Ask HN: Whats the worst job you've ever had?

I was a bag boy for six months or so in high school for . I wanted some extra side money and a friend of mine worked there and offered to put in a good word for me.

Simultaneously, I had been a high performing student, taking all advanced classes, doing after school sports, etc.

The job itself was not intense or anything. But it was miserable. You could tell that nobody working in that store wanted to be there. Some seemed positively stuck too, like they couldn’t move on and improve their lives even if they really wanted (I don’t actually believe this).

Anyways it induced something of a small existential crisis in me seeing all these sad people who had been what I thought at the time was wasting sometimes decades away working these pointless jobs. I became depressed a bit and my studies fell. I also kind of sucked at the job after a while because it was mind numbing.

Anyways it’s put a lot of my career as a software engineer into perspective and I’m very thankful to be in the position I am. I am also much more thoughtful about bigger picture goals and things I want out of life because of it. Perhaps most importantly though I never look down on anyone based on their job or career.

A few years back I built a website for a large corn seed vendor in Eastern Iowa and learned that this was a VERY common job for teens in rural areas.

>Treating employees this way (no guaranteed hours, unpaid scrambling for individual gigs, etc.) is simply evil.

Did you have an employer that managed placement or were you contracting directly with the schools?

Corporate software dev gig in the Bay Area. Was like a 10 minute commute by bike from my house. All but 2-3 of us on a team of 30 or so were H1B, all from the same village in India. Many of them appeared to have little more than some passing familiarity with software. Instead of working at their desks, they would all crowd into a conference room for a day long quasi-meeting all day, every day. A spot at the actual table was primo, most had their laptop in their lap all day 'coding'. This team barely produced anything, and when they did it wasn't even close to what was asked for. Decisions were debated in this room for hours that should have been made in minutes. First, the director of this group was fired, then they went through 2 CTO's in 2 years, each re-organizing everything. Bar none the least productive shop I've ever seen. All management knew how to do was insist on more hours in hopes of getting something useful. Working conditions were so bad the girl who sat next to me jumped to her death in front on the San Leandro Bart train one morning after getting yelled at again for yet another failed deliverable.

I took the job because they wanted help migrating some apps from an old proprietary stack to Java and I'd done this many times before. However, if you weren't from that village, you were not to be trusted. Finally, they moved the whole team to another office 20 minutes away but I stayed at the office close to my house. I just gave up and enjoyed a few months of doing nothing, going for long bike rides in the hills in Oakland during the work day before moving on.

I think I stumbled into some kind of fraud where they were just giving jobs to people they knew without any qualifications without any intention of building software. It was truly bizarre.

I worked in a warehouse for around 3 months over a decade ago. They stored data in paper form from various companies. I was hired to place stickers sequentially on all the incoming boxes.

One of the worst aspects of that job was I wasn't trusted with anything. I think this is because I got the job through a staffing agency, and this warehouse probably assumed that anyone they were going to hire would either be sketchy or missing a bulb in the pack, but would at least be competent enough to place stickers. I couldn't even operate the sticker printer or fix issues without annoying this one other guy who I was never sure was my actual boss. Every day, I had to put these stickers on pallets of boxes, standing the whole 8 hours, and perform janitorial duties if I happened to get through that day's worth of palettes.

It was a very lonely job, which was both a plus and a negative. I could put on my headphones and space out, and after a while I figured out areas that were out of sight of security cameras, so I'd sneak under them and play games or read comics. No, I wasn't lazy, but if I got through all my boxes and already swept the entire warehouse, there really wasn't anything else to do, but I had to look like I was working if anyone spotted me. I never got caught in one of my hiding spots.

What made the job more lonely, ironically, was the fact that sometimes I'd be working with someone. I was never fast enough for these people, so there was a handful of times where they brought in someone else from staffing to help out with the stickers. These people never lasted more than a week, if they even lasted a few days. It sucked because they were personable and I was hoping I'd make a friend or two. One of them was a Black lady, real nice person. I didn't expect to hit it off that easily with someone from a different background from mine; we were joking and laughing the whole time, and I even showed her where those hiding spots were once I knew she was cool. The following week rolls by and she's not there. I was disappointed because she made the job a lot more tolerable.

The one cool thing about the job is boxes frequently came in with missing covers or they'd fall apart, which let me peek and see what's inside. A lot of the incoming boxes were from big film studios, and I found some scripts for old films and TV shows. In retrospect, I could have rifled through that stuff more and gotten away with it, but I was mostly a good boy back then. lol I like to believe there were some lost episodes somewhere in those boxes.

I stayed for 3 months because I badly needed the money. This was a few years after the Great Recession and I still found it difficult to find work as someone with no experience in animation (which was my first career). I did make some money doing web development, but at that time I didn't have any projects to work on. The staffing company, for good and bad, gave me a job pretty easily.

In the end, I just had something snap in my mind. I suddenly realized "I can't come back to this anymore." I collected my check from the staffing company, told them I'm not showing up again, and that was that.

There are worse jobs from a physical standpoint, but being almost alone in a gigantic warehouse of identical looking boxes and having the sole task of placing stickers was the most soul-crushing experience I've ever had.