Looking forward to seeing some interesting jobs I haven’t really thought about. Bonus points if it’s an IT job.
I have been working in power plants for over ten years. Entry level plant operators can make six figures with a high school diploma. At a decent plant, you’ll be balls to the wall busy on 5-10% of your shifts, pretty steady with general routine stuff that’s mostly just confirming that shit is normal 80% of the time, and the remaining 10% is in outages which can vary between busting your ass and waiting around but it’s rough either way because you might be working every day for a few weeks. Every plant I’ve been to does 12 hour shifts with pretty frequent changes between days and nights, which is by far the worst part. You’ll have an easier time getting in and moving up if you are pretty good with STEM stuff, but you’re fine if you passed honors physics in high school. V=IR and PV=nRT will get you really far. Spatial reasoning skills are also really helpful.
I’m at a combined cycle natural gas plant where I started as an outside operator almost 3 years ago at $39.80/hour and am now a ZLD water treatment operator in the same plant at $52/hour; control room operators start at about $60/hour here. I had a really shitty 12 hour shift today so I earned every dime of that wage, but sometimes it’s only like 4-6 hours of work in a 12 hour shift and a bunch of reading or YouTube in between while monitoring everything. Even the tough shifts are kinda good sometimes because I get to work the puzzle part of my brain.
What starting jobs does your plant offer right now? Are they hiring? I’m not interested but I am wondering if your experience is colored at all by a different job market.
Did you have any experience prior to 3 years ago?
Not gonna lie: When I started reading your comment, I was fairly sure this was gonna be some kind of Simpsons joke.
The real Simpsons joke is affording a big house with a garage, two cars, three kids, pets, and vacations on a single income from a high school education. My wife and I are a DINK couple each with associates degrees in a two bedroom apartment with no pets.
D’oh indeed, Homer. D’oh indeed…
Garbage truck driver
I had a friend that worked garbage trucks. It was an early day but the pay was good and you’d be done with work by noon
It’s not an easy job. You’re constantly moving weights (the truck lifts the garbage bin, but moving a 120 lt bin full of garbage from its spot to the truck and back is not easy either). When your friends are done with their workday, it’s time for you to go to bed. You have to work with bad weather, because trash bins must be emptied no matter what. I work in the IT of the company that does the garbage collection in my area. My colleagues are not very enthusiast of their job, lol. But it’s a stable job, at least. Pay is decent, but I wouldn’t call it good. In other countries though, people doing the same job are getting paid better than in Italy
Ah yeah this was for a city in the US. It’s definitely not easy!
We have this in my city, so it’s literally just driving the truck https://youtu.be/QxhHkoz99D8?si=QWjJCJAZcqdXIXIo (I haven’t watched the full video, but it appears to just be 18 full minutes of our garbage trucks.)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/QxhHkoz99D8?si=QWjJCJAZcqdXIXIo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Honk honk
That’s one of the perks, yes
Mmmm… geese.
In the IT field particularly, if you like programming, Ada and COBOL are easy to learn, not desirable for young people because they’re not fashionable languages, and pay well because the old people that know them are retiring.
If you learn to code in COBOL, there will always be demand for your coding skills. But you’ll want to kill yourself because the only code you’ll ever get to work on is half-century-old spaghetti that has absurdly high uptime requirements.
I was thinking the same thing lately… Which organizations do you know of using these?
In the last fifteen years, I’ve worked at banks, insurance companies, and telcos on COBOL, and defence contractors and telcos with Ada.
There is always talk about replacing these huge legacy systems with something in Erlang, or Rust, or even Java (!); but some of these systems are more than fifty years old, with patches on patches, so in my opinion, replacement is going to be cumbersome and impractical.
Give it a decade or two, and Java will be the new COBOL
If you really want IT. Then telecom
Most people in telecom are old and are analog phone people, they don’t know ip/sip and don’t want to learn.
It’s basically a small networking job that you never get calls on nights and weekends about and if you do it’s a system you can reboot remotely. If it’s not the system it’s a switch and its someone else’s job.
Telecom isn’t sexy but it’s still needed, no one’s going into it as it’s not ‘sexy’ and to be honest it’s easy AF.
Telecom seems fantastic except it’s really hard to get into At&T or Verizon at the moment
Tech support for factory machines. I used to work in a fairly modern (in terms of products) factory, and the SMT assembly machines were positively archaic. Most were decades old by the time I quit, they all had their own quirks, and very few people who could troubleshoot them. The factory was shut down every weekend, and getting the machines to talk to each other and the server on Monday mornings was a ritual just short of praying to the Omnissiah.
Piggybacking off this, CNC machining has a lot in common if you don’t mind getting your hands just a bit dirty. It’s a lot less manual labor than you’d expect and you typically won’t ever have to deal with a customer.
GCODE is simple to pick up the basics if you have any familiarity with 3D coordinates and many colleges will offer a fast-track course for around $2-3k. Depending on the area, some shops will even cover this cost while you’re starting.
I’ve done some gcode but moved onto other programming(mostly c# so completely different. One thing I HATED about gcode, I don’t know if it was just my machines or gcode in general(most of mine were based on fanuc cnc controllers typically seen as top of the line) , we were not able to name variables.
I create a variable and assign it #315. What does #315 do? What does it mean? Who knows… Better have notes or comments to explain or your fucked. I can’t say variable x_offset_tool_15 nope…just #315.
I worked with Fanuc control machines for 20 years up until 2023. Sounds like you were needlessly in macro hell. Just declaring an offset will use either an H (typically height) or D (typically a radius offset in Fanuc controls, but sometimes they are setup for diameter).
It would go something like this:
G40G49G80G90 (CLEARS OUT POTENTIALLY PREVIOUS GCODES); T1M06 (EXECUTES A TOOL CHANGE, LEAVE OUT M06 IF JUST DECLARING THE TOOL); G43H01 (DECLARES H01 AS THE HEIGHT OFFSET); G00ZO.O1 (MOVES THE TOOL 0.01 ABAOVE WORK); G41D01X1.0 (DECLARES LEFT HAND TOOL OFFSET AS D01);You don’t need true macro variables for 9/10 applications, or general operation. I feel like you got placed on some overenginered solution.
If you learn graphic design and are good with IT then there’s a lot of small companies that need an ‘everything guy’.
You see them advertised as graphic design jobs but with executives assistant responsibilities in the descriptions.
Machinist, electronics, or glass shop at a large university. Half make more than most professors (although that isn’t saying much)
In Norway, fishing has the reputation of being a good fit for many who struggles with more theoretical professions while being very, very well paid. Like highly paid IT consulatant sallary.
Dental Hygienist. They make like $40/hour to clean people’s teeth. It only requires an associates degree and you can get it from community college (aka cheap).
That’s actually pretty tempting… I’ve wondered if I could hack it in dentistry before.
If you aren’t risk adverse I hear undersea welders make a ton.
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It wasn’t when I took it, but condominium superintendent. I fell into it. It’s very minor work since all the repairs are done by contractors. I’m just a homesteader essentially, I get up and make sure the property is cared for.
I get paid $50k a year plus benefits, pension, Union, and I get a rent free condo unit, free internet and cable, free phone.
The free apartment saves me roughly $2500 a month on rent, in this ridiculous city I live in, so that alone makes this job extremely worth it
General handyman is also a good job if you know what your doing. Lots of smaller condo associations would love a someone they can pay $40/hr to fix a mailbox, paint a sign, fix siding, paint a deck, replace shingles, change light bulbs, talk to contractors, etc.
How did you land this job and what country are you in?
I just took a job as a condo cleaning staff to make extra money. The fact that I was younger guy, who speaks perfect English made me kind of an elite hire for the cleaning industry.
So once a building needed a super while one was on vacation, I tried it. After that, I just got a call from the company owner one day saying a condo needed a live in super, so I went in for an interview.
All I had to show was that I have common sense and I’m able to put together an email/incident report.
have you had to evict people yet?
Condos are privately owned, so any renters in the building are the individual unit owner’s concern. I only deal with the common areas and amenities, if there’s a flood in a unit I can shut off the water and call a plumber. If there are any other issues in a unit, I can suggest contractors for the owners to call. My job is mainly to coordinate contractors, keep an eye on things and make sure stuff is getting done.
If I ever have any residents who are causing issues, I just pass it up to the manager and condo board, so I don’t have to deal with confrontations or anything like that.
Database Administrator (DBA) can be a lucrative position with a low barrier to entry. Can bridge nicely into data science/AI if you want to go that route. Data is the new oil, and AI/LLMs are the refineries.
Learn FORTRAN, and you’ll be set for life.
COBOL
I’m listening… Where will I use it?
Where will I use it?
In the heart of every financial company that has been around for longer than 30 years, lies old code.
The keys to their kingdoms are made from the old code. The old guard has a foot in the grave, and the finance people will pay through the nose to keep everything exactly how it is.
There are a lot more jobs in the medical profession than doctor or nurse. It’s indoors so climate controlled. There’s 2 yr programs that start out around 60k a year.
Electrician, especially if you’re ok with relocating. So many places around the world lack electricians when the infra just keeps growing everywhere.
