Restaurant work in general is hell on earth. I’d peg it as better than retail in terms of quality of life. But purely based on the fact that most food/bev workers are excepted from, or just don’t get, most important labor protections it certainly should be sitting near the bottom.
If I had to guess these guys were just looking at averages of annual income. And then pegging them against some other similarly simple metric. Restaurant work often looks decent enough on paper. A cook for a decent, well run, resto group can make what looks like a healthy salary. You know $45k plus. But you peg that against the hours involved. 16 a day, 7 days a week. No benefits. No sick or vacation time. It doesn’t come out too shiny. Same deal front of the house. Those limited markets where a server can walk out with $60K a year make it look plausible. But most of us are making sub $30k. For an absurd amount of hours. Every weekend. Every holiday.
And yet somehow, you’re more likely to die of a heart attack or stroke. Go figure.
If you work in video games, maybe pick up Japanese and work there? Apparently they treat their QA people like another 9-5 employee.
For sure. I happened quite by accident to get interested in my eventual career in high school, which turned out to have good job prospects. My folks could afford to send me to college. I managed to find a job that suited my personality as well as my skill set. I wish everyone could get chances like that.
On the other hand, I guess I did a good job taking advantage of opportunities.
It is funny, but my son and I were talking about this last night over dinner. My Dad has set an example for us that is pretty hard to live up to.
He certainly was not wealthy. The opposite, really. But somewhere in his youth he saw an airplane, and that was settled, in his mind at least. He literally walked into a USAF recruiters office and asked specifically what would be required of him to fly jets. They told him what college degrees would be mostly likely to get him into flight school. So he did that, and came back with the right engineering degree in hand. And so it went.
But luck does enter into it in several places. He was lucky to find a recruiter who actually had the right answer to his questions. He had no physical disqualifications, which is what gets a lot of people. And he was born into a family that encouraged education and the sort of stubbornness that is required to just persist in single minded pursuit of that sort of goal. And none of his planes exploded, nor did he get shot down.
But my son really does think that the rest of us are completely squared away and following a well though out plan, and he feels like he is muddling along filled with uncertainty, and doomed to eventual spectacular failure. Those feelings are completely normal. I see him as much more focused than I was at his age. He has only ever wanted to do one thing. I tried out all sorts of diverse and exciting careers. But of course he only sees his Mom and I how we are now, after we worked through all the fits and starts and dead ends.
I am glad to have the skills, I suppose. After we came to the US, we moved a lot for Dad’s postings. That always meant building a house wherever we were moving to. Dad’s clever plan was to have me work with every trade involved in the process, from the surveyors to the trim carpenters, and everything in between. After four houses and associated barns and shops and outbuildings, I was able to do most of those jobs with some competence. To the point where I would get a call if a crew needed an extra man on some unrelated job. Some of those jobs were industrial roofing jobs. In central Texas.
So I got a sweet job with a big residential construction company. Assistant Superintendent of a development planning several hundred homes. And I, at 18 years old, would go out with the surveyors and decide which plan would work well in that lot, and how the house would be oriented, then proceed to order the materials, schedule the crews and inspections, and take responsibility that that house would be ready to move in on the projected date. I was pretty good at it, and was making great cash. I almost did not go to college. But Dad had a little talk with me, and my plans changed.
I’d like to mention another difference I’ve noticed through the years between programmers and software engineers:
Patents.
I had the amazing good fortune to work for an actual honest-to-god computer company with actual R&D going on. Hardware (from the chip up!); operating systems and partition managers and file systems; and the applications that ran on top, plus some management tools. A lot of the guys I worked with (and ahem*), had patent plaques on their office or cubicle walls.
Now I work in the same office. There’s a tiny sliver of the old organization doing maintenance work; most folks work on unrelated applications. No patent plaques that I know of. Short-timers and contractors don’t have the time or encouragement to work on original work on the side.
It is. HR and business people come up with silly titles to market the job openings and make people feel good about promotions. But their meaning varies widely from one place to another. Here are rankings from some of the places I’ve seen:
At one place:
Programmer - just a junior code monkey who needs to be told how to do things as well as what to do, bottom tech rank
Developer - can do everything related to developing a system, from concept and design to implementation, deployment, operations, and maintenance; directs the programmers
Engineer - could do what a developer can but speaks well and looks good in a suit, so instead spends most time on sales calls, going on site visits to impress big clients, or in meetings with management
At another place:
Developer - just a junior code monkey, a new hire that may turn out to be a programmer or a UI designer or even a manager, but isn’t really good at anything yet
Engineer - leveled up to doing more challenging programming, but still does some UI design; directs the developers
Programmer - selects technology to use, does the code design/architecture, and handles the infrastructure, top tech rank
At a third place:
Programmer - just a junior code monkey who needs to be told how to do things as well as what to do, bottom tech rank
Engineer - leveled up to doing more challenging programming, but still does some UI design; directs the programmers
Developer - can do everything related to developing a system, from concept and design to implementation, deployment, operations, and maintenance; directs the engineers
This is partly why there are so many articles like “Career Advice: Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer” and “Career Advice: Do Call Yourself A Programmer”, “The Myth of the Full Stack Developer”, arguments about whether software engineers should really be called engineers, etc. The title means ‘just what the person saying it chooses it to mean - neither more nor less’, as Lewis Carroll would say.
I’m glad for you that your Dad had the perspective to nudge you towards that path. Things that are good to do are worth doing sooner rather than later.
