Looking forward to seeing some interesting jobs I haven’t really thought about. Bonus points if it’s an IT job.
[off topic]
Try this book. “Discover What You Are Best At.” Linda Gail. First half of the book is a series of self administered tests to see what you are good at. Things like math, mechanical problem solving, interpersonal skills etc. Second part is a listing of jobs that use those skills.
I’m curious about tests like this. I took a couple when I was younger and it pointed me a lot of places that had nothing to do with my current job. So I’m not sure how much value I place on them, but if it helps people point themselves in the general direction they want to go I guess that’s good.
I was easily able to push the test I did in high school to exactly what I thought I wanted to do with my life. It said cook/chef which for me made sense at the time I was spending 3-4 hours a day in the school kitchen making the meals for the students and teachers.
It definitely taught me I didn’t want to spend my life in a kitchen. Too many drunks and chain smoking assholes in kitchens.
Pretty cool suggestion! Thanks! :)
It actually changed my life, so I love letting folks know about it. Good luck.
I can relate. Many books have changed my life in more or less strong ways. Simplify your life and 7 habits of highly effective people were two of them. I‘ll check it out. Have a good one.
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
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.
I had a friend who managed a huge building of both private owned and rentals. it was trip what people did on their way out. some nightmare scenarios. and some people would give him things like a kitchaid mixer or old stereos or furniture etc. the evictions and occasional death were the hardest on him. he lasted about 7 years before the management company changed hands and started messing with his deal.
That’s amazing.
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.
Thanks for sharing. Sounds like you got a nice setup.
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).
Dental hygiene is a pretty awful field for most people though - there’s a lot of depression and heart problems from having to cause people pain (even if you logically know it’s good for them). This is a great option for some people but if you consider yourself empathetic I’d urge some caution.
Some people also don’t brush or just have putrid breath
Sounds like the perfect job for a sadist with a busted olfactory bulb!
That’s actually pretty tempting… I’ve wondered if I could hack it in dentistry before.
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.
How would you prepare for telecom? I’ve got a background in IT and have been trying to switch to Software Engineering by learning React and TypeScript. Would the skills compare at all?
No idea if those skills would be transferable. I was on the small to mid sized biz side. Never worked for a provider or anything. Mainly managing, installing and configuring systems.
Once you understand the basics of telephony it’s pretty easy. It’s getting more complex now since it’s all ip/sip based but because that’s a skill that is lacking because everyone who does know that wants to be a network or security guy, not the phone guy/gal.
If you are working it now. Figure out who’s doing your phones and express interest in learning. It’s how everyone I know got into it.
System admin skills are key. Your script skills are great. Tons of good resources online. Check out teams, Cisco, 5nines, and their competitors
Telecom seems fantastic except it’s really hard to get into At&T or Verizon at the moment
You don’t need to work with the big guys.
Small businesses, managed service, utilities, hospitals all need telecom guys. Ive been out of telecom for years and I still have recruiters occasionally reaching out to me.
All of this is true. I work with telcom and it is needed in all these areas. I’d add schools, government, anywhere with lots of phones.
Trades. Become an electrician or a plumber or any number of other skilled contractor position. Financially you’ll be set for life.
18 hours too slow, I was. Should’ve read the comment section before throwing my two cents in.
Union trades. That’s where the money is, unfortunately for this conversation few areas have full union coverage.
I’ve worked in NYC. You can not do much in commercial buildings without union help.
Helped change a water heater at my parents place. Got quoted 1k in labor. Took us a little less than 2 hrs of actual work to do it. Had to buy new flexible connectors and Teflon tape. Possible fire or water damage is no joke so i understand the hesitation to DIY, but the work is pretty straight forward.
Trades are absolutely a viable option. There will always be a need.
The difference between what you did and what a licensed plumber will do is liability insurance. If you somehow accidentally broke a pipe or something, home owner insurance might decide you’re the one to foot the bill for repairs, flood damage included.
It is totally worth it. That being said, I did the same thing a month ago.
Well, idk about set for life. Most trades I know spend all their money on toys, and get too old physically before realizing that maybe they should’ve been saving for retirement all those years.
I had a travel job broadly under the umbrella of trades, we were pulling like 85k+ between overtime and per diem working 6 days a week. Maybe 2 months into this job we were having some meeting about the upcoming 2 week break for Christmas and one of the younger guys makes some comment about missing out on hours and says ‘man we’re broke’.
I’m just sitting there like ??? I thought you guys were exaggerating about the $1k+ nights at strip clubs. I had already maxed my ira contributions and run out of things I could think of to waste money on.
An Arborist I knew made bank, but threw it down the sink with every paycheck.
Be sure to learn how to invest kids, compound interests pays well and you don’t have to work doing something you hate if your money works for you.
This is not a universal truth. I am a union electrician and I make decent money but I am most certainly not set for life. It takes some significant overtime but it’s not uncommon for guys to take home 6 figures.
HVAC. Takes just as much to learn as other trades but you make way more money.
Machinist, electronics, or glass shop at a large university. Half make more than most professors (although that isn’t saying much)
Offshore seismic survey. The positions vary in title, but technician, observer, seabed logger, etc are, quite honestly, easy as fuck. If you’re able to display reasonably good troubleshooting skills and adaptability to a “different” kind of job, you’re golden. Pays quite well too. Your background certainly plays a role, but it’s more about being the right kind of well-rounded personality.
Pros: Computers, heavy machinery, robotics, nice people, loads of travel, nice ships (most of them, at least), five weeks at home to do whatever you want, well paid.
Cons: Five weeks offshore gets tiring, you sometimes find yourself in the shittiest shitholes in the world, the work can be really repetitive and boring, and if you’re unlucky you will find yourself on a ship with shitty food.
Source: I used to be one. Now I hold a more specialized supporting role instead. Been in the industry since 2008, and before that I had no fucking clue what I wanted to do with my life. It didn’t take me long after to figure out “what I want to be when I grow up”. I’m now 41, not quite a grownup, but I definitely am happy with my career.
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.
Unit Clerk here is a 4ish month course plus a practicum. GF is union and gets shift premium for working outside business hours.
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.
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.
The course I took in college had 2 required classes for COBOL. A large majority of students did not like it, but I understand why it was (and still is) being taught. Huge demand. I enjoyed it at first, but then gradually started to dislike it, especially when getting into more complex problems. I’d have commically large files where 60-70% of the file itself is taken up by data definitions. Not to mention that the logic itself could probably be a fraction of the size in higher level languages… Not forgetting to properly tab your code was also hard to get used to. I’d consistently lose marks on that.
If you can learn to love it, it’s probably a fantastic career path…
Those who do enjoy it, I really do envy you. I really did want to like it, but it just didn’t work out.
Currently working on a programme of work for a huge client whose core system is still running the same COBOL spaghetti that was written in the 80s. The demand for COBOL developers to support or update these systems, and the compensation they get, is wild.
Ok, installing COBOL now 😂
Give it a decade or two, and Java will be the new COBOL
People have been saying that for like a decade now
A decade ago I said it was 3-4 decades away
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.
The finance sector has been good to me, worked at the same place for 8 years, was well paid, got laid off due to cutbacks as my skills were not needed anymore, but got a good deal and am now at another finance company earning more and doing more interesting stuff.
My roles have all been in IT.
IT in finance sounds wonderful. I would love to target an SRE position at the big banks but that’s too far off right now
If you don’t mind, what set of skills got you employed ?
I don’t mind, I have two trade school educations in IT, both dealing with networks, one also focusing on Windows servers, active directory, stuff like that, the other focused on Linux.
I then started working at helpdesks, and at my last job I started as a helpdesk technician, and wuickly got tasked with managing their Linux systems in addition to being part of an advanced internal helpdesk dealing with everything from ordering equipment to configuring AD policies and Microsoft 365 systems while also being a VIP tech for the top managment.
The VIPs and Linux stuff was never the main focus, but I learned a lot, and combine that with my personallity of being patient and positive I had a great time and made a huge impact on the company.
I can’t say too much about my current place of work due to NDA, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done, and I have tried to hit the ground running.
Please also not that this is a European perspective.
If you want advice on what you should focus on to improve your chances, I can share a few insights…
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Right now, IT is moving everything to the cloud, you don’t have to like it, but you have to deal with it.
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This does not mean that traditional skills from running servers are useless, it jist means you need to apply them in other ways.
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Networking can’t be completely run in the cloud, even if the management portal is located in the cloud, you still need switches, routers, access points and firewalls on site.
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Linux will suddenly pop up, learn how to navigate it, how to manage files, especially permissions, learn the basics of vi and nano, vi exists on every normal Linux system, nano is not uncommon and is far easier, but it is not uncommon to find it missing on servers.
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Working with AI is a fad right now, it will be of less improtance in the next years, but new AI and LLMs are constantly being improved and users will learn how to use the tool more effectively, learn how to use it now, so that later when it matters far more you will be prepared.
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Most improtantly of all, have an artistic hobby outside the computer, it is increadibly improtant to have a creative outlet, for me it is photography, I bought a Panasonic Limix S5 with several lenses last spring, upgradibg ftom the Lumix GX80, and I get rid of a lot of stress by taking photos, and it is fun to show my coworkers my new photos and gear.
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Ones I’ve experienced because of healthcare and would’ve otherwise not really known about—
US tech CT Tech Xray Tech Medical Simulation Tech/Actor (this varies, can also be IT. Med sim centers need a ton of IT) ECMO Perfusionist
https://80000hours.org/ probably has information relevant to you, and they do have specific comments about IT roles, and many careers they talk about are related to computers in some way.
