The 10 worst jobs in America right now

Oh, buoy…

4 Likes

Yeah. Feels like WH press secretary is the worst job regardless of how much it pays.

1 Like

I could hazard a guess.

Web developer: Took some classes / self taught knowledge of HTML, javascript, graphics tools and others needed to design and implement a web page and some of the background wizardry.

Computer programmer: Went to college, learned CS basics, knows a bunch of languages. An implementer, but not a designer of systems at least on a big scale.

Software engineer: Full blown CS degree (compiler design! linear algebra! advanced algorithms!), with mathematics and analytic skills required to architect big projects. May get sucked into management and fondly remember coding days.

11 Likes
3 Likes

These days software engineering is high stress in the best of times. Constant deadlines and pressure to do it fast but of course not make any mistakes.

4 Likes

That was my dad. All of it. He’s been retired for almost a decade, though. His most stressful thing now is a low bocce score.

3 Likes

I’m a QA guy in a team with 3 week sprints.

So, yeah. Are there, doing that!

OTOH, that’s not the same stress as dealing with angry customers like a call center person or retailer, or the danger of a meat packing floor.

7 Likes

Enjoy it since someone might take your job away like mine. :frowning:

1 Like

About $40k at least.

6 Likes

Nailed it.

I just came off a 300 hour month, so yeah that’s definitely true.

3 Likes

There’s an acquisition in the works, so yeahhhhhh . . .

4 Likes

I understand how people can get caught up in whatever their situation is, but it is sort of sad that some of the jobs with a high stress rating are jobs where the price of screwing up badly is that your boss might yell at you because your metrics are down.
I have always found that my stress level, unless there is some life or death thing going on, is directly related to how much FU money I have laid away. I can endure almost anything if I know that I have the choice to just walk away whenever it gets to be too much to deal with.
By the way, I strongly believe that the “best job” is a matter of individual competence and personality. My Dad was a test and fighter pilot. He approached his job with constant, actual joy.
Most of us are not so lucky.

4 Likes

In my experience one must be either extraordinarily lucky. Or already pretty well off to make that happen.

So for my purposes the “best” job is:

  1. A job you can get.
  2. A job that won’t go away.
  3. A job you can enjoy.
  4. A job that will pay enough to allow you to do something you love. As a side. Eventually. Or as part of the job.

Yeah that’s the thing. It can pay well, eventually. Particularly once you hit the NCO level, which is still technically enlisted. Though those added benefits are eroding somewhat.

My cousin is effectively a Statistician for a credit card company. Though the title is different. Its a pretty tits job. He gets paid through the nose, gets excessive vacation, can work from home, on hours as he sees fit. And unlike other jobs in finance or banking he’s rarely on the firing line when things go tits up.

Your dad is awesome. And ended up doing what my dad always wanted to. But a congenital heart defect meant there was a decades long legal battle to make something even remotely like that happen. He opted to pass on that. It took him till he was 40 to stumble into something that ended up being far more to his liking. Less of a “dream job”, “what do you want to be when you grow up” sort of thing. But the reality of it fit much, much better with what he was into and wanted to be doing.

2 Likes

:frowning: Yeah, it’s hard to find a new job. Argh!

I saw the bottom ten and said, “Well, I’ve been two of those…” Wait, what’s the difference between a broadcaster and a disc jockey? I was never paid as much as either one.

3 Likes

The problem here is the range within position. I’m a university professor. I get paid a substantial and embarrassing amount over the 80k in this article, but 97% of my particular gig is federally funded soft money research (that’s in contract, it’s really 100%, sorry ‘mentoring grad students’ which is supposed to be the other 3%). Which I love, but is stressful as shit and will vaporize the second I can’t get enough grants to fund my existence.

At the other end of the ‘stressful as shit’ academic scale are adjunct teaching positions where tenure is not an option (despite whatever Gap Ads may lead you to believe) and the pay is <40k and contracts are semester-by-semester - “I got a phd to do what now?”

Somewhere in the middle are people like my lovely and tenured partner, who earns almost exactly that ‘average’ salary and has tenure. Not sure I’d call her job low stress, but it does have an unusual level of security.

But my point is the majority of “university professors” are way under or way over that pay scale and either way extremely stressed, and the median ‘80k, low stress’ is actually kind of rare in these exciting neoliberal times.

The problem with this clickbait article is the above is true for any of the listed professions, both at the putative ‘worst’ and ‘best’ ends of the spectrum - there’s so much variation within any profession that the median/average is almost irrelevant.

5 Likes

ask to see their sampling technique :wink:

1 Like

Ten jobs I’ve had… one is a lie…

4 Likes

cough I can think of worse jobs than these. Cashier. Short order cook. “Hygiene Technician” at a fast food restaurant. Hell, cooking at a fast food restaurant. Wait-staff. Landscaper’s assistant. Suicide support line counselor.

What is this nonsense? Almost none of the jobs on this list pay minimum wage, yet an absolutely ENORMOUS amount of people work for just that.

10 Likes

Worse than industrial roofing?

I"m skeptical. Maybe the makers of this list never did it.

4 Likes