I work 13 hour days, full of the risk of life and death, assault, cleaning up incontinent people, and massive legal liability. I barely make enough to afford a 1 bedroom apartment with my bachelor’s in my “professional” degree. When I get my master’s, and I get to diagnose conditions and prescribe medications, I’ll get ~10,000 more per year.
Nursing? We treat nurses and EMTs like crap for hope much they have to deal with. You prior deserve to be treated like the insanely hard working and caring people you are, but in our society the more you care the less they pay you.
Judging by their username I feel they probably work in robotics.
I was part of a stable of about 50 programmers working for a company that manufactured lubricants circa 2000. For about a month at one point, the entire roomful of programmers spent the entire day calling into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to try and get on the show. Absolutely nothing happened to the company – lubricants kept getting manufactured and sent to customers on schedule. The entire operation ran on mainframe applications that dated to the 1970s. I’m not even sure what any of these programmers did other than myself, and all I did was write IE6-based web frontends that sat on top of the mainframe apps (and they’re still running to this day lol, which means the mainframe apps are still in use).
a stable of about 50 programmers
I did not know that a group of programmers were called a stable, but it’s part of my vocabulary now thank you
It’s because we’re studs 😏
*gets message in ear*
oh, it’s because we’re workhorses or donkeys 😞
it’s because we’re fussy gas bags that need constant de-farting to function
And y’all are kept in cubicles because nobody trusts any of you to roam free
Security through obscurity lol. If the code is old enough it’s secure because no one is assuming it’s that old. Also 50 programmers is like a lot. Ten dudes can get a billion dollar company rolling.
50 programmers who all knew how to write one function that none of the other ones did.
which is pretty common with legacy applications.
and moving off legacy applications you’ve been on for decades… takes a decade typically, sometimes longer.
I think that’s precisely where the central problem of our time lies: in the imbalance between the value created and the social significance of jobs, on the one hand, and the compensation paid for those jobs compared to administrative and management positions, on the other.
The best example of this, in all its absurdity, is that billionaires are getting richer and richer—or rather, that they exist at all.
at the age of 16 I was working for a local ISP doing dialup support when we got a call that couldn’t be resolved by level one techs … but was apparently in the same building, across the hall. After going around and around with them for 4+ calls and realizing we were right there, I just walked over on my lunch break, got hired as their helpdesk, walked back, quit, and started connecting all their desktops up to a novell netware network to use their paired ISDN line instead of having dozens of desktops dialing in for 28.8k
This work went on for 8 months, and I was always struck by how many desktops and offices they had, but so few people were ever there. Slept with my future wife on a couch in the lobby lol. Anyway, after almost a year of this, they were raided by the feds for selling fake ‘executive personality analysis’ and helping tons of companies pick their c-suites based on woo-woo garbage surveys they were selling to fortune 500 companies for thousands of dollars each. Turns out the entire business was lies layered on lies but I cashed the fuck outta those checks and appreciated not having to work fast food.
never underestimate money laundering and scams, there’s shittons out there
In the 70s my grandfather owned a muffler company and they’d all go to lunch at 11 till 3 and get good a drunk. Every day.
Your grandad is my type of guy.
I’ve been offered the office job twice in my life now. I’ve always worked in a shop in industrial electrical manufacturing and field service. The first time was my old job, I ended up quitting entirely and walking out on a promotion for drafting, which paid less than my current job’s base salary and which has just exploded with raises, bonuses, overtime, double time on Sundays. I’m pretty happy where I’m at. But now my boss just mentioned there’s something available in the office at the end of the year and he’ll keep me in mind.
I’m kind of at a crossroads. Do I keep the job I physically enjoy doing more and keeps me busy and on my feet and hanging out with people who I enjoy their company? Or do I take the job which is gonna be a lot more boring, a lot of killing time, with relatively boring strangers, but would push me a lot into more knowledge and skills? And I’m genuinely interested in the field and want to learn more and apply myself, but I’ve never been someone who could sit at a desk all day. I’ve never had a job like that. But also I’m starting to outgrow my current position and it does get awfully repetitive testing and doing QA all day. I told him I’d think on it.
Keep in mind that more physically demanding jobs wear your body down faster. And if you took the office job and it wasn’t your cup of tea, how difficult would it be to go back to your current position?
My wife turned down an office promotion but negotiated basically all the pay and benefits of it to keep her current role, maybe you could give that a shot?
So my old job involved a lot of lifting heavy shit, drilling & fabricating, installing / bending heavy power wire and conduit. Where I’m at now is honestly pretty low stress on my body. I’m on my feet all day but it’s testing / QA. It’s honestly more paperwork of writing reports, testing, and half the time the field service is programming anyway. Also a lot of maintenance crews will do the heavy lifting on site.
So it’s a bit of a moot point in that regard.
If I left this position I doubt I could ever go back. They’d need to replace me with whoever I trained to take my place. We’d have to get sooo much more busy to justify more than two people in my current department.
Definitely a tough call, but it does sound like you have a good thing going. It sounds like your boss values you, so I’d suggest you take the route my wife did. She didn’t want to deal with the meetings/paperwork of a promotion, but talked her boss into getting a pay raise and some benefits while keeping her current role. Doesn’t hurt to ask. Best of luck!
Protip: dont be that programmer.
You might think that working hard and putting the weight of everything on your shoulders is honorable and will be rewarded. But, no one will care. No one will care until you stop. When you stop dragging everyone else, when they have to start pulling, they’ll blame you. To them, things were going great until you started slouching.
I learned this lesson after about 5 years into my 15 year career. Busting your ass and going above and beyond just rewards you with more work. When i discovered what i was capable of, rarely did i give over 80%. The bonus there was when something was actually high priority, you can turn it up to 100 and get the recognition for going above and beyond.
Ive cruised until those moments. Im now outranking some of my peers who have gone hard and always “exceeded expectations” on their performance eval. Corporate life is bullshit and totally not fair. Its very political and very much a buddy-buddy in group
Edit: grammar. Words are hard first thing in the morning
If you spend your whole time doing your job you dont leave any time to kiss the ass of the guy who decides if your job performance is worthy.
