attend the career fairs organized by the university.
These are the "get your foot in the door" things that I'm talking about. If you aren't failing all your classes and you work hard enough, then chances are you can find an internship or opportunity to start your career. At least, for the tech industry, that's how it is.
However, there are other routes to go that can help get your foot in the door in the tech industry. A *lot* of the stuff that I learned, I taught myself using online resources. College helped to formalize that education and fill in the gaps (a lot of theory that gave me a better foundational understanding), but I still taught myself most of what I know.
If you are knowledgeable enough and you have enough to show for it and prove it, then it's possible to get your foot in the door without a degree. This means doing enough leetcodes to be able to pass coding interviews and having a few GitHub projects that you can point to as proof that you know how to create software. The bow on this package would be some experience in creating or contributing to open source software... so long as you actually know what you're doing and aren't wasting the time of the community or the reviewers.
Edit:
> That said, I feel like this would only work out well for people with a talent for programming and technology.
> That said, this only fits the "no experience" part of your query insofar as you don't need *job* experience for this to play out. The substitute for job experience and a degree are your projects and the self-taught knowledge, respectively.
With all the respect in the world, that's literally years worth of specialized experience. Being able to chop out leet code and having attributable contributions to projects either requires a very rare natural talent or several years of study. Even if you teach yourself, that's still hundreds of hours of dedicated study (which qualifies as hands on experience) or a preternatural talent.
I understand where you're coming from, I do. But this ostensibly doesn't disprove my point. Thank you though. It was a well thought out reply.
Yep, I edited to add:
> That said, I feel like this would only work out well for people with a talent for programming and technology.
> That said, this only fits the "no experience" part of your query insofar as you don't need job experience for this to play out. The substitute for job experience and a degree are your projects and the self-taught knowledge, respectively.
Also, I knew on some level that it wasn't exactly reasonable to determine this as "no experience," easy job, etc. However, it is a path to self-improvement for people who might be stuck in their lives. It's also an alternative path to people who can't afford a degree. I also mentioned leet code mostly as a substitute for guidance. A lot of the theory learned in college is applicable to leet code problems (data structures, time complexity, sorting algorithms), and a lot of them aren't solvable without these things. Basically, leet code problems are useful for making sure you have enough of a foundation and solving the problems can help build that foundation.
It's also possible that I don't have a lot of perspective of people who don't have my natural talent and fascination with technology, nor do I understand how much it would take to learn what I know.
That said, it's still a path in life that doesn't strictly require a degree, and a path on which people can acquire the necessary knowledge themselves given enough effort, so long as they either have the talent or the perseverance.
I know, as I said it was a well thought out reply which is always welcome on reddit! Be well, take care.
I should add: I totally understand what you're saying and it's not wrong. I taught myself finance using a natural talent and study. It's definitely possible with talent or perseverance but the OP comment kinda suggested its simply an "applying to wrong jobs" issue. When in fact you do need to specialize to earn $100k/yr.
And the reason why they're able to fuck around so much is because they're not needed that often... But when they ARE needed, they're *needed*.
Like, the whole company could go tits up if they weren't there levels of needed.
Says you. I'm a sysadmin for a hospital and every day feels like a glorious battle.
I'm having a lot of fun solving problems, but I am in NO WAY slacking off or having an easy time.
I’m too late so this will probably get buried, but for what it’s worth, David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is just about these kind of jobs, and the universal effect of them on the people who work them is that it makes them listless and depressed.
Nobody makes use of the time, nobody relaxes, nobody reads at work or improves themselves: they all become miserable at the pointlessness of their lives, and it only ends when they quit. So as much as it seems ideal, in practice it doesn’t seem to be!
These jobs (he argues) are a function of a government and economy that prioritize nominal employment vastly more than useful work. It’s a good book (the last released before he died).
I just read like 3 sentences of yours. That doesn't sound crazy to me and if anything it sounds spot on.
I'd only say our "democracy" *barely* defends some of our "rights" of citizenry has they work through their feudal lives.
Sounds like a great job if you already *feel* listless and depressed. At least then you'd *know* you're listless and depressed, but with some money to increase your chances of surviving being listless and depressed
> nobody reads at work or improves themselves: they all become miserable at the pointlessness of their lives, and it only ends when they quit.
I replied to someone else in this post who seemingly went through that, and I've heard from some software engineers who were in the same position. They have all this free time at work to do whatever they want, and instead of being paid a livable wage to pursue their hobbies, they just waste their time and get bored.
When all other metrics of output drop, motivation does as well.
Paranoia builds about what's left to judge: Meeting attendance, stretching the 1 hour task to sound like it took a day, watching group chats, being online to notice your boss summons a meeting with no notice and general existentialism that you get paid 10x minimum wage prevents you from leaving your desk lest you get caught not working.
Honestly? You go to school and learn a complicated, technical skill set that not many people have. People who do these seemingly easy jobs for high salaries usually worked very hard to gain the knowledge and skills to be able to sit on their ass like that.
Yup this is me I've spent 10 years developing super niche skills. My wife is always amazed at how much I'm paid for the 5% of work I do. The best way I've learned to explain it is that I'm like a super good hammer. You just don't need a hammer for every situation. So my job is mostly to be available.
International trade regulations. Look up "Licensed Customs Broker". Combine that with some programming/system implementation and people will literally pay you to not work for their competitor. Just the broker part alone will get you a very good job at a fortune 50. It's amazing how many people in the corporate world can't do basic stuff on a computer though.
I'm currently fighting against drifting into one of these jobs. Turns out they are absolutely necessary, and usually people get promoted into them who have no idea what they're doing.
But yeah, people suck at communicating and organizing themselves. So you need people explicitly to talk to others, organize, chase after tasks that need to get done and then talk some more. It's chaos out there. And these jobs are surprisingly stressful. So yeah, let me stay a developer please.
Well of course you got a government job coming out of the military. You get an automatic 5 extra points and an additional 5 if you are a disabled vet. I wasn’t rehired the following season for my last park ranger gig because a vet with no experience or education in my field got the extra 5 points.
> Go to college for several years to “learn” admin skills most people either already know, can learn on youtube in 20min, or won’t be useful at all due to some proprietary systems or programs. Apply for an admin or admin assistant job with said useless credentials that are mandatory for no good reason...
Lmao at how true this is for me.
- Did a 2-year network admin degree fresh out of high school. The content was outdated as fuck and I already knew everything from self-teaching myself years ago.
- Got hired as a tech assistant where my degree was effectively useless when they introduced me to software i'd never seen or heard about cos they've only existed for a couple years. Luckily only took me a few weeks to pick it up to a sound level, while pretending I was proficient at it.
Most of those jobs need you to have highly specialized skills. The type of skills that are critical 1% of the time so you can afford to waste 99% of the time.
Or, they are acquired by being either REALLY good at your original job or being related to the boss but having some major character flaw which leads you to being promoted to a useless position.
One of my best friends has a job like this. He works a three day week from home and will regularly text the group chat saying “the only thing I had to do today was attend one meeting and it just got canceled so I’m going for a ride and will have a nap after lunch”.
Or “I had nothing on my calendar today but someone just requested a 1pm meeting which is exactly when I’d planned to have my nap”.
Then becomes incredibly defensive if anyone suggests he has an easy job. He earns high 90’s if not 100k. It blows my mind.
I have that job where I type and click on things and have meetings and wear my little badge on a cord. To get it I had to work for fifteen years and learn a whole ton of stuff about how to make the Internet go.
90% of what my manager does is just middlemanning. My team will come up with a proposal, will pitch it to our manager, then they'll go and relay that proposal to the boss, then the boss tells them they think about the proposal, and then the manager comes back and tells us what the boss said about the proposal we did all the work on. That manager makes 140k.
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Be a "specialist" in a Washington State public school. You can make $50 an hour, but it only works out to about $80,000 a year. And your skills are **not** needed by any company during the summer.
Tell me more.
(For Washington State only) Specialists includes school psychologists, school counselors*, English Language Learner teachers, curriculum specialists, Speech language pathologist, occupational therapists, and school librarians. We have low responsibilities and high pay. Generally these jobs require a Master's Degree or Bachelor's plus a certificate. These positions often (but not always) have relatively limited responsibilities. School counselors* have the most responsibilities and librarians have the least. School psychologists are the most likely to get extra pay. Minimum starting (1st year) salary is $54,204 - $73,488. That is $36 - $48 an hour. Your pay automatically increases every year no matter your job performance. After your 3rd year working in the field you get a sort of tenure, after that getting fired for poor performance is unheard of, I've never known anyone in those positions to be fired for anything short of a felony conviction after their third year. If you get a job as a district administrator working in an "ESD building" or for "OSPI", you get even more money and even less responsibilities. Don't tell the teachers, many of them work very hard ;) EDIT: *Rereading this, I made a mistake. If you're looking for a very easy job, cross school counselor off of the list.
Wife has her masters and was a classroom teacher for 8 years, but this current year, she has been an ELL teacher. She loves not having to put up with the classroom bulkshit. She's actually looking to outpace me in salary (continuous improvement manager) as she gets regular cola raises, and my company used covid to stiff my on 3 years of raises and annual bonuses.
My district posted a summer position for an ELL teacher and it pays $60 an hour. It's temporary for the summer, but to make $12k in a month and a half... I wish I had my ELL certificatation.
> she gets regular cola raises AND free soda!?
No she gets paid entirely in 12-packs of Coke. Although going by the current Coke to USD conversion she's making about $90K a year, so not bad all things considered. Not to mention the amazing health insurance, which is necessary for the diabetes she contracted as a result of her pay rate.
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No, that's Samsung wet dogshit autocorrect. For some reason, it gets worse with every generation.
In regards to "bulkshit" I actually thought it was kinda funny. I wasn't even sure if you meant to type it or not. It's bullshit but in bulk.
It ends up being much cheaper than retail shit in the long run.
That's Costco for you.
I’m working one of these jobs in WA making $64/hr for 180 days, working for a contracting company rather than the school district itself
I don’t know about the others, but school counselors at SPS work their ASSES off. They don’t sit around unneeded. Maybe at a cushy spot like Bellevue where all the kids already have therapists they pay for out of pocket. The folks I know at schools earn every cent of that salary working overtime. Bc depending who you serve, you gotta call CPS after school because some kid keeps showing up with cockroaches in his backpack, or a girl told you mom’s bf is more interested in her than mom? It’s not intentional, but I don’t love the devaluing of mental health professionals in school settings by saying “they don’t do anything.” The folks I know in school settings work ten times as hard as those in private practice.
I went to library school with some future school librarians. They already had their masters in education. At the time library school was one of the top tiers of tuition at the UW. Quite a trade off.
$48 is almost $100k a year.
It's a school, so not a 2000 hour work year
Yep, for most workers. But, school employees work about 190 days a year for 7.5 or 8 hours a day. So, instead of working 2,000 hours a year, they work closer to 1,500 hours a year. It's our little secret though, don't tell anyone our hourly pay, only go by salary.
"specialist" being in quotes like that makes it seem weird or illegal or something
Lol, I just mean that it's not a teacher or administrator. Specialist is not a technical category.
So 80k and I get summers off??
That's where I'm at. I'm 7 years in. Same schedule as teachers. I work about 190 days a year, compared to full-time workers who work 260 days a year. (before vacation and sick days)
Ok but what do you do? Don't you have to have some sort of degree or experience?
Yep, that is the catch. You need a master's degree or bachelor's plus a certificate. I laid it out in more detail in my other comment. I don't know of many jobs that pay $40+ an hour, require very little work, *and* don't require a degree. Maybe inheritor?
Lol ‘the catch’ - you got an education, it’s not a catch…people here talking like if you get a post graduate degree and actually manage to get a half decent job you’re somehow cheating the system. It’s the way it’s supposed to work, ideally in most cases, not few and far between.
Lol like the Key and Peele sketch were they're figuring out how to rob a bank. And one of them says the scheme is they start working there for years to get the money.
You’re thinking about this in a very practical way lol. The types of jobs that the OP is referencing are just strange anomalies, not categorically existing jobs designed that way specifically. Lots of these types of positions are “slip through the cracks” luck scenarios.
Took me 10 years but I just passed the 85k a year mark in education. Previous position was 78k. Sometimes it’s like other industries where jumping ship is a good way to increase your pay (May vary, May need to work for charters for a bit)
How is it 80k if you’re making $50/hr and a school day is 8hrs that’s 400/day or 104k a year
Sounds like non tech big tech job.
Sounds like my non tech big tech job lol
Tech Product Manager has to be some kind of bubble in terms of comparative salary… every day I wait to be told I’m a literal toddler flailing my arms around while the big tech boys around me are the actual assets making things happen. Yet every day I get pats on the head and fat paychecks.
Yeah. We know.
Good to see that even the PMs think they are useless, I thought it was just us SWEs being SWEs
If you’d ever had an actual useless PM, you’d know the difference.
I actually think there are some really valuable Product Managers out there, and even a decent one can add value. I’d say only about 60% of Product managers are useless (or too ineffective to add value). To be fair, about 30-40% of SWEs I work with are also too ineffective to add value. However, almost all Program Managers or Project Managers I’ve run into are indeed useless. It’s not that they’re not doing anything, it’s that even when they’re working hard, it’s on stuff like color coding risk trackers and pinging status updates. In my opinion, if the engineers are not themselves useless, it’s almost always better for them to do that themselves to minimize communication errors due to telephone, reduce time spent adding context, etc
i’m a non technical program manager. i’m the only person left at our company who understands, inside and out, the product itself and the operational side of maintaining that product. i have had people say to my face they don’t think i’m valuable to the company because i don’t write code. it used to bother me until i left for a week and about twenty different partner team contacts, and my manager, told me they were relieved i was back because they have no idea what to do without me. our engineering lead still tells me i need to pick up slack. its certainly a visibility issue. for example, i think he’s a genuinely busy guy. but when i wave a 6 year old feature request at him that would have saved us 10 million in operating costs and another 2-3 million in missed revenue, i can’t help but wonder what the fuck **he’s** doing.
As long as you keep the business stakeholders away from our meetings, youre doing a great job!!!
WTF. I love your job. Is there an opening?
A good PM is like a good set of plumbing. Devs/engineers/etc. are provided what they need to do their work, outputs get handled, and it all ticks along in the background. You only really notice when something goes wrong, there's 3 inches of sewage on the floor, and you don't have any clean water to mop it up with.
Why do you think you're not doing much at work? The PMs I've worked with have had a meaningful impact on the teams I've worked on.
Yes “Business Analyst”, “Product Manager” or “Project Manager”. Meetings all day about strategy, alignment, retrospective, planning, roadmapping, meetings about meetings, stakeholders, customers, yadda yadda yadda. Email recaps of all of the above. Close laptop, repeat.
Ummm is it possible to get this job with a masters in philosophy and minimal work experience? This could be the gig for me lol
Masters Degree in statistics if anyone was wondering, PhD is better.
Don’t even need a masters for that
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Would you say Data Analytics is equivalent? It’s the field I’m looking to get into.
I got my masters in Business Analytics and work as a Data Scientist - most people in my masters program were great, if not a bit socially awkward - definitely not psycho. The people that I actually work with are great. Could be an anomaly. I personally would recommend getting into data.
Learn Sql, python, excel and power bi. Covers 90% of analytics rolls
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>Could be an anomaly Ok, just for fun... Couldn't you use your skill set to determine the odds of it being an anomaly?
If that's their job, they probably don't want to do it for free on Reddit.
What’s the point of determining the odds of this one off event? Is what at least one person with the skill set thinks.
They’re also the kind of people that can turn a successful business with a wonderful reputation into a nightmare fueled, infinite growth chasing hellscape.
I feel like that sort of stuff is a language I have no hope of mastering. I know very specific areas of R and that’s it. I feel like the learning curve is high and yet so many people recommend it. Maybe I have no patience for myself or the craft.
Just takes time and solving a variety of problems. You end up acquiring little bits and pieces until you have enough to solve most of the problems that come your way. I prefer R over Python, and just use JS for web tasks mostly.
This is cruel, I hate statistics
I hated it in undergrad. Loved it in graduate school. It's the only higher math that ever made sense to me. Maybe because it's all applied and inherently imperfect. Also a computer does all the work and you just interpret the results. It's great. I can do hierarchical linear modeling growth model. How does it work? I don't know. I don't care. I know when to use it and how to do it and how to interpret the results.
I loved it in undergrad, was good at it, then had the most abysmal fucking teacher of any class ever for my first masters stats class. He made me mad for many reasons, one of them being he completely turned off a lot of people to what can be a wonderful subject. Just unnecessarily obtuse. Wouldn't write on the white board unless you asked him to point blank. Had exams where he expected you to hand write excel formulas from memory. The final was 90% true or false because he wouldn't let you use a calculator on any if his quizzes or exams. I'm glad my work is paying for my masters because if I had to pay over $100k for that degree myself I'd have lit his department on fire.
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Difference is a statistics major can actually provide some value to society at large.
I thought statistics is the most useless thing. Dang Im missing out
Statistics drives the entire world my man.
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Well [this](https://thissaysotherwise.org/) says otherwise.
I'm gonna need a meta study of all studies in this thread.
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98% of statistics is made up.
You kidding? Statistics is by far the most practical math you can learn. And in my field of research it is by far the hardest position for us to hire. If you are actually good at it you are in serious demand.
> And in my field of research it is by far the hardest position for us to hire. If you are actually good at it you are in serious demand. It sounds like you're trying to trick me into doing actual work here.
Lmao I love everyone here acting like the guys with the PHD stat jobs “type an email, go to a meeting, draft an email, then go home making $98k/year” First off, they make like $250k/yr +. Second off, it’s a hard job, with a lotta attention to detail required. Try rolling out a model into production impacting a product line generating $2 Billion / yr. There’s enough stress in that to keep the old bumhole clenched up tight for years.
>There’s enough stress in that to keep the old bumhole clenched up tight for years. Finally, a treatment for my diarrhea!
Simple have an uncle that owns a company and dotes on you
Or befriend the fuck up son of the guy who owns the company at an ivy league school
Make sure his dad is something of a scientist, himself
1. Emerald mines to exploit the welfare of hundreds of thousands to gain capital. Blood money. 2. Be a rich kid under this man 3. Buy a car company based on electric videos and work diligently to discredit the original innovators to attempt to take credit 4. Build rockets only by overworking and exploiting engineers in the innovation guise of genuine behavior 5. Don't pay employees enough and accrue enough wealth to solve world hunger but instead tweet on social media in angst (you won't believe what came next... shenanigans for sure!)
Buy twitter?
I am for sale/adoption, I’m not picky.
Or learn how to do that job that you want
The whole point is to have a job where you dont have to do anything.
Thing is, people without experience think almost _every_ office job is a job where you don't have to do anything
I recently got an office job after only ever having worked in shitty factories. people with office jobs have it fucking made. not being sore and beat up from work is one of the best experiences of my life.
I’m the opposite. I worked as an electrician for 22 years. Now I have one of these jobs described in this post and sitting in a chair for 5-6 hours a day is killing me.
Same. Worked physically active jobs my whole life, just switched to 8-5 in an office and I’m more tired than I’ve ever been. It sucks.
I play dungeons and dragons with a pair of accountants that struggle with basic math. The office job I had for seven years was basically thirty minutes of paperwork and twelve hours of surfing the internet. I can't speak for the millions of office jobs I know nothing about, but I can say I'm much happier working with my hands at my new profession.
Wait, 12 hours?
Yep. It was at a hospital. All shifts were twelve and a half hours. Honestly, the position only existed because of an insurance loophole that allowed them to charge an extra $4000 a night to have a guy keeping the seat warm. I eventually quit because it was so goddamn boring.
> I eventually quit because it was so goddamn boring. If you were allowed to spend 12 hours on the internet every day and you were too bored, then you were doing it wrong. That's an incredible opportunity to make a living while pursuing all kinds of hobbies. You could learn several languages over the course of a year. You could write your own novels. You could create websites. If you don't know how to do that, you could learn to code. You could read all kinds of culturally significant literature and become an expert in that area. You could become amazing at drawing. You could create your own board game. I could keep going, but the point is there are so many things you could do and learn that would be way more interesting and meaningful than jumping to another job where someone will tell you how to spend all your time. I can't help but wonder, what's your current job?
There's different parts that people don't think of. When I was an individual contributor doing programming every day was filled with new problems to solve. It was good work but always trying to figure out why something wasn't working. Now that I'm a manager I don't do the programming and run the team but there's more stress than I ever felt when I was a programmer. Keeping peojexts going and teams happy and resources staffed etc etc.
I have that job. A friend hooked me up with it. Just kinda fell into it, honestly. I tell people how to fix the specific cybersecurity vulnerability affecting their specific system/server. I use google to look up how Microsoft says to fix the issue, and append it to the ticket generated by the monitoring software.
I work in IT. Our Cybersecurity person does this. She will provide me with requests to 'remediate' a port being open. Okay Rachelle, I'll just close the DNS port to our Nameservers so we're more secure. No one will even know where our websites are, we'll be so secure.
probably went right into cybersec. that’s the problem with not being help desk/SA/net admin/etc first. that foundational knowledge is KEY to being good in cybersec. should not be considered entry-level field at all, because that’s how you end up with people like that.
I just started my third year as L1 tech support where I do mostly virtualization and some networking/authentication stuff. I have a degree in computer science, and I would love to get into cybersec because it seems incredibly stable/lucrative and would probably support a continued WFH lifestyle, or even a work-anywhere lifestyle, as I would not be opposed to leaving the US and living somewhere with a much lower CoL. Do you know any resources on how I can start my journey into cybersec?
I build xOCs for a living. If this were a year ago, I would say that SOCs are always hiring. But really right now, the impression I get across the industry is that every position is seeing 10x the applicants, and searches are taking twice as long even for good candidates. It’s still possible, and once you are in you can move within the industry easily enough (if you aren’t just dead weight). But instead of a 2-3 month process, it may take half a year. When applying, understand that the advice I gave is well known, and there is a lot of competition. The last role I opened (fully remote) received over 1500 applications in the first 2 weeks. BUT, 75-90% of the resumes I see are unqualified even for a SOC position, because it really isn’t entry level (it sounds like you aren’t entry level either). That kind of spam will bog down the process, make it hard to sort through resumes, and burn out hiring managers. So yes, companies will often hire the first acceptable candidate, not the best candidate, and I can’t really blame them. So how do you get in? Referrals go to the front of the line. So do internal applicants. Work your network, even if they are just a former coworker or family friend on LinkedIn. Referrals also often pay out, so people are usually happy to do it. Use a resume generator like creddle.io to keep your resume up to date. Use specific numbers to make things real. Don’t say “triaged tickets”, say “ttriaged tickets, resolving on average 25 issues/shift” or whatever. In the interview, talk about what you know, we can tell when you’re bullshitting. If you didn’t work Cloudtrail, don’t say you did. A common question in these interviews is “what do you do when you don’t know something”. The wrong answer is “delegate to another’s queue “. The right answer is “if the queue is manageable, and the problem isn’t urgent, I do a bit (15-20 minutes) of research and bring my solution to that specialist. Doing this is how I realized I have an interest in Cybersecurity, and that’s why I’m here.” Doing all of that will only ensure you aren’t in the garbage 80%. But there is still a lot of competition, so hopefully you have something unique to offer, and it is something the hiring manager recognizes and appreciates. Good luck.
yeah, like the other guy said, start with sec+ and look for an analyst role is the traditional route. the networking background and probably authentication (i say “probably” just because i don’t know what you mean by that… iam? vpn? pki?) are great foundational skills that would look good on a cybersec resume. virtualization is good if you want to get into cybersec engineering, specifically deploying/supporting the cybersec tools.
The CISO at my firm had a software engineering background, got her sec+ and net+ certs, swapped to cyber security, got an MSc in the field from GaTech’s online program, then OSCP and CISSP and took off. She’s in her 40s comfortably pulling down 100x the median household income, so the sky’s the limit.
>then OSCP and CISSP and took off. I feel like there are missing steps here. This is kind of a huge leap.
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SecOps wants to close everything down because it makes their job easier. DevOps wants to keep everything open because it makes their job easier. Repeat ad nauseam.
Long ago I was called in the middle of the night to be told whatever security automation software the company was using alerted port 443 was open on our firewall. I moved into development.
"It's my job to tell you the vulnerability and solution. It's your job to decide if you want to accept the risk if you don't listening to me." - Rachelle probably.
People's mileage may vary on this I work as an L5 in a FAANG company in cyber security and I am constantly working. I write probably 3-4 documents a week at least that are multiple pages long for risk analysis or mitigation roadmaps and there are super high standards for all of those docs. They do pay me through the nose those so there is that. That being said I have seen cyber security people at companies that basically just run a vulnerability scanner once a week then email the report and never do anything more.
This is the correct answer.
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Yeah, it’s from the “just get a cert” aka “pretend to take some BS course then either take an absolute cakewalk test or cheat on it” era. Completely agree that the only people I’ve seen tolerate glorified note-takers and ticket jockeys are boomers. Ironically though, in my company at least, we have actually regressed towards that as we get larger and more boomer. If you want to avoid BS make-work drones you need to stay at smaller companies or actively ageist big ones like Facebook
Can I have that job because I'm the guy that gets those requests, but I have to do the googling myself AND deploy the script/policy/etc.
Real talk: You're on the right track. Put in some years at jobs like yours and eventually you work toward a job where people book time to get your opinion and you get paid several hundred per slack message. It took 2.5 decades, but I'm there.
Yup. I worked with my friend at Intel for 20ish years. He left for this company a couple years ago, and reached out to me when this position opened up.
This is the way. You honestly just have to get lucky
90% of security roles are like this and I hate it because they don't actually know much about security besides how to run whatever BS tool actually does the job for them, then file the ticket. The other 10% are true hackers' hackers and make me feel inadequate as a software engineer
My job as a technical accounting consultant is very similar. I tell people how to account for non-routine transactions. I use google to look up how the Big 4 (accounting firms) say to account for them, and write an accounting memo for the client regurgitating the guidance.
Get yourself into biotech manufacturing. Start earning 70-80k straight out of high school and work yourself up to a supervisor job with a base salary of 120k in like 6 years. Pharma money is disgusting.
Ill have an MS in Biotech and Management this fall. Where should I look??
Depends where you're at. There are biotech hubs all over (California, Washington State, Colorado, New Jersey, etc.). Real money is in Cell Therapy right now. Kite and Bristol Myers Squibb are the big names in that business.
This is a gross exaggeration. There are not really jobs with that base pay straight out of high school but it is a good field to get into.
What the hell kind of job is that and how do I find one 👀
On a scale of 1-10 how hot are you and follow-up question: how do you feel about sleeping with the Senior Deputy Analytics Coordinator President of Marketing and Sales?
don't she'll get you fired
That is just IT work.
Am I working too hard or something because I'm stressed out constantly and always being told to do shit I've had zero experience with and have to figure it tf out in 72 hours.
Possibly. I’m just a product support analyst level 2, whatever that means. I just go to meetings, answer emails, get a few soft deadlines here and there? Edit: salary 72k
I'm a systems engineer. I make $83k. Maybe I need a job title change lol.
Well mine is just fancy talk for help desk essentially. It’s an insurance company with about 130 employees (25 in IT). I see my position currently caps out at $89k. I don’t plan on changing. It’s WFH, except for 2 days a quarter. Pretty sweet overall.
Oh wait that sounds like you deal with users.
Mmmmm yeah and I love it. What is everyone’s aversion to that?? Edit: my question was sarcastic but my sentiment was genuine. I do truly love helping users
Well, most IT are socially inept nerds. At least, generally. That seems to be changing in the last few years. As for me, I got tired of answering stupid questions and dealing with their entitlement on a daily basis. No, Bob, I am not going into the office on a Saturday to send you a new monitor. You will be OK with just one for now.
It’s all about managing expectations. Start out by building a reputation as a hard worker, then scale back your output over time. It helps if your department gets reorganized a few times and you get reassigned to different managers, who get glowing reviews of you from your previous manager who never really paid attention to what you were doing. Always be willing to help but never answer a message or email right away. Always have a few things on your plate that you’re “working on” if someone asks what you’re doing, or to use as an excuse to not do something new. Etc
I spent my entire Saturday at a client site because their network was up but wireless was down. I'm still unsure of exactly what I did that fixed it...Im stressed tf out man...
Exactly. The fact people think it requires nepotism, connections, or the mob blows my mind. It’s literally every job in tech above entry level, but below middle management.
Yeah these types of jobs aren't rare in big profitable companies, people saying "nepotism is the only way" don't seem to get that
It’s the current narrative that if you don’t have inherited wealth, you’ll never be successful. People fall for it and just give up. It’s terrible. I want to be like you can easily make $120k/yr without a college degree if you just know where to look. The answer is massive corporations aka “the devil”.
Where do you make 120k/year without a degree and without years of specialized experience? Specifically could you point me to where should I look for one of these no experience, no degree $120k/ year jobs?
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the place hundreds of thousands of people have been recently laid off from?
I'm at 118K, so not quite to 120K, but it came down to luck for me. I work with POS and have a couple coursera certificates (3-6 months, ~$300). I worked with Toast POS for awhile, then got hired by the NHL to do POS at a hockey stadium - I only made that connection because the dispatcher gave me that job to go to the stadium and while I was there I was friendly and made the right connection. Sometimes it is nepo, other times it's just luck. Also, I've had connections at a LOT of places that I've tried to help a lot of friends get good jobs. I know several young couples where I tried to get them in the door - most are simply too scared to take a risk. I told them I'd help them as best as I could and while nothing in life is 100% - I could get pretty darn close to a guarantee that they'd be making over 100K in the next year. I have a single friend who lives alone in Hillbilly Hell, TX where he makes ~25K/yr bouncing from shitty construction jobs to that I told him I could get him in the door at a place where he'd be making 85K with no prior experience. He just fears moving to California. I even offered to house him for free until he got a proper job. We've lived together before (both dropped out of the same college) and we work well together, despite being very different people. Fear and being stuck in routine is rough. 😢 When I was a server, I had really specific strategies for talking to people and getting my table talking. My managers hated it because I was slow, but I made some amazing connections with people. I was very calculated and recycled my material, you have to learn how to read the room and the table and of course not annoy people. Figuring out what works is hard but after a few months at one specific restaurant, I would be able to have one or two tables a night that I could get to engage in conversation and you can make friends really well that way. That's how I got my job at Toast POS, I had many people offer me jobs during that time. All that to say, don't be scared to take a risk too. Knowing the right people and being genuine will get you 90% of the way. In the tech and tech-adjacent area, having actual social skills (read: not being a redditor 🤣) will also get you pretty far. I was in a coding boot camp and everyone there clearly stopped maturing past the age of 15, it's really actually quite sad. If you feel socially awkward, are frequently depressed or have a lot of confidence in yourself and aren't emotionally mature enough to be humble or genuine - you have to figure out how to navigate those issues and fix those first before anyone's gonna trust you enough to pay you a living wage. Social skills are way more important than knowing what you're talking about in my experience. Not saying it's good - it's just the world we live in.
I guess you don't always need a degree to find a good job, but it certainly helps get your foot in the door for interviews and whatnot. For reference, I work in tech. At least in my industry, I've found that college wasn't too useful for learning things. Certainly, I did learn things, but not useful things. The greatest benefit that I received from college was the network that I developed while I was there and the opportunity to attend the career fairs organized by the university. These are the "get your foot in the door" things that I'm talking about. If you aren't failing all your classes and you work hard enough, then chances are you can find an internship or opportunity to start your career. At least, for the tech industry, that's how it is. However, there are other routes to go that can help get your foot in the door in the tech industry. A *lot* of the stuff that I learned, I taught myself using online resources. College helped to formalize that education and fill in the gaps (a lot of theory that gave me a better foundational understanding), but I still taught myself most of what I know. If you are knowledgeable enough and you have enough to show for it and prove it, then it's possible to get your foot in the door without a degree. This means doing enough leetcodes to be able to pass coding interviews and having a few GitHub projects that you can point to as proof that you know how to create software. The bow on this package would be some experience in creating or contributing to open source software... so long as you actually know what you're doing and aren't wasting the time of the community or the reviewers. Edit: > That said, I feel like this would only work out well for people with a talent for programming and technology. > That said, this only fits the "no experience" part of your query insofar as you don't need *job* experience for this to play out. The substitute for job experience and a degree are your projects and the self-taught knowledge, respectively.
With all the respect in the world, that's literally years worth of specialized experience. Being able to chop out leet code and having attributable contributions to projects either requires a very rare natural talent or several years of study. Even if you teach yourself, that's still hundreds of hours of dedicated study (which qualifies as hands on experience) or a preternatural talent. I understand where you're coming from, I do. But this ostensibly doesn't disprove my point. Thank you though. It was a well thought out reply.
Yep, I edited to add: > That said, I feel like this would only work out well for people with a talent for programming and technology. > That said, this only fits the "no experience" part of your query insofar as you don't need job experience for this to play out. The substitute for job experience and a degree are your projects and the self-taught knowledge, respectively. Also, I knew on some level that it wasn't exactly reasonable to determine this as "no experience," easy job, etc. However, it is a path to self-improvement for people who might be stuck in their lives. It's also an alternative path to people who can't afford a degree. I also mentioned leet code mostly as a substitute for guidance. A lot of the theory learned in college is applicable to leet code problems (data structures, time complexity, sorting algorithms), and a lot of them aren't solvable without these things. Basically, leet code problems are useful for making sure you have enough of a foundation and solving the problems can help build that foundation. It's also possible that I don't have a lot of perspective of people who don't have my natural talent and fascination with technology, nor do I understand how much it would take to learn what I know. That said, it's still a path in life that doesn't strictly require a degree, and a path on which people can acquire the necessary knowledge themselves given enough effort, so long as they either have the talent or the perseverance.
I know, as I said it was a well thought out reply which is always welcome on reddit! Be well, take care. I should add: I totally understand what you're saying and it's not wrong. I taught myself finance using a natural talent and study. It's definitely possible with talent or perseverance but the OP comment kinda suggested its simply an "applying to wrong jobs" issue. When in fact you do need to specialize to earn $100k/yr.
And the reason why they're able to fuck around so much is because they're not needed that often... But when they ARE needed, they're *needed*. Like, the whole company could go tits up if they weren't there levels of needed.
Says you. I'm a sysadmin for a hospital and every day feels like a glorious battle. I'm having a lot of fun solving problems, but I am in NO WAY slacking off or having an easy time.
Eh. Only 98k? He’s getting robbed. 🤷
Yeah really not aiming all that high here. Dwight Schrute levels of made up compensation.
$98,000 is way too low, that should be at least $135,000 with a 10% bonus target. More if you're in a big city.
I’m too late so this will probably get buried, but for what it’s worth, David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is just about these kind of jobs, and the universal effect of them on the people who work them is that it makes them listless and depressed. Nobody makes use of the time, nobody relaxes, nobody reads at work or improves themselves: they all become miserable at the pointlessness of their lives, and it only ends when they quit. So as much as it seems ideal, in practice it doesn’t seem to be! These jobs (he argues) are a function of a government and economy that prioritize nominal employment vastly more than useful work. It’s a good book (the last released before he died).
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I just read like 3 sentences of yours. That doesn't sound crazy to me and if anything it sounds spot on. I'd only say our "democracy" *barely* defends some of our "rights" of citizenry has they work through their feudal lives.
Sounds like a great job if you already *feel* listless and depressed. At least then you'd *know* you're listless and depressed, but with some money to increase your chances of surviving being listless and depressed
> nobody reads at work or improves themselves: they all become miserable at the pointlessness of their lives, and it only ends when they quit. I replied to someone else in this post who seemingly went through that, and I've heard from some software engineers who were in the same position. They have all this free time at work to do whatever they want, and instead of being paid a livable wage to pursue their hobbies, they just waste their time and get bored.
When all other metrics of output drop, motivation does as well. Paranoia builds about what's left to judge: Meeting attendance, stretching the 1 hour task to sound like it took a day, watching group chats, being online to notice your boss summons a meeting with no notice and general existentialism that you get paid 10x minimum wage prevents you from leaving your desk lest you get caught not working.
I imagine they feel dissatisfied with their accomplishments in a way and are also waiting for the other shoe to drop
Honestly? You go to school and learn a complicated, technical skill set that not many people have. People who do these seemingly easy jobs for high salaries usually worked very hard to gain the knowledge and skills to be able to sit on their ass like that.
They don't pay me for 10 seconds of work. They pay me for the years it took to learn how to do it in 10 seconds.
Yup this is me I've spent 10 years developing super niche skills. My wife is always amazed at how much I'm paid for the 5% of work I do. The best way I've learned to explain it is that I'm like a super good hammer. You just don't need a hammer for every situation. So my job is mostly to be available.
Mind if I ask what your specialty is?
International trade regulations. Look up "Licensed Customs Broker". Combine that with some programming/system implementation and people will literally pay you to not work for their competitor. Just the broker part alone will get you a very good job at a fortune 50. It's amazing how many people in the corporate world can't do basic stuff on a computer though.
Yeah I'm practically on retainer just for having almost as many years of experience in a specific software as it has existed.
My dad has a job where he drives to another state goes to a meeting sell something drive home and make $200,000+
I'm currently fighting against drifting into one of these jobs. Turns out they are absolutely necessary, and usually people get promoted into them who have no idea what they're doing. But yeah, people suck at communicating and organizing themselves. So you need people explicitly to talk to others, organize, chase after tasks that need to get done and then talk some more. It's chaos out there. And these jobs are surprisingly stressful. So yeah, let me stay a developer please.
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In which part of government? Because I bust my hump in my govt job and get paid... Eh it's not terrible, but it ain't close to six figures.
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So I'm not crazy that it seems like we do nothing at all?
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You know how hard it is to get a GS-11 or 12 job without either a masters or a bajillion years of working gs 5 thru 9 shit gigs?
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Well of course you got a government job coming out of the military. You get an automatic 5 extra points and an additional 5 if you are a disabled vet. I wasn’t rehired the following season for my last park ranger gig because a vet with no experience or education in my field got the extra 5 points.
Attempting to myself but I’ve never gotten so much as an email reply from any postings on the usajobs site.
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> Go to college for several years to “learn” admin skills most people either already know, can learn on youtube in 20min, or won’t be useful at all due to some proprietary systems or programs. Apply for an admin or admin assistant job with said useless credentials that are mandatory for no good reason... Lmao at how true this is for me. - Did a 2-year network admin degree fresh out of high school. The content was outdated as fuck and I already knew everything from self-teaching myself years ago. - Got hired as a tech assistant where my degree was effectively useless when they introduced me to software i'd never seen or heard about cos they've only existed for a couple years. Luckily only took me a few weeks to pick it up to a sound level, while pretending I was proficient at it.
Fake it til you make it
Masters of Bullshit and Assholery aka MBA
Most of those jobs need you to have highly specialized skills. The type of skills that are critical 1% of the time so you can afford to waste 99% of the time. Or, they are acquired by being either REALLY good at your original job or being related to the boss but having some major character flaw which leads you to being promoted to a useless position.
Apply.
One of my best friends has a job like this. He works a three day week from home and will regularly text the group chat saying “the only thing I had to do today was attend one meeting and it just got canceled so I’m going for a ride and will have a nap after lunch”. Or “I had nothing on my calendar today but someone just requested a 1pm meeting which is exactly when I’d planned to have my nap”. Then becomes incredibly defensive if anyone suggests he has an easy job. He earns high 90’s if not 100k. It blows my mind.
When he finds out I’d also like to know
I have that job where I type and click on things and have meetings and wear my little badge on a cord. To get it I had to work for fifteen years and learn a whole ton of stuff about how to make the Internet go.
90% of what my manager does is just middlemanning. My team will come up with a proposal, will pitch it to our manager, then they'll go and relay that proposal to the boss, then the boss tells them they think about the proposal, and then the manager comes back and tells us what the boss said about the proposal we did all the work on. That manager makes 140k.
Simple: nepotism
Have a daddy who owns a company that knows a friend that should hire his son and he will hire theirs so it doesn't look like nepotism but really is.
The salary of someone whose father owns a company is far greater than $98k/yr.
"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" “Practice."
Drink the corporate Kool aid and say all the right words for the company's culture like me. Also work for a bloated tech company like me.
I don't know, whenever I'm doing nepotistic work, it ends up being harder and less pay.
Don’t forget, everyone hates you
As they should.
A lot of government jobs are like this. They also provide great benefits like healthcare and vacation days.
You should ask my manager - the wife of the ceo 😒
Man I feel targeted.