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What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

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Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#441

Post by Sohurt00 »

lettergram wrote: post #203
abxytg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynically untrue. Amazon is not even close to bottom of the barrel. And it's clear you haven't paid market rent in a major city since you bought that starter home back in the 90s - 42k is a joke when your rent is close to $2500 and you get no benefits.

> rent is close to $2500 and you get no benefits. You can get a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment where I live in a decent low crime location for $700-$1000. There’s an Amazon wear house up the street. It’s a city >250k people. People around here make $40k on average and still go to sports games, bars, dancing, etc. It depends where you live.

“Works for me.” isn’t a solution

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#442

Post by [deleted] »

Sohurt00 wrote: post #441
lettergram wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rent is close to $2500 and you get no benefits. You can get a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment where I live in a decent low crime location for $700-$1000. There’s an Amazon wear house up the street. It’s a city >250k people. People around here make $40k on average and still go to sports games, bars, dancing, etc. It depends where you live.

“Works for me.” isn’t a solution

[deleted]

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#443

Post by rdiddly »

nradov wrote: post #419
rdiddly wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, although are Amazon warehouses in the most expensive cities? My understanding was that they were big and therefore located in spread-out suburban food-deserts poorly served by public transit, where land is cheap and available, and the zoning is lax if you're building an Amazon warehouse and "bringing jobs" but strangely prohibitive if you're thinking of building apartments. Anyway just penciling out t…

Healthy food like frozen chicken, canned vegetables, potatoes, apples, and eggs are widely available and cheap unless you're in a complete food desert.

Trivia note - "an apple and an egg" is a German expression to mean a cheap price, kind of like when we say something costs "peanuts."

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#444

Post by chefandy »

gruez wrote: post #359
chefandy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of worse doesn't make something good .

>make something good. What does make something good, then? The top level comment implies that having to work at all is indentured servitude. Does that mean any sort of work to sustain oneself is not "good"?

Standard of living, living wages, and employee satisfaction are among the most frequently measured and calculated statistics of our time. I’m not your research assistant.

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#445

Post by screye »

yuppie_scum wrote: post #401
screye wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boston is actually an amazing example of things the US needs to do to enable affordable living. The expansive public transport network allows you to live far from the city without incurring huge commute times. That paired with the density means that car ownership is discouraged, which takes away another expense. Lastly, the city continues building multi-family middle housing in the city outskirts which keeps housing…

Boston and eastern MA are far from affordable. Homeownership in a decent area inside 128 is unattainable without a pretty sizable nest eg (equity or gift from parents). The public transit system is insufficient. The Commuter Rail is infrequent, slow and often unreliable. The entire system needs to be electrified for RER service but that’s probably twenty years away if we are lucky. And the homeless have just been con…

All good points.

My praise for Boston was in comparison to absolutely shambolically run cities in the rest of the US. In comparison to some well-run global cities, (Greater) Boston still has ways to go.

> Mass and Cass

Yep, Methadone Mile is the uncomfortable compromise between liberal: "don't evict the homeless" versus the moderate: "keep our neighborhoods safe" agendas. It keeps the rest of Boston relatively aggressive-homeless free, but the addicts and local residents are worse off.

> entire system needs to be electrified

At times, it is jarring to see the US do worse than 3rd world countries. The mind-boggling cost of any infrastructure in the US is really holding the country back.

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#446

Post by BeFlatXIII »

ip26 wrote: post #296
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those jobs also aren't effective teachers of skills. Some exceptionally engaged employees will pick them up. Most of the rest will pick up the attitude that it doesn't matter if you get fired from one jobby job because you can get hired to do the same thing across the street and then take your original job back once you're fired from the other place and your current manager has left for better opportunities. A strong…

That’s an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered. How would you envision nudging “the rest” to pick up skills over their summer, assuming they weren’t working?

The "assuming they weren't working" adds a major wrinkle because my default suggestion would be to get them into better jobs where professionalism and responsibility actually matter.

At least as far as teamwork (and possibly independent work) is concerned, sports or marching band are the first two summer opportunities to come to mind. However, that still leaves out customer service (and the effectiveness of that actually being picked up by most teenage employees is debatable, at best).

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#447

Post by BeFlatXIII »

crate_barre wrote: post #354
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with STEM degrees, you're making a bet on the state of the job market in four years. If you can self-teach how to program, the degree is more of a compliance checkbox to get into your first job easier, even if it is directly to do with computers.

Enumerate the STEM jobs that won’t create a life for you. Go. To. Medical. School. Stop thinking a Bachelors in STEM is enough. It’s a not a bet. The literally moronic other majors half of you pick is a bet. I’ve seen all of your resumes and there is literally totally dumbfounded major choices. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say web development will create less of a life for you long term than most other STEMs. People…

What are you ranting about?

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#449

Post by hakfoo »

lazide wrote: post #246
antifa wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe people are so detached from reality that they feel entitled to live within driving distance of their job...

Within a specific, ideal job they always wanted and got without having to make hard tradeoffs somewhere, or do a ton of searching? This is what folks are talking about. Expecting things to just fall into place 'just because' without having to do the legwork to actually make/find something workable.

It's an entirely solvable problem at the data level.

We know where the employers and residential zones are. We could put together a model to minimize average commute time.

The problem is that we need to have a grand "rehoming" moment to deliver it. The day where everyone gets assigned a new residence in accordance with the optimization scheme. A day that would doubtless be deferred to long past the heat-death of the universe in endless court challenges by those who ended up on the losing side of the deal in some way.

In a way, the fact we still have powerful regimes which aren't tied down to "rule of law", and specifically the "property rights as sacred" segment of it gives me hope; I'd expect to see this day occur in Beijing long before it happened in San Francisco.

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#450

Post by lazide »

masonic wrote: post #431
lazide wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally always been that way. Every business tries to cut costs, or they become unprofitable. Every organization tries to mechanize/create repetitive process where they can to minimize the amount of skilled workers they need as part of it. Every organization tries to skrimp where it can. I literally never worked for a company with an onboarding or training process until I got to a FAANG. At that point I had be…

Yet you don't see that "gopher" / shopping jobs are alive and well in the very service workers you use today (Uber/eats, "items shipped to your door", etc.)

I think you’re making my point for me?
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