I've watched enough buddy cop movies to know this is the most dangerous time in your career.
Just when I think I'm out.... they PULL ME BACK IN!
(not gonna fukn happen)
Congratulations from someone who has no hope of retiring in the next ten years of my life lol. My parents both retired at your age though. Enjoy it!
The best thing is that I work for myself.
The worst thing is that my boss is an idiot.
Apartment superintendent.
Best: Free rent and utilities on top of a full time wage.
Worst: Finding people dead.
Wait…. What? Does this happen often enough that it’s an issue? Or is that you’re saying that ONE is more than too many?
In 18 years I've personally discovered 20 bodies.
Good god man!
You better work in a nursing home
I did spend a few years managing a retirement community, and a few more managing subsidized housing where opioid overdoses were the leading cause. So my stats are probably higher than the average.
How did you react the first time it happened? Was it your first time seeing a dead person ?
Walked in on a guy who was just sitting there. I immediately knew but completely denied it for about 10 minutes. "He's just pining for the fjords."
Nice neighbourhood
Best: I’m busy, we’re always making stuff, shipping stuff, it’s productive and interesting. Rarely is any single day the same. No scope for boredom.
Worst: Bloody hell, I’m busy. I need to prioritise better, and delegate more. There’s never enough time in the day to get through everything, and my low priority items are perpetually shifted forward into the next week.
Best: setting my own hours
Worst: having to actually follow the hours I set two weeks ago
Best: helping the animals, improving their living conditions and treatment, giving them toys and treats
Worst: killing the animals and witnessing some horrible diseases/injuries
Best: Get to solve logic problems, create, and learn. Somehow get paid for this.
Worst: Interviewing between jobs requires a different set of skills than the everyday work.
Source: Unemployed software engineer.
Solve this series of textbook algorithm problems using OOP in 5 minutes or less so we can see if you're good enough to spend the next 5 years maintaining a site designed in the early 2000s that is basically just a bunch of JavaScript and one giant main as a backend
Worse is going to work, best is leaving work
Best: Working with patients. People are hilarious, touching, aggravating, endlessly interesting.
Worst: Dealing with the for-profit American healthcare system. Chronically understaffed, the complete lack of social support system outside the hospital makes our efforts virtually meaningless in so many cases.
Am critical care nurse.
Pro: huge impact, great pay, awesome coworkers, always something to learn with being at the forefront of datacenter server architectures.
Con: it's a technical job but we have an admin manager somehow. Admin/non-technical managers don't have any purpose so they worry about metrics, creating meetings no one is interested in, and volunteering other people to do favors to make themselves look good.
My manager is great in that he knows his primary purpose is to filter the bullshit admin stuff away from us so we can get work done. He's pretty good at it.
Best: I get to be outside.
Worst: I get to be outside.
Software engineer. My company has been hiring low budget contractors instead of full time engineers. Training and onboarding people always has a cost, so the revolving door nature of this hiring method is already a problem, but the people we’re hiring are also very low skilled and take more of the rest of the team’s time hand-holding them through easy tasks
OK, so what's the worst thing then?
Best thing about my job is the flexible hours. I get to spend a lot of time with my kids, even do my hobbies sometimes, ride my bike, play video games, cook, visit friends, etc. I mean, I don't really have a ton of time for that stuff after the chores, but at least work doesn't ask much else of me and it's fairly low stress.
Worst thing about my job is it doesn't come with a paycheck. I'm unemployed.
Surgical Tech
Best: Helping people to not hurt/die is super gratifying, and didn't need to spend a million dollars and years of my life in secondary education to get here.
Worst: I've seen things that will haunt me all the way to the grave. Also the pay is kinda shit.
WFH
RTO
What does RTO mean? Is it the same thing as PTO?
Return to office
Same as WJF, minus the RTT
You are thinking about MRV for LPB
Best: Trusted working hours and WFH(no time keeping but you lose overtime)
Worst: Deadlines and many many projects
Branch Manager
Best: Freedom. My day can be over at 11a or it could go to 5p. I could work in the office, in the field, or from home. Developing people is awesome when you see the light bulb go off and they start excelling.
Worst: Expensing receipts/invoices. God I hate Expensify.
Expensify, really? Not that I've used a ton but I found that one really easy. Probably depends who set it up though. And I wasn't a heavy user.
Also IIRC they give a ton of money to good causes so I'm willing to put up with a little more BS, not that it was ever necessary.
When it works it’s fine. But usually when I need to get my end of month finished the login page goes down. It will also fail to save my categories and descriptions after I’ve moved on. That’s irritating. I also don’t like that if I expense a receipt as soon as I’ve purchased and then a day later it finally sees the transaction it’s too dumb to know it’s the same transaction. I don’t even get a, hey, are these duplicates? Nope. Nothing. It has so much more potential to make expensing easier.
That sucks. I had none of those issues at all, it just worked for me. Maybe it has gone way downhill in the past year?
I also hate expensify. Whenever I get someone green with me I set them up with the app and suggest it would be better if everything came through one person also that it is important for them to learn the system.
Usually takes them about a day or so for them to figure out the real reason I made that suggestion. I know it's a dick move but in my defense I really fucking hate expensify.
best: I get to learn.
worst: the body is ready, but the mind is not. coffee flips me over and makes me sleep more.
I am a student.
Do you have adhd
I am not sure. I don't think I show the more distinguishable symptoms.
to be fair, there's other alternatives to coffee that actually helps like tea so it is not a dead end if need be.
also, like many people can confirm, coffee doesn't help with cognitive abilities.
Best: Casual work environment, Monday-Friday work schedule, Day shift
Worst: Small businesses shenanigans and problems like lack of health insurance and occasional late paychecks to name a few. The workplace is dysfunctional. There are very little safety standards. There is a complete and utter inventory mismanagement problem. There are no standardized procedures, especially for training. There is difficulty in hiring new and retaining new employees. The long time employees are leaving due to retirement, health issues, or just utter frustration and dissatisfaction, and they're taking all of their knowledge and experience with them.
Some long-timers recently quit, including the business owner's son who's also the person who hired me. They quit because they were doing the jobs of multiple people and having more responsibilities and job duties tacked on to them. Even the IT guy is trying to fix the inventory situation at the off-site warehouse even though the business owner said he was looking to hire an inventory specialist.
Customers and customers.
IT Sysadmin
Best: get your play with multi million dollar computer systems.
Worst: paperwork. Change management is a necessary horror and is only getting worse.
Best: I’m good at it and I self taught in 18 months what was supposed to take 5 years. Having something(s) to take pride in is strange and nice.
Worst: I’m bored now but very busy.
This was a very hard question to answer in a short format. Well done.
What is it though?
By title I run the kilns at a lumber mill. That was the biggest skill and learning. Their previous operator got poached and they had no one cross trained so ‘figure it out’. Had nothing to work with so developed my own inventory and moisture tracking system and a few statistical modeling tools to predict the moisture variability. Part of making that inventory system somehow led to doing project management for a 3 person ios dev team in Turkey. Basically I found a couple of textbooks online, don’t function without computers and just kind of went from there.
There may be one other person that reads and understands this but fwiw I tested a kiln charge that was for a heat treatment order on Thursday after it was dressed at the planer. Customer requested 12% MC. I hit 12.2% MC average with a standard deviation of 1.2. Cut dates range of 1 week prior to 3.5 months prior. Piled air dry and standard box piled mix. Sales guy had an order to fill for a face size we ran low on and said ‘do your best’.
I also run the round saw filing cnc machine(I make saws sharp) as another ‘we need someone to figure this out’. It is painfully boring but I eliminated about 12k/week in opportunity cost in my first 60 days of doing it so they won’t let me stop.
I also fill in driving front loaders on a regular basis. I can run forks, grader blade or bucket. If you ever want to learn about Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor drive a front loader for a bit.
And occasionally I fill in on the planer if they need help with a set up.
Hired June of 2021 from 4.5 years of disability and 10 years in Apple retail. I put in my resume because I figured it would be a cool tour and took the job figuring I’d wash out in the 90 day probation period. Just over 2 years later and I’ve learned a few skilled trades and I’ve personally improved the business’ margins in 3 different areas.
That's awesome actually. Hopefully they compensate you well for your contributions.
Thank you! Like I said in my OP it’s weird to be proud of myself and something I’ve done.
It’s not bad by any means and I’m pretty lucky. I make the Canadian median wage(54k/yr) with no post-secondary and almost 6 years of disability in 18 years of working. I’m doing fine but it’s frustrating to be able to point to multiples of my income that I’ve pushed personally(in a 200 person operation) and still have to fight for a greater than inflation wage increase.
I’ve got irons in the fire and plan to be moving on in the next year or so. Need to get a hold of someone that can do patent discovery.
Best: flexible start/end times, not much drama.
Worst: material counts. I hate material counts.
Best: when not on a call I have minimal supervision and can do virtually whatever I want. I do good work and have legitimately saved 3 or so lives in the past month in my new position.
Worst: sleep is poor and my schedule is annoying if I have to nap in my off time.
the travel and the travel
I get it. I have seen stuff and been places that have forever changed me as a person. I have also sat there picking at a shit restaurant meal across from a coworker whose face I am tired of seeing while missing my wife and kids.
Best: I get to see a lot of aerospace stuff being manufactured.
Worst: The owner's wife is a dumb bitch.
Best: 1. My coworkers 2. Getting to see wild and crazy cases.
For exampke with the latter: I had an extensive gallbladder resection specimen for a very rare type of gallbladder cancer the other day. I had never seen a tumor so large completely encasing a portion of the gallbladder and extending into the liver. Was crazy to be able to see and feel something so bizarre.
Worst: 1. Monotony 2. Can be streasful
My place of work provides affordable housing.
Best: helping people be housed
Worst: It's a toss up between knowing there are still so many people waiting for help and seeing people sucked back into the cycle of poverty
Best: the real work part of it and my coworkers
Worse: the few terrible clients I have
Best: unlimited free coffee, lots of free cake and sandwiches etc
Worst: 5am wake-ups several days a week. Customers suck. The public are idiotic assholes.
Best thing: working with very talented and famous, bands, authors and comedians.
Worst thing: the hours being so brutal I'm not awake enough to enjoy any of it.
Best: still have some autonomy to do my individual job on my team and decent budget to get meaningful work done
Worst: the broader company's other products, policies and leadership.
Best: Defending peoples' honor
Worst: Stage fright
I manage my business units data and support the team to use it and the applications associated with the data.. best thing is the day is variety..no two days are usually the same. The worst thing is the people..I don't know how they function sometimes. And the team's managers are so hands off when training and coaching their team.
Best thing is I’m retiring in 18 days, at age 58.
Worst thing is the next 18 days.
I've watched enough buddy cop movies to know this is the most dangerous time in your career.
Just when I think I'm out.... they PULL ME BACK IN!
(not gonna fukn happen)
Congratulations from someone who has no hope of retiring in the next ten years of my life lol. My parents both retired at your age though. Enjoy it!
The best thing is that I work for myself.
The worst thing is that my boss is an idiot.
Apartment superintendent.
Best: Free rent and utilities on top of a full time wage.
Worst: Finding people dead.
Wait…. What? Does this happen often enough that it’s an issue? Or is that you’re saying that ONE is more than too many?
In 18 years I've personally discovered 20 bodies.
Good god man!
You better work in a nursing home
I did spend a few years managing a retirement community, and a few more managing subsidized housing where opioid overdoses were the leading cause. So my stats are probably higher than the average.
How did you react the first time it happened? Was it your first time seeing a dead person ?
Walked in on a guy who was just sitting there. I immediately knew but completely denied it for about 10 minutes. "He's just pining for the fjords."
Nice neighbourhood
Best: I’m busy, we’re always making stuff, shipping stuff, it’s productive and interesting. Rarely is any single day the same. No scope for boredom.
Worst: Bloody hell, I’m busy. I need to prioritise better, and delegate more. There’s never enough time in the day to get through everything, and my low priority items are perpetually shifted forward into the next week.
Best: setting my own hours
Worst: having to actually follow the hours I set two weeks ago
Best: helping the animals, improving their living conditions and treatment, giving them toys and treats
Worst: killing the animals and witnessing some horrible diseases/injuries
Best: Get to solve logic problems, create, and learn. Somehow get paid for this.
Worst: Interviewing between jobs requires a different set of skills than the everyday work.
Source: Unemployed software engineer.
Solve this series of textbook algorithm problems using OOP in 5 minutes or less so we can see if you're good enough to spend the next 5 years maintaining a site designed in the early 2000s that is basically just a bunch of JavaScript and one giant main as a backend
Worse is going to work, best is leaving work
Best: Working with patients. People are hilarious, touching, aggravating, endlessly interesting.
Worst: Dealing with the for-profit American healthcare system. Chronically understaffed, the complete lack of social support system outside the hospital makes our efforts virtually meaningless in so many cases.
Am critical care nurse.
Pro: huge impact, great pay, awesome coworkers, always something to learn with being at the forefront of datacenter server architectures.
Con: it's a technical job but we have an admin manager somehow. Admin/non-technical managers don't have any purpose so they worry about metrics, creating meetings no one is interested in, and volunteering other people to do favors to make themselves look good.
My manager is great in that he knows his primary purpose is to filter the bullshit admin stuff away from us so we can get work done. He's pretty good at it.
Best: I get to be outside.
Worst: I get to be outside.
Software engineer. My company has been hiring low budget contractors instead of full time engineers. Training and onboarding people always has a cost, so the revolving door nature of this hiring method is already a problem, but the people we’re hiring are also very low skilled and take more of the rest of the team’s time hand-holding them through easy tasks
OK, so what's the worst thing then?
Best thing about my job is the flexible hours. I get to spend a lot of time with my kids, even do my hobbies sometimes, ride my bike, play video games, cook, visit friends, etc. I mean, I don't really have a ton of time for that stuff after the chores, but at least work doesn't ask much else of me and it's fairly low stress.
Worst thing about my job is it doesn't come with a paycheck. I'm unemployed.
Surgical Tech
Best: Helping people to not hurt/die is super gratifying, and didn't need to spend a million dollars and years of my life in secondary education to get here.
Worst: I've seen things that will haunt me all the way to the grave. Also the pay is kinda shit.
WFH
RTO
What does RTO mean? Is it the same thing as PTO?
Return to office
Same as WJF, minus the RTT
You are thinking about MRV for LPB
Best: Trusted working hours and WFH(no time keeping but you lose overtime)
Worst: Deadlines and many many projects
Branch Manager
Best: Freedom. My day can be over at 11a or it could go to 5p. I could work in the office, in the field, or from home. Developing people is awesome when you see the light bulb go off and they start excelling.
Worst: Expensing receipts/invoices. God I hate Expensify.
Expensify, really? Not that I've used a ton but I found that one really easy. Probably depends who set it up though. And I wasn't a heavy user.
Also IIRC they give a ton of money to good causes so I'm willing to put up with a little more BS, not that it was ever necessary.
When it works it’s fine. But usually when I need to get my end of month finished the login page goes down. It will also fail to save my categories and descriptions after I’ve moved on. That’s irritating. I also don’t like that if I expense a receipt as soon as I’ve purchased and then a day later it finally sees the transaction it’s too dumb to know it’s the same transaction. I don’t even get a, hey, are these duplicates? Nope. Nothing. It has so much more potential to make expensing easier.
That sucks. I had none of those issues at all, it just worked for me. Maybe it has gone way downhill in the past year?
I also hate expensify. Whenever I get someone green with me I set them up with the app and suggest it would be better if everything came through one person also that it is important for them to learn the system.
Usually takes them about a day or so for them to figure out the real reason I made that suggestion. I know it's a dick move but in my defense I really fucking hate expensify.
best: I get to learn.
worst: the body is ready, but the mind is not. coffee flips me over and makes me sleep more.
I am a student.
Do you have adhd
I am not sure. I don't think I show the more distinguishable symptoms.
to be fair, there's other alternatives to coffee that actually helps like tea so it is not a dead end if need be.
also, like many people can confirm, coffee doesn't help with cognitive abilities.
Best: Casual work environment, Monday-Friday work schedule, Day shift
Worst: Small businesses shenanigans and problems like lack of health insurance and occasional late paychecks to name a few. The workplace is dysfunctional. There are very little safety standards. There is a complete and utter inventory mismanagement problem. There are no standardized procedures, especially for training. There is difficulty in hiring new and retaining new employees. The long time employees are leaving due to retirement, health issues, or just utter frustration and dissatisfaction, and they're taking all of their knowledge and experience with them.
Some long-timers recently quit, including the business owner's son who's also the person who hired me. They quit because they were doing the jobs of multiple people and having more responsibilities and job duties tacked on to them. Even the IT guy is trying to fix the inventory situation at the off-site warehouse even though the business owner said he was looking to hire an inventory specialist.
Customers and customers.
IT Sysadmin
Best: get your play with multi million dollar computer systems.
Worst: paperwork. Change management is a necessary horror and is only getting worse.
Best: I’m good at it and I self taught in 18 months what was supposed to take 5 years. Having something(s) to take pride in is strange and nice.
Worst: I’m bored now but very busy.
This was a very hard question to answer in a short format. Well done.
What is it though?
By title I run the kilns at a lumber mill. That was the biggest skill and learning. Their previous operator got poached and they had no one cross trained so ‘figure it out’. Had nothing to work with so developed my own inventory and moisture tracking system and a few statistical modeling tools to predict the moisture variability. Part of making that inventory system somehow led to doing project management for a 3 person ios dev team in Turkey. Basically I found a couple of textbooks online, don’t function without computers and just kind of went from there.
There may be one other person that reads and understands this but fwiw I tested a kiln charge that was for a heat treatment order on Thursday after it was dressed at the planer. Customer requested 12% MC. I hit 12.2% MC average with a standard deviation of 1.2. Cut dates range of 1 week prior to 3.5 months prior. Piled air dry and standard box piled mix. Sales guy had an order to fill for a face size we ran low on and said ‘do your best’.
I also run the round saw filing cnc machine(I make saws sharp) as another ‘we need someone to figure this out’. It is painfully boring but I eliminated about 12k/week in opportunity cost in my first 60 days of doing it so they won’t let me stop.
I also fill in driving front loaders on a regular basis. I can run forks, grader blade or bucket. If you ever want to learn about Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor drive a front loader for a bit.
And occasionally I fill in on the planer if they need help with a set up.
Hired June of 2021 from 4.5 years of disability and 10 years in Apple retail. I put in my resume because I figured it would be a cool tour and took the job figuring I’d wash out in the 90 day probation period. Just over 2 years later and I’ve learned a few skilled trades and I’ve personally improved the business’ margins in 3 different areas.
That's awesome actually. Hopefully they compensate you well for your contributions.
Thank you! Like I said in my OP it’s weird to be proud of myself and something I’ve done.
It’s not bad by any means and I’m pretty lucky. I make the Canadian median wage(54k/yr) with no post-secondary and almost 6 years of disability in 18 years of working. I’m doing fine but it’s frustrating to be able to point to multiples of my income that I’ve pushed personally(in a 200 person operation) and still have to fight for a greater than inflation wage increase.
I’ve got irons in the fire and plan to be moving on in the next year or so. Need to get a hold of someone that can do patent discovery.
Best: flexible start/end times, not much drama.
Worst: material counts. I hate material counts.
Best: when not on a call I have minimal supervision and can do virtually whatever I want. I do good work and have legitimately saved 3 or so lives in the past month in my new position.
Worst: sleep is poor and my schedule is annoying if I have to nap in my off time.
the travel and the travel
I get it. I have seen stuff and been places that have forever changed me as a person. I have also sat there picking at a shit restaurant meal across from a coworker whose face I am tired of seeing while missing my wife and kids.
Best: I get to see a lot of aerospace stuff being manufactured.
Worst: The owner's wife is a dumb bitch.
Best: 1. My coworkers 2. Getting to see wild and crazy cases.
For exampke with the latter: I had an extensive gallbladder resection specimen for a very rare type of gallbladder cancer the other day. I had never seen a tumor so large completely encasing a portion of the gallbladder and extending into the liver. Was crazy to be able to see and feel something so bizarre.
Worst: 1. Monotony 2. Can be streasful
My place of work provides affordable housing. Best: helping people be housed Worst: It's a toss up between knowing there are still so many people waiting for help and seeing people sucked back into the cycle of poverty
Best: the real work part of it and my coworkers
Worse: the few terrible clients I have
Best: unlimited free coffee, lots of free cake and sandwiches etc
Worst: 5am wake-ups several days a week. Customers suck. The public are idiotic assholes.
Best thing: working with very talented and famous, bands, authors and comedians.
Worst thing: the hours being so brutal I'm not awake enough to enjoy any of it.
Best: still have some autonomy to do my individual job on my team and decent budget to get meaningful work done
Worst: the broader company's other products, policies and leadership.
Best: Defending peoples' honor
Worst: Stage fright
I manage my business units data and support the team to use it and the applications associated with the data.. best thing is the day is variety..no two days are usually the same. The worst thing is the people..I don't know how they function sometimes. And the team's managers are so hands off when training and coaching their team.