I’m a kiln operator. I run a giant oven to dry red and white pine.

Dropped out of uni. Various retail and tech jobs for about 12 years. 4 years disability. Took an interview at a lumber mill because ‘cool tour’, took a job because ‘paycheck for a little while anyway’. Ran a planer for about 6 weeks and then offered kiln operator when their previous was poached.

On the job learning for me with the caveat that it was not a reasonable expectation to set. Typically one works under a senior operator for about two years not ‘you’re on your own but you’re good at google right?’

Certified by my work for government heat treatment programs, front loader/forklift operation and working at heights. One of those jobs where mindset is more important than education.

Would I do it again? Yes? I’d want more money for the work. There’s not a lot of people who will write an algorithm to interpret the data they gather in a 50c box. It’s a really intense combination of intellectual and manual labor and the compromise seems to be to plop the pay in the middle. Good pay for a lumber mill but shit pay for developing processes, an inventory system and an entire goddamned iOS app(that my boss didn’t even understand much less appreciate).

I wouldn’t expect the door to be open again in the future. There’s not a lot of kilns to run, they are increasingly automated and it’s a job people hold til retirement. The manager who hired me took a massive gamble on a physically disabled but intelligent person so that’s not easy to find either. Owner runs under the ‘warm body is better than no body’ premise. There’s not even any other mills close enough with kilns that I have other employment opportunities. I’ve got a very specific and reasonably lucrative skill set for a rare job.

It’s becoming more common, but I work in the cannabis industry. People don’t tend to know much about exactly what I do and how weed sales works. The education and certification side of this is actually super unique. You do have to get a basic agent ID, but it’s really more of a background check than anything. But, because the rec market is so very new here, you are basically required to have broken the law extensively to have the knowledge and experience needed to sell weed. Everyone I work with has a criminal past, even if they never got busted. I talked about buying psychedelics on the darkweb in my interview, and my HR person knew exactly what the fuck I was talking about. It’s just one of the many wonderful things about working in cannabis <3

I’m an environmental chamber technician. I fix and test the equipment that does all of the temperature and humidity testing for most electronics from consumer grade stuff to stuff that is literally going into space. Basically an environmental chamber is just a programable box that is refrigerated and/or heated that you put stuff into to see how it performs at different temperatures. The ones I work on also often have programable humidity levels for testing equipment under basically any normal atmospheric conditions. The ones I work with are anywhere between the size of a household microwave and slightly larger than Volkswagen Beetle. The ones that don’t use liquid nitrogen can manage temperatures anywhere between 200C and -75C. The liquid nitrogen ones can of course manage temps as low as liquid nitrogen gets.

As far as education and certifications go, there isn’t much. In the US you do need an EPA 608 certification to work with refrigerants but that only cost like $100 (my employer covered it) and it’s a lifetime certification. Everything else was just on the job training. I just got mentored by some coworkers, did some independant study, and practiced. The biggest thing is just haveing a technical mindset. Troubleshooting is troubleshooting so basically if you’re someone who can usually figure out how to fix things on their own then odds are you could do my job with minimal refrigeration training.

As far as getting into the same niche today, I definitely would if I could find the job (it’s not all that common). I love working with refrigeration and troubleshooting these machines scratches tha puzzle solving itch in my brain. It’s fun to see the unique options that certain customers get like water cooled systems or liquid nitrogen boost units. Also seeing as how these machines need to be benchmarked at a known ambient temp, it is one the very few refrigeration related jobs that you get to do from a strictly climate controlled building. It is always exactly 23C in my work area because that’s exactly what our testing spec calls for. To top it all off the pay isn’t bad. I could be making a bit more in normal HVAC but not much more and, unlike HVAC, my equipment comes to me in my climate controlled shop. I don’t have to climb up on a roof when it’s 40C outside to fix someone’s AC.

I’m a geologist, but not the fun kind that gets to look at actual rocks.

I do environmental and some geotechnical work, which pretty much boils down to “Is the dirt poisoned?” and “How hard do I have to squish the dirt to make the future building not fall down?” There’s few things to get excited about, but it’s steady work and pays the bills.

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I work in the surgical pathology department in a hospital.

Anything you get removed from surgery comes to me to be examined. Then I describe what I have and what sort of pathology I can see with the naked eye. I select and cut out pieces of tissue that are important to the case. The tissue undergoes further processing and eventually reaches the desk of a pathologist (a type of physician) who examines the tissue microscopically, forms a diagnosis, and ultimately signs out the case.

My job can assist with several things depending on the case…

1. To help the clinician confirm or determine what type of lesion or disease process the patient has
2. To document and confirm that a surgery was necessary
3. To stage cancer cases
4. To make sure the patient does not have an unsuspected cancer

I see everything from tiny boring specks of tissue they biopsy during a colonoscopy to large cancer resection cases.

The other day, I got an almost entirely necrotic above the knee amputation with maggots. A few days before that I got a 9 lb spleen. It’s fun in the lab.

In the US, my job generally requires a very specialized 2 year master’s degree (on top of a bachelor’s degree in any subject). In other countries, the role of my job can be fulfilled by different types of people depending on the country and education will be different.

I found out about the job on Google lol. I was looking for something hands on in healthcare or anatomy related, but I didn’t like patient contact. I would probably select this career again if I had a second go around. It pays pretty well and is interesting. But grad school in the US is very expensive.

My main job is pretty commonplace but I moonlight as a fire performer. I got into it kinda by chance but it has consumed my life. I actually have to carry insurance and do have certifications to do fire. In fact, I’m licensed to write letters of recommendation for new performers. I also have to pull permits for it in my city.

I also do burlesque and sideshow, but there isn’t really a formal process other than deciding you want to try hammering a 5" nail into your head. Sideshow is best described as putting things where they DON’T belong. Being a social outcast and knowing people helps.

Would I do it again? Yes, it’s a fulfilling art form. But unfortunately the industry is superficial garbage, and the conditions of your birth will greatly affect the ratio between effort put in and success.

I basically failed out of engineering. It turns out I care more about people and systems, so I have a job at a City doing something called Asset Management. Which means I coordinate all the different ways the different departments take care of their infrastructure, and plan for the City to keep doing what they do for 50, 100 years out.

It’s a bit of people, relationships, organization work, finance, engineering, operations, data analytics, planning, risk mitigation, public consultation, blah blah blah. I’ve moved up in the industry to the point where I’m helping other city’s do similar work.

I work in a museum adapting internationally touring exhibitions to align with their host communities. It’s a great career - there’s travel, I get to see behind the scenes of museum collections, and I get to study other cultures as a job. I do get paid to match the fact that I work for a charity.

My background is in the museum sector, which you can get into either through a PhD in study of a relevant field to the specific museum, or through a graduate program in museum/ conservation studies (which is what I did).

So far as I can tell, there are only a handful of people that do this job globally, which I suppose makes it lesser known!

I have a typical job, but just today I was reading an article about different types of potatoes, and they quoted a post harvest potato physiologist.

For one glorious summer I was a small boat sailing instructor at a summer camp. My life was sitting on the beach and teaching kids to sail. I had a wonderful tan, and sun bleached hair. My life was stress free and wonderful. I got into it by learning how to sail at that very camp, and applying for the job. It paid minimum wage, but it also came with free room and board, and I was a kid, so I didn’t really need any money anyways.

I work at a ski place, partially with making snow.

No certs needed, mostly learn on the job type stuff.

A snowmobile license is very useful but hardly required.

I think given the choice I’d pick this again.

I’m a software sales engineer. I was a systems administrator that learned a really in demand product front to back, and incidentally had good people skills and presentation skills. The company contacted me when I left that job and I joined on.

I scope installs, perform architecture reviews, compete with other products, give presentations/demos/conference talks, do hands on training, happy hours, dinners, triage and escalate support issues…

It’s been life changing. No more oncall, West Coast / Silicon Valley benefits, lots of fun with customers, and absolutely stupid money in a good year.

Not everyone is cut out for it. It can be very stressful and high pressure, but those who can do very well for themselves.

I’m a metals engineer. I design and monitor processes to make metals with the right properties for a given application. That means lots of testing to prove it was done right, and testing usually means breaking shit to make sure it has enough strength and ductility.

It has pros and cons. The money is good and demand is higher than supply so it is pretty easy to find a good job, but it is a niche field so I have to go where the work is and aw(mm usually they put these places in the middle of nowhere in shitty republican states that have great corporate tax policies. It is also pretty much exclusively on-site work which means I have very limited choices of where I live.

I am a polymath and am good at lots of mathy sciencey things, I’m hindsight I probably would have picked something that allows for remote work. TBF remote work wasn’t much of a thing in 1995 when I chose this field but I wish now that I could work remotely.

All that said it is a good time and has treated me well so far.

I’m a county prosecutor (in the US). Prior to law school, I studied horticulture and worked on an industrial hazelnut farm. Law school only required an undergrad degree and a decent score on the Law School Amission Test (LSAT). Law School took 3 years and then a summer to study for the Bar exam. After passing the bar exam, one is generally qualified for an entry level attorney job with most DA offices, but the pay is generally slightly lower than you could find at a private firm.

However, government jobs are often sought out for because they don’t generally have a “billable hour” requirement. Billable hours are how attorneys generally charge for their services with a set price per hour. Most attorneys charge by 0.1 hours and each charge must have a statement explaining what it is the attorney did. This is sent to the client at the end of a job or month for them to know how much they owe. Most law firms require a out 1,600 hours per year (33 hours per week). An efficient attorney can probably get their ratio of billable hours to work hours to about 60%. This means if an attorney worked for 10 hours, they would generally only have 6 billable hours. This system often forces people to work longer hours to meet their requirements. However, if an attorney bills more than their requirement, they get a bonus based on amount of money brought in.

If I could do it again, I might do it. I generally like the work environment, pay, benefits, and coworkers, but someday I think I would have enjoyed a more physical job doing something interesting.