The opening comments resonate with me quite a bit. I’ve been food-stamp and Medicaid poor. My wife has always been upper-middle class. Her idea of tightening her belt is quite a bit different from mine. I think on some level she really can’t believe there are people who simply forgo things that she perceives to be basic necessities. (This is how you get those NY Times articles about people who make, say, $250k year claiming that it’s not that much money, really, once you account for all the spending on basics (private school, two vacations, violin lessons, two new cars, maxing-out the 401ks, etc, etc)).
What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
71–80 of 458 posts
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#72>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep u…
> Pediatric oncology. That job must be nightmarish for anyone who isn’t a full-blown sociopath. I’m not a particularly empathetic person and I couldn’t start that job let alone stay in it for years. Edit: > One of the attractions of pediatrics is, surprisingly enough… This is the opposite of surprising. I imagine one of the appeals of pediatrics is significantly fewer of your patients die. That’s why pediatric oncolo…
Interestingly, 70% of veterans who experience traumatic combat experiences will not have PTSD. 30% of veterans who experience the most severe traumatic combat experiences will not have PTSD.
Human beings are very resilient. Or at the least, there is a sub-population of us who are that way.
I like to think of myself as being in that sub-population because I have few triggers despite experiences that others might call traumatic: violent home invasion, car crash and roll over, nearly being run over by train.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sat down at a bar once and the woman next to me was a pediatric oncologist, basically just crying into her beer about how she wanted to quit. It wasn't just sad-- it was an incredibly interesting conversation that I still remember about a decade later.
I haven’t spoken to a lot of doctors, but a lot of nurses I know are desperate to leave the field. The last doctor I spoke to was the most condescending man I met in a while, unfortunately, he was also my surgeon.
I think it is important to have some empathy for surgeons, despite the commonness of arrogance and the mostly absurdly high compensations they receive. Their work is to intentionally mutilate people and their skill is to make it so that the mutilation will improve health. It is an incredibly dissociating job, taking you out of all standard relationships to the body and other people. It takes years, sometimes decades of training to become skilled enough to lead operations, and even short breaks are known to significantly diminish skill and outcomes for patients. The stress level is unfathomable for lay people, and the distance it creates in them from other people is not a sign that they’re assholes but the remnant of the sacrifices they had to make to fulfill our idea of what they have to be. I know not all surgeons are arrogant in the way you and then I have described, but I always feel sad and caring for those people who are wrecked enough by the process to become so socially inept and disconnected from the people around them.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#74>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep u…
> Pediatric oncology
My father in law does this, in a developing country no less. Bless his soul, he's a very kind man. But it's incredibly taxing. Not just the treatments but there are many cases where children die and there's nothing you can do about it. And it doesn't stop, even when he's on vacation, he has patient's families calling/texting him.
I've been at dinner where someone will walk over and say something like "you saved my brother/daughter/sister/son's life." Or sometimes my wife and I will meet someone who will recognize she's his daughter and day the same. Hopefully that makes it worth it.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A working day surrounded by kids undergoing painful treatments, particularly when you are the person prescribing those treatments, grinds down one's soul. This is why psychopaths are overrepresented in such professions. I guess it makes it easier to cut into people, and to make dispassionate decisions. edit: are the downvotes because you think I'm implying this is a bad thing? Am I wrong?
didn't downvote, but I wonder if you have a study showing the stats. Before I've heard that psychopaths are over-represented in politics, as CEOs, as lawyers, as law enforcement, and as criminals. Now also, evidently, in pediatric oncology?
Oh okay I see. When I said "such professions" I meant all of the ones the parent had mentioned: medicine, lawyers, law enforcement. And like you said CEOs and politicians can be added to the list. I know I read something about surgeons in particular having an overrepresentation of psychopaths, but I don't have them handy. I'd imagine it could be true for pediatric oncologists as well for the same reasons, but I don't have any studies to back that up.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#76>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep u…
As far as low-skill, high-pay goes, dockworkers unloading ships is up there with meatgrinder jobs. Your team gets paid for each lb / kg unloaded off the ship, and that sum is divided equally over each team member. So the faster and more ships your team can unload, the more you're paid. That's the incentive. I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day - but that day was 20 hours long, and you're pretty much beat to…
> I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day
This is surprisingly high in that I would have assumed it would be far more cost-effective for the company to improve automation here and bring in more equipment to assist — intuitively, even if such equipment would be expensive, it couldn't be more expensive than the labor costs.
What industry was this?
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#77Many things in life are to some degree what you make of them, but a lot of low skill jobs don't even offer the hope of learning or advancement. This seems like a real situation of despair to me.
This is one of the biggest mistakes we're collectively making right now, intentional or not. Ideally, every job should offer the opportunity to learn more and/or move into better-paid roles eventually-- and even if that's too much to ask, we could still be doing far better than we are.
I showed a lot of promise in a field I was interested in early in life, but there was nowhere to go to level up in it without going back to college (which I couldn't afford either the time or the money for). Now I'm staring down a dead end at middle age with no idea what's next, other than that both my pay and my workload will be miserable compared with what I should be capable of.
One apprenticeship at the right place & time would have dramatically changed my life, and I'd be contributing to the economy on a whole different level.
When all the entry level jobs are dead ends, everybody loses.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#78No post body was provided.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#79I had such jobs for four years. Because of low-pay (low-pay due to low-skill), because of odd-schedules, there is no way to get out, without some external help. Basically, people keep these shitty jobs as they need to pay rent, and rent needs that job.
In 2001, I was making $8 per hr in Cali, worked there for 1.5 years, jumped to another sh!tty job that paid $12 per hr in 2003, stayed there for 3.5 years. Then a friend I met online offered a way out: a guarantee job with some training.
Yes, when you work in sh1tty jobs, even $2 per hr more means a lot.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#80I always have to think about this when people say "buy more at small businesses!" Most small businesse owners I met were just as shitty as the ones of big businesses, they just weren't as smart as them.
Reminds me of the guy who used to own a video rental place and would fire his employees before they had worked there long enough to accrue benefits.