There is a common belief that you have to be a stressed-out workaholic in order to make a decent living. But that's not always the case.
Two weeks ago, Reddit user u/rabahi made a post, asking: "What's a low-effort job with a surprisingly high salary?" And it has caught people's attention.
As of this article, the post has 16K upvotes and 6K comments, many of which have seriously caused people to consider changing their career path. Here are some of them.
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I once had a job at a dog kennel and my job was to sleep In a bedroom with a dog or two, provided a comfy bed & Netflix/wifi. I was getting paid $30/hr to basically cuddle with dogs.
I worked as a massage “model” at a massage school. My job was to lay there and be massaged for a few hours while the students did their lessons or took their exams. It was £30 an hour which isn’t loads, but better than the £10 an hour office job I had before.
In college I had to catalogue and convert old radio shows. I was literally paid to listen to old comedy shows. The actual 'work' was loading the reels and pressing a button.
Neat side effect is Looney Toons cartoons make more sense, I am getting more of the jokes, turns out they were just meme fests for their time.
I am most likely the only person under about 60 who has heard the entire run of "Fibber Mcgee and Molly’.
My next-door neighbor works in a power station. His job is to sit in front of a monitor and make sure everything is working well. If something goes wrong, he calls the appropriate workstation and they fix the problem. Because an alarm sounds if something is out of sync (which rarely happens) he is able to play games or read a book 99% of the time. He is on $150 per hour to basically play games and chill at work.
Keeping in mind though that should they fail at their one task, tens of thousands of people would be impacted in a bad way ;)
I work at a heliport where I just get a couple of passengers' bags, put them on the heli, and then go and sit on my phone for however many hours until the heli gets back. Rinse and repeat. Roughly $70k
Tour guiding.
I’m a water tour guide in Hawaii. I make 4 times what the average person my age makes. Half the time I’m chilling in the water or on the boat, the other half I’m a lifeguard, information dude, and boat flight attendant lol
Thank you, tourists!!
I.T. Manager at a university. The techs know their jobs, their users, and manage their own schedules and workloads among themselves. Managers basically just have to rubber-stamp timecards, confirm parts orders, and make sure the techs don't all take vacations at the same time.
This is what I love about IT... if you don't have garbage managers, being good at IT means having very little real work (because you build and maintain things in a way that gives you stability; you still need people for when the poop hits the fan)
Vanna White's job on Wheel of Fortune. She gets paid $4 million a year walking back and forth in an area of 20 feet.
If you can create the right software as a service business, it's basically free money. I licensed out a software I wrote to 2 large franchises and basically get paid $15K a month to stay home and ensure it's running 24/7
But how long did it take you to write said software during which time you would be on zero income. And being on call 24/7 and by the sound of it the only person who can deal with it means that you aren't going to be going on holiday, at least not without taking all your gear with you.
I do admin work for the Government. My pay is 55K. At best I get 5 emails a day with about 2 that actually concerns me. No B.S; my phone has rung about 20 times since June 1st. On a super busy day, I have about 45 mins worth of work to do.
THEY did not create the job with these conditions. Why should they be ashamed of accepting a job that was offered to them?
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I must work for the wrong branch of the government then. Since covid hit 70-80 hour work weeks are the norm.
I would be too ashamed to waste taxpayer money like that. I would at least ask for more responsibilities and find some useful way to spend my time/help my department/colleagues. Ethics, anyone?
There’s no ethics in not having enough money to enjoy your life and knowing that the government is going to be inefficient even if you tell yourself you’re being honorable.
Load More Replies... I work full time on a tiny fraction above minimum wage (about 17k a year) I work my a**e off in a very physical retail job, yet can’t afford to pay my bills and I’m the assistant manager. There’s no room for progression and I can’t earn any more in this job. The above post kind of triggers me. Just to add, I’m also studying to better my situation.
I was in a similar position a few years back. About the same pay too. Government job that had a big IT team, but a single department had a lot of time sensitive things that the main IT contract didn't cover. So they hired me OBSL exclusively to handle that department's tickets. I did maybe 2 tickets a week, that generally took less than 30 minutes to complete, and the rest of the time was just fielding questions and unofficially consulting for the department's IT concerns.
As a former state financial regulator, I can assure you not all government jobs are this easy.
And depending on where you live, 55K is decent or could still be considered low.
In a small town in the midwest, $55K is good money, but in NYC or LA, it isn't even a living wage. Even in the "flyover zone", you wouldn't be living like a king in most bigger cities.
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I have worked in government (as a contractor) and can confirm jobs like this exist. There are a few people who work long hours and really care, but the vast majority do <2 hours of actual work a day. One lady I worked near just read e-books all day. Pension, health benefits etc.. The wasted money in government is absolutely obscene. They'd pay people really well to do nothing, but if you ever needed to genuinely expense something it often wasn't worth the admin.
Back in the early '70s, I knew a guy who "worked" for the government. He never did any actual work, just sat in an office and watched TV all day. His "job" was essentially to collect a paycheck so his bosses could avoid a budget cut.
Where I worked in the BC government — climate change — most of us worked overtime, even on the weekends. We very rarely claimed overtime. We did it because we cared. I can’t stand it when people say government workers are lazy, but I guess some are. That said, if I had a job where I had too little to do, I’d go crazy. I’d definitely ask for more work. Boring jobs are torture.
He did say government employee...our tax dollars hard(ly) at work...
I worked in an admin government position and was so overworked that I routinely worked unpaid hours. Dozens of my colleagues were in the same position.
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Why don't Civil Servants look out the window in the morning? Because they would have nothing left to do in the afternoon! I'm one & work my bum off - but it's still funny!
The problem with jobs like this is usually you have to at least LOOK like you are busy, which is mind numbingly tedious and boring if you really have nothing to do. Refolding the same shirts over and over in a mostly empty retail store. Pinching yourself to stay awake at a meeting where they don't really need you but someone from your department is supposed to show up. I would much rather actually be busy; time goes much faster.
That means that they have an excess of workers, and are expending 6 times more public money than needed
I'd rather pay some guy to make paper clip chains for eight hours a day than pay for never-ending wars. It's a funny thing. Politicians whine and cry that we can't afford to take care of our poor, sick and elderly, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure or fund scientific and medical research, etc., but it seems like they never have a problem finding trillions of dollars to bomb the s**t out of somebody.
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I call BS! I'm in public employee in Canada. But Governments worldwide have been cutting jobs, benefits and wages. Staff are being forced to do more and more with less and less. Look at any public sector job and the number of support staff (ie, unionized) per manager has inverted. Too much work and they refuse to hire enough people to do it.
Sounds like you are redundant and your role needs to be reduced to PT or removed all together.
And now we know why it takes so long for anything regarding tk government to happen. Yikes
You have a very poor understanding of national budgets.
Load More Replies...When I was backpacking I signed up to a temp agency in Sydney who would hire “well presented” front my of house staff for corporate firms who liked to have a pretty, young, well-dressed thing manning the reception desk whilst their clients came. I often got paid $30-40 an hour to welcome clients, show them to their meeting room, pour some water and order their catering. And that’s all I did. In fancy beautiful offices overlooking Sydney harbour bridge etc. Once their regular receptionist got back from leave I’d be popped onto the next one. I did a stint at Sydney University at one of their newly built research centres, all I did was direct people to the lifts and the right part of the building for their meeting. I made enough money doing this to backpack through the entire East Coast of Australia over 3 months.
Trash truck drivers, it's a fairly simple job with a higher salary than being a teacher
I had a job like this. I got paid $28 an hour working as an administrative assistant in a high school. It takes like 15 minutes to input grades and send truancy letters. Answering phone calls always resort to just transferring them to the Principal or school nurse. Literally, nothing to do. I left the job because there's no work in the summer (school is closed) and honestly, the environment was toxic. When you have that much free time at work, people want to start talking about their personal lives and I don't like to talk about mine to my toxic co workers. So I left. This job was the definition of money doesn't buy happiness.
Business Intelligence/ Data analyst. Do you know how to use excel, can you write basically SQL, are you able to express yourself clearly and deal with getting variations of the same 10 questions for the rest of your career? Congrats welcome to making 100k.
This is my job, but I make half as much. Still for the level of work it really ain't bad.
Radiological control technician. 85k base 100k if you work 1 weekend a month and plenty earn 150k+.
I'm making $45 an hour right now browsing reddit and all I have for work today is 1 hour of tours. That's my work load. Doesn't really change
International Pilot! I make $200k a year as a widebody first officer. None of the decisions fall to me, I fly one leg to Europe (I get a couple hour nap on each leg), I get 24-48 hours in a cool city, then I fly 1 leg home (couple hour nap again on the way home). When I'm home there is nothing I could conceivably do for work so I just get to enjoy my many many days off. Don't get me wrong the training was intense, but man, my job now is stupid easy.
Until things go wrong and then you need to be awesome or hundreds can die. Air Crash Investigation last night was Air France flight 447, incompetent copilot who didn't have a clue what he was doing, stalled an Airbus A330 and belly-flopped into the ocean
As a closed captioner broadcaster for the News, I work from home. I set my own hours and earn anything from $50 to $70 per hour, depending on the assignment. It takes a lot of money to get started, but the payoff is well worth it.
Depends on where you live, but in my neck of the woods, firefighters get paid six figures and spend most of their time chilling. Of course, when you're called to work, you really got to work, and you don't get to just leave work to go home when your shift is over when [hell] goes down.
Mobile notary that does home signings. They can line up 4-7 appointments in a day and make $200-300 per. One of the absolute best weekend gigs. In some markets you can pay your rent by working one extra Saturday a month.
I'm a notary (can do online/electronic also) and the most my state permits me to charge is $20 to officiate a wedding. Not profitable in all places. 4-7 appointments in one day would at most net me $35.
Call Center management. Not even something high up like operations or quality assurance, even being middle management can be lucrative. I've worked a few call center jobs, the people on the bottom absolutely get overworked, stressed out... but once you get to management it's easy.
Last call center job I worked, I got promoted to management just due to how long I had been there. After the promotion, I was paid 50K per year to sit at home, listen to people do their job, fill out paperwork and have the occasional web meeting. I spent more time playing video games and working out than anything else while on the clock.
The funniest part to me is that when I gave my notice, they tried to offer me a promotion to stay because I was such a hard worker. I was super tempted to laugh and tell them how little work I actually did in a day.
Made $55 an hour supporting an American system... during grave-yard hours.
I was, literally, the only person in one of 3 huge buildings. All dark except for my lowly office.
For the first few nights, security would come around to see why the light were on all night...
I received no calls nor emails, ever, at any time. This lasted for 4-5 months. I slept most of the time, and, of course, got myself banned from sub-Reddits.
In our country: A forklift driver.
Usually gets as much money as a person in middle management.
Isn't that with all people who have really learned a skill? There are many people out there who have trained for a pencil biting, paper pushing, white collar job. You'll have a much harder time finding a forklift driver, a welder, a carpenter, a plumber or a roofer.
My current job. Project Manager for US Based Fortune 200 Company, permanent work from home, make six figures, and I do maybe 4 hours of actual work each week. I have my home office set up where I have 2 gaming monitors connected to my gaming laptop sitting on my desk directly in front of me. Then I have my work laptop sitting to one side that's got the volume turned up so I hear if I get an email or message. When I do, I handle that, then go back to my personal laptop. Most days I'm either playing video games, watching movies, browsing Reddit, studying for new certifications, or doing stuff around the house like laundry, dishes, cleaning rooms, food prep, etc. People on my team constantly say things like "Man, this workload is insane." I've got the same and even more than some. It's so boring. But, they're paying me to dick around most days.
Truck Driver. Seriously, look into it. There is a huge demand for truck drivers right now, and I'm not talking the Amazon delivery guys. You can even get a local route and work regular work hours and make a lot of money for having the skill of driving.
Ick, no thanks. Drove 29ft trucks for a Walmart POS replacement contract a while back. HATED IT! 11 hours of driving a day, 14 hour shifts, DOT record keeping while the company yells at you for not getting enough distance in (while also telling you they can't tell you to speed and they can't tell you to fudge your records, which is them really saying they require you to but that would be illegal). All for a whooping $740/wk... you can keep it.
My job. The bulk of my job is essentially helping ICU nurses get through annual basic life support.
Now that it’s all on computerized dummies, I basically just click the link for them, adjust hand position now and then and sit back.
I watched Jurassic Park today because everyone is up to date.
I make $120k...
An actual life support and CPR trainer should go through each step of the process (repeating each step a few times for practice) carefully and fully with the class and not sit back and allow the students to just work with the program. A good CPR program for new students usually takes 2 days, (usually a weekend) and a refresher course usually take 4-6 hours. Our hospital requires a full code blue drill to be completed after the training session before the staff are cleared to return to work.
I have some relatives that work for the (US) Federal Government that often talk about jobs where they work in areas like Accounting and Project Management that make over $100,000 and might on a busy day have as much as two hours of actual work. My Aunt was talking about this one older women near retirement that made over $120,000 a year and her only job was running some transactions every morning, which usually took no more than 20 minutes, then she would spend the rest of the day knitting at her desk.
To be fair, while the workload in a lot of those types of government jobs is pretty low, you're often fielding a lot of questions that require expert knowledge throughout the day still. And I've seen the workload PMs have, no thank you; project management is grueling.
Driving the massive dump trucks that serve mines. Starting salary is like 70k and all you do is drive back and forth all day.
Yes, but you have to be GOOD because your truck is worth A LOT, and it's quite boring
School board members.
Don't know about other places, but school board members at my school (public school) made well over 5k eur a month (well above the average).
All the board ever did was create sh**ty rules and then remove them.
They always acted so damn busy when everyone knew they drank coffee while surfing Facebook the entire day, a school member's husband even said that so you know it's true.
Cop. Where I am from they make $100, 000 annually with very little crime. Money is divested into new toys, like helicopters, tanks, even robots.
Southcentral L.A. it is not.
Note: this post originally had 32 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Exactly! You cannot stand doing nothing at your work! It's more tiring and you feel like working double hours!! The shift never ends!
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I wouldn't want a job where I basically sat around and screwed about on my phone or computer. The days just drag like that. I would much rather be busy when at work. And busy with something meaningful and interesting
When you're in a position where you can play with your phone for hours and get paid extremely well, you also can afford to start online courses, though.
Load More Replies... Some of these jobs are cool. But I have a really big problem for people who work in government bragging about doing nothing all day. Hardworking people pay taxes to support them. I would love for there to be some independent office of efficiency that could walk into any government office any time and log what people are doing. You could probably halve the number of government administrators and still have things run just fine. It's millions and millions a year in salaries that we pay for with our taxes, and these lazy reprobates think it's funny.
It depends on the person. My boss posted for my former supervisor's position and I applied to it. I talked to my boss and told her that the work duties she had listed amounted to about 15 hours of work a week. I work a full 40 hours because it was never that there wasn't more work to be done, it was that the person who had the job spent 4 hours a day talking to everyone, had no clue what they were doing, and basically said that something that takes me 30 minutes at the end of the day took her 3 hours. There is a reason why she is my former supervisor, she was asked to leave but she was here for 4 years. Then she found a different job in neurosurgery and they quickly realized she was incompetent and she was forced into an early retirement. Over 20 years working for the state and the entire time she was always incapable but just kept bouncing around until she could retire. People hired her for her years of experience so we was always able to just go to a different department.
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I had a job where I was paid reasonably well but didn't have much to do. Many days there was nothing. It may sound great on paper, but it gets old. Also, it made me feel like I didn't earn what I was receiving, which isn't nice.
I dont like many of this. They claim to be "easy jobs" ymbut you actually need to know a lot to be able to do them (pilot, programmer, data analyst...). Some like truck driver or garbage cleaner are easier but still demand some effort (like never being at home like truckers).
Except maybe the first 5 I didn't find any of the others jobs easy... come on there are even firefighters on that ridiculous list!!! Truck driving can also be exhausting, in many countries they drive for many hours even when there are laws to forbid that!
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Fair enough when there’s a job that requires a high-level of expertise, but you don’t need to use it all the time and it’s a private company, but people boasting about wasting government money is not okay. If our government processes and roles were streamlined, the money could be invested into areas like child poverty, the NHS, education etc.
Makes me sad reading this. So many nurses and teachers working their butts off, enriching and saving lives yet they struggle to make ends meet.
Internal Auditor. Maybe 2 - 3 hours of work a day for $90K a year. Most of my time I spend here or reading g other news or playing games. In order to do my job I have to request documents and noone seems to ever want to hand over documents to be audited. About once a week I get a question about a regulation. I look it up on Google.
In order to get this job I do have a MBA and several years experience in my industry already. But even at the lower level it was easy.
Load More Replies... I’m a freelance translator for a huge online retailer you may have heard of. Sounds like hard work? Well, here’s the thing. I translate from US English to UK English. I basically have to change z to s and add a few u. For this, they are paying me very generously indeed!
Some erasers with rubbers, and sandals with thongs?
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Many of these may sound boring, but if they allow you to have a lot of free time, it also allows you to upgrade yourself, like learning a new skill online, a new languaje, keep in touch with relatives without time being a concearn. This jobs make seem great but is also just a luck that nobody has said "they have a lot of free time, lets meke them do x and y and z to compensate"
Ugh ... why did I become an engineer, then? I don't work in my desired field of technology (development of internal combustion engines), because it's said to be outdated (may or may not - elsewhere, that...), sometimes get to design actual industrial equipment, sometimes just do the drawings thereof, sometimes both, ... I still like it of course, but I honestly think my work would have an impact, would I develop actual engines (however outdated they are or not - there still are like 100 million ICE-driven passenger cars expected to be made and used, and if that is anyway, these should be as efficient as possible - and that, I am talented in ... my kind of thinking matches well with the level of interaction between features, changes, parameters, combinations thereof, ... and it would allow me to be a messy on the job, not just at home, while as it is, I work from home most of the time, and when not, I cannot clutter my desk with my stuff - which I love to.
Not quite the same but working as an activity leader to explain games to groups of adults was great. I didn't earn much but it was nice to be paid to help people have a good laugh.
I had to stop reading this list. It’s just a reminder that good jobs are for the lucky (and the few), and they’re vanishing. This thread is like rocket fuel for survivorship bias. I wish I had a brain for programming. Don’t you “everyone can code” people tell me I can learn; dyscalculia & dyslexia says NOPE. But again, look at game developers: they treat programmers like cattle, too.
I agree. I hate when people tell me (I cant work because I am ill) to "just get a job online like programming". Thats not how life works.
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Can people start admitting to themselves that we are all just making it up as we go? And that also includes money. You don't really need the money because if you have every natural resource we need already on Earth to survive. We could definitely go on living without money. But we just made it up as we go. That we need the money in order to sustain Our lives. But in reality it's not the money we need it's the resources. The money has become a hurdle a very unnecessary hurdle to live.
Friend of mine was an interpreter for British airlines - basically he spoke his native language for a living and got to reap the benefits of working for an airline, plus visit home (Florida, US to Israel) weekly, paid $60k at the time which was a fair amount.
I agree that I would rather be busy, and some of these sound like BS to me, but on the other hand, here in Florida, not too long ago, an independent contractor for a government agency was arrested because for over 15 years, he showed his badge to get in and out, and never did any work at all. How he got away with it for so long is a mystery that was never discussed, no doubt to keep the stunt from being repeated. You'd think someone would notice, in 15 + years, that someone was spending almost all their time fishing or sleeping.
When I was just out of college (early 90's) I had a side job going to parties. I would be hired to put on a cocktail dress and attend fancy parties in the city I lived in and tell people where to find the restrooms, point them to coat check, the bar, the valet, whatever. I got to eat and drink and mingle with the guests. I worked two weekends a month and got paid $500 per event. It was fantastic.
Cell phones make these jobs better too. It used to be you could read a book or magazine with all the down time. With phones you can do SO much including school work or personal life work plus watch shows
What kind of satisfaction do you get from not being a productive member of society?
Tbh, I see a lot of envy and sour grapes in a lot of these comments! In many of these, I say more power to them. But the government jobs, paying exorbitant salaries to people who do almost nothing, really pisses me off. That money should go to the needy in this country. Toward social programs, which would lessen crime rates. Toward healthcare and educational subsidies. Infrastructure. Something needs to change.
I kind of makes you angry when (as an older adult) you slugged your ass off doing jobs that now days only takes the push of a button. My profession was working with people who needed care. To-day a lot of this is just automated machines that do things that used to require personal contact. I don't really think I would like my profession today.
I build websites for a living, which isn't always fun and easy, depending on the clients I work for. But sometimes, there are these gems that make me think my job should be on this list. Like building a 20 page website for a veterinarian that works mainly with cats. This meant I justifiably got to spend a full day looking at and picking out the best cat photos.
It's nice to know that the federal government is paying so many people to sit around and do virtually nothing!
I work for the federal government and we work our butts off. Please don't lump all federal employees into a group that is rare. We don't like the loafers either.
Load More Replies... Reading this, I feel less bad for having a LOT of slow days at work (Data Management Technician). I can have 40 hours of work some weeks (rush before vacations) but most of my week, I do about 5 to 10 hours of actual work AND everything is done REMOTELY now. So I'm paid about 50k to work from home in my PJs, keeping my work laptop open in case of workload and using my own PC to pass the time (Netflix and games).
Exactly! You cannot stand doing nothing at your work! It's more tiring and you feel like working double hours!! The shift never ends!
Load More Replies... I wouldn't want a job where I basically sat around and screwed about on my phone or computer. The days just drag like that. I would much rather be busy when at work. And busy with something meaningful and interesting
When you're in a position where you can play with your phone for hours and get paid extremely well, you also can afford to start online courses, though.
Load More Replies... Some of these jobs are cool. But I have a really big problem for people who work in government bragging about doing nothing all day. Hardworking people pay taxes to support them. I would love for there to be some independent office of efficiency that could walk into any government office any time and log what people are doing. You could probably halve the number of government administrators and still have things run just fine. It's millions and millions a year in salaries that we pay for with our taxes, and these lazy reprobates think it's funny.
It depends on the person. My boss posted for my former supervisor's position and I applied to it. I talked to my boss and told her that the work duties she had listed amounted to about 15 hours of work a week. I work a full 40 hours because it was never that there wasn't more work to be done, it was that the person who had the job spent 4 hours a day talking to everyone, had no clue what they were doing, and basically said that something that takes me 30 minutes at the end of the day took her 3 hours. There is a reason why she is my former supervisor, she was asked to leave but she was here for 4 years. Then she found a different job in neurosurgery and they quickly realized she was incompetent and she was forced into an early retirement. Over 20 years working for the state and the entire time she was always incapable but just kept bouncing around until she could retire. People hired her for her years of experience so we was always able to just go to a different department.
Load More Replies... I had a job where I was paid reasonably well but didn't have much to do. Many days there was nothing. It may sound great on paper, but it gets old. Also, it made me feel like I didn't earn what I was receiving, which isn't nice.
I dont like many of this. They claim to be "easy jobs" ymbut you actually need to know a lot to be able to do them (pilot, programmer, data analyst...). Some like truck driver or garbage cleaner are easier but still demand some effort (like never being at home like truckers).
Except maybe the first 5 I didn't find any of the others jobs easy... come on there are even firefighters on that ridiculous list!!! Truck driving can also be exhausting, in many countries they drive for many hours even when there are laws to forbid that!
Load More Replies... Fair enough when there’s a job that requires a high-level of expertise, but you don’t need to use it all the time and it’s a private company, but people boasting about wasting government money is not okay. If our government processes and roles were streamlined, the money could be invested into areas like child poverty, the NHS, education etc.
Makes me sad reading this. So many nurses and teachers working their butts off, enriching and saving lives yet they struggle to make ends meet.
Internal Auditor. Maybe 2 - 3 hours of work a day for $90K a year. Most of my time I spend here or reading g other news or playing games. In order to do my job I have to request documents and noone seems to ever want to hand over documents to be audited. About once a week I get a question about a regulation. I look it up on Google.
In order to get this job I do have a MBA and several years experience in my industry already. But even at the lower level it was easy.
Load More Replies... I’m a freelance translator for a huge online retailer you may have heard of. Sounds like hard work? Well, here’s the thing. I translate from US English to UK English. I basically have to change z to s and add a few u. For this, they are paying me very generously indeed!
Some erasers with rubbers, and sandals with thongs?
Load More Replies... Many of these may sound boring, but if they allow you to have a lot of free time, it also allows you to upgrade yourself, like learning a new skill online, a new languaje, keep in touch with relatives without time being a concearn. This jobs make seem great but is also just a luck that nobody has said "they have a lot of free time, lets meke them do x and y and z to compensate"
Ugh ... why did I become an engineer, then? I don't work in my desired field of technology (development of internal combustion engines), because it's said to be outdated (may or may not - elsewhere, that...), sometimes get to design actual industrial equipment, sometimes just do the drawings thereof, sometimes both, ... I still like it of course, but I honestly think my work would have an impact, would I develop actual engines (however outdated they are or not - there still are like 100 million ICE-driven passenger cars expected to be made and used, and if that is anyway, these should be as efficient as possible - and that, I am talented in ... my kind of thinking matches well with the level of interaction between features, changes, parameters, combinations thereof, ... and it would allow me to be a messy on the job, not just at home, while as it is, I work from home most of the time, and when not, I cannot clutter my desk with my stuff - which I love to.
Not quite the same but working as an activity leader to explain games to groups of adults was great. I didn't earn much but it was nice to be paid to help people have a good laugh.
I had to stop reading this list. It’s just a reminder that good jobs are for the lucky (and the few), and they’re vanishing. This thread is like rocket fuel for survivorship bias. I wish I had a brain for programming. Don’t you “everyone can code” people tell me I can learn; dyscalculia & dyslexia says NOPE. But again, look at game developers: they treat programmers like cattle, too.
I agree. I hate when people tell me (I cant work because I am ill) to "just get a job online like programming". Thats not how life works.
Load More Replies... Can people start admitting to themselves that we are all just making it up as we go? And that also includes money. You don't really need the money because if you have every natural resource we need already on Earth to survive. We could definitely go on living without money. But we just made it up as we go. That we need the money in order to sustain Our lives. But in reality it's not the money we need it's the resources. The money has become a hurdle a very unnecessary hurdle to live.
Friend of mine was an interpreter for British airlines - basically he spoke his native language for a living and got to reap the benefits of working for an airline, plus visit home (Florida, US to Israel) weekly, paid $60k at the time which was a fair amount.
I agree that I would rather be busy, and some of these sound like BS to me, but on the other hand, here in Florida, not too long ago, an independent contractor for a government agency was arrested because for over 15 years, he showed his badge to get in and out, and never did any work at all. How he got away with it for so long is a mystery that was never discussed, no doubt to keep the stunt from being repeated. You'd think someone would notice, in 15 + years, that someone was spending almost all their time fishing or sleeping.
When I was just out of college (early 90's) I had a side job going to parties. I would be hired to put on a cocktail dress and attend fancy parties in the city I lived in and tell people where to find the restrooms, point them to coat check, the bar, the valet, whatever. I got to eat and drink and mingle with the guests. I worked two weekends a month and got paid $500 per event. It was fantastic.
Cell phones make these jobs better too. It used to be you could read a book or magazine with all the down time. With phones you can do SO much including school work or personal life work plus watch shows
What kind of satisfaction do you get from not being a productive member of society?
Tbh, I see a lot of envy and sour grapes in a lot of these comments! In many of these, I say more power to them. But the government jobs, paying exorbitant salaries to people who do almost nothing, really pisses me off. That money should go to the needy in this country. Toward social programs, which would lessen crime rates. Toward healthcare and educational subsidies. Infrastructure. Something needs to change.
I kind of makes you angry when (as an older adult) you slugged your ass off doing jobs that now days only takes the push of a button. My profession was working with people who needed care. To-day a lot of this is just automated machines that do things that used to require personal contact. I don't really think I would like my profession today.
I build websites for a living, which isn't always fun and easy, depending on the clients I work for. But sometimes, there are these gems that make me think my job should be on this list. Like building a 20 page website for a veterinarian that works mainly with cats. This meant I justifiably got to spend a full day looking at and picking out the best cat photos.
It's nice to know that the federal government is paying so many people to sit around and do virtually nothing!
I work for the federal government and we work our butts off. Please don't lump all federal employees into a group that is rare. We don't like the loafers either.
Load More Replies... Reading this, I feel less bad for having a LOT of slow days at work (Data Management Technician). I can have 40 hours of work some weeks (rush before vacations) but most of my week, I do about 5 to 10 hours of actual work AND everything is done REMOTELY now. So I'm paid about 50k to work from home in my PJs, keeping my work laptop open in case of workload and using my own PC to pass the time (Netflix and games).
