Best: setting my own hours
Worst: having to actually follow the hours I set two weeks ago
Best: Casual work environment, Monday-Friday work schedule, Day shift
Worst: Small businesses shenanigans and problems like lack of health insurance and occasional late paychecks to name a few. The workplace is dysfunctional. There are very little safety standards. There is a complete and utter inventory mismanagement problem. There are no standardized procedures, especially for training. There is difficulty in hiring new and retaining new employees. The long time employees are leaving due to retirement, health issues, or just utter frustration and dissatisfaction, and they’re taking all of their knowledge and experience with them.
Some long-timers recently quit, including the business owner’s son who’s also the person who hired me. They quit because they were doing the jobs of multiple people and having more responsibilities and job duties tacked on to them. Even the IT guy is trying to fix the inventory situation at the off-site warehouse even though the business owner said he was looking to hire an inventory specialist.
Best: Working with patients. People are hilarious, touching, aggravating, endlessly interesting.
Worst: Dealing with the for-profit American healthcare system. Chronically understaffed, the complete lack of social support system outside the hospital makes our efforts virtually meaningless in so many cases.
Am critical care nurse.
Software engineer. My company has been hiring low budget contractors instead of full time engineers. Training and onboarding people always has a cost, so the revolving door nature of this hiring method is already a problem, but the people we’re hiring are also very low skilled and take more of the rest of the team’s time hand-holding them through easy tasks
OK, so what’s the worst thing then?
Best: helping the animals, improving their living conditions and treatment, giving them toys and treats
Worst: killing the animals and witnessing some horrible diseases/injuries
Best: Defending peoples’ honor
Worst: Stage fright
IT Sysadmin
Best: get your play with multi million dollar computer systems.
Worst: paperwork. Change management is a necessary horror and is only getting worse.
Best thing is I’m retiring in 18 days, at age 58.
Worst thing is the next 18 days.
Congratulations from someone who has no hope of retiring in the next ten years of my life lol. My parents both retired at your age though. Enjoy it!
I’ve watched enough buddy cop movies to know this is the most dangerous time in your career.
Just when I think I’m out… they PULL ME BACK IN!
(not gonna fukn happen)
Best: 1. My coworkers 2. Getting to see wild and crazy cases.
For exampke with the latter: I had an extensive gallbladder resection specimen for a very rare type of gallbladder cancer the other day. I had never seen a tumor so large completely encasing a portion of the gallbladder and extending into the liver. Was crazy to be able to see and feel something so bizarre.
Worst: 1. Monotony 2. Can be streasful
Best: Get to solve logic problems, create, and learn. Somehow get paid for this.
Worst: Interviewing between jobs requires a different set of skills than the everyday work.
Source: Unemployed software engineer.
Solve this series of textbook algorithm problems using OOP in 5 minutes or less so we can see if you’re good enough to spend the next 5 years maintaining a site designed in the early 2000s that is basically just a bunch of JavaScript and one giant main as a backend
Best thing about my job is the flexible hours. I get to spend a lot of time with my kids, even do my hobbies sometimes, ride my bike, play video games, cook, visit friends, etc. I mean, I don’t really have a ton of time for that stuff after the chores, but at least work doesn’t ask much else of me and it’s fairly low stress.
Worst thing about my job is it doesn’t come with a paycheck. I’m unemployed.
Best: Trusted working hours and WFH(no time keeping but you lose overtime)
Worst: Deadlines and many many projects
Best: the real work part of it and my coworkers
Worse: the few terrible clients I have
Best: unlimited free coffee, lots of free cake and sandwiches etc
Worst: 5am wake-ups several days a week. Customers suck. The public are idiotic assholes.
Best: I’m good at it and I self taught in 18 months what was supposed to take 5 years. Having something(s) to take pride in is strange and nice.
Worst: I’m bored now but very busy.
This was a very hard question to answer in a short format. Well done.
What is it though?
By title I run the kilns at a lumber mill. That was the biggest skill and learning. Their previous operator got poached and they had no one cross trained so ‘figure it out’. Had nothing to work with so developed my own inventory and moisture tracking system and a few statistical modeling tools to predict the moisture variability. Part of making that inventory system somehow led to doing project management for a 3 person ios dev team in Turkey. Basically I found a couple of textbooks online, don’t function without computers and just kind of went from there.
There may be one other person that reads and understands this but fwiw I tested a kiln charge that was for a heat treatment order on Thursday after it was dressed at the planer. Customer requested 12% MC. I hit 12.2% MC average with a standard deviation of 1.2. Cut dates range of 1 week prior to 3.5 months prior. Piled air dry and standard box piled mix. Sales guy had an order to fill for a face size we ran low on and said ‘do your best’.
I also run the round saw filing cnc machine(I make saws sharp) as another ‘we need someone to figure this out’. It is painfully boring but I eliminated about 12k/week in opportunity cost in my first 60 days of doing it so they won’t let me stop.
I also fill in driving front loaders on a regular basis. I can run forks, grader blade or bucket. If you ever want to learn about Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor drive a front loader for a bit.
And occasionally I fill in on the planer if they need help with a set up.
Hired June of 2021 from 4.5 years of disability and 10 years in Apple retail. I put in my resume because I figured it would be a cool tour and took the job figuring I’d wash out in the 90 day probation period. Just over 2 years later and I’ve learned a few skilled trades and I’ve personally improved the business’ margins in 3 different areas.
That’s awesome actually. Hopefully they compensate you well for your contributions.
Thank you! Like I said in my OP it’s weird to be proud of myself and something I’ve done.
It’s not bad by any means and I’m pretty lucky. I make the Canadian median wage(54k/yr) with no post-secondary and almost 6 years of disability in 18 years of working. I’m doing fine but it’s frustrating to be able to point to multiples of my income that I’ve pushed personally(in a 200 person operation) and still have to fight for a greater than inflation wage increase.
I’ve got irons in the fire and plan to be moving on in the next year or so. Need to get a hold of someone that can do patent discovery.
