It's amazing that front of house staff are making $80-90k. That's starting salary for engineers in many parts of the country. Absolutely boggling.
I’m not holding my breath for my European government retirement benefit to actually be useful in thirty years, to be honest.
Engineers outside of American tech centers are generally highly underpaid.
That said it's easy to look over the skills of some of these folks. Being able to be gracious and provide a good customer experience for 8+hrs/day in a hectic environment requires skills that take effort to learn and maintain.
"With the service charge, our servers were making $38 per hour (hourly base + hourly service charge) or the equivalent of $70,000 to $80,000 a year if you were working for us full-time."
In comparison with my more experienced co-workers that were offering cut-rate deals, I garnered more respect and support, had higher client satisfaction, and almost every client I had decided to stay in my book of business during transitions.
Charge a lot. Be good enough to deserve it. Use that impostor syndrome to up your game.
Part of my issues also were ADHD made it really hard to stay on task and focus but now I'm on meds for that and I'm super focused when I'm in my office, I'm also really neat and orderly around the house lol.
I picked vue because I prefer it's templates to jsx, and I like vuex and it's sort of well documented for use with laravel. But if I hadn't picked vue, I'd have gone with react because of market domination.
I'm currently even thinking of pivoting from laravel to node based backends because it seems js devs make all the $$... and I'm not so locked into laravel that I can't move or jump to other frameworks.
The more you know the more you can charge...I have many friends who target a specific vertical like Fintech that charge between $100-200/hour for js/node development as freelancers. Working on teams I've made around $35/hr, solo depending on the client I've pitched 40-60... I work w/ a lot of small businesses who that's on the high end for them --they're used to wordpress devs at $25 or less per hour on upwork.
Clojure being a bit obscure though, I think freelance would be harder to secure, but a full-time gig at a shop/agency or startup who's apps are built on that framework would be easier, as long as you have a good portfolio and very active github showing activity w/ that.
What industries do you understand? How can you add business value?
How do you pay for housing in SF with $900/mo or less?
If it's a standard 40 hour work week then I agree - it's much higher than I thought.
Not to mention, good waiters know about food, wine, spirits and have the soft skills required to put up with people who frequent restaurants.
Anyhow, barrier to entry is a bad excuse. Education does not equal a good living.
> Education does not equal a good living
No but it is heavily correlated with one.
There are plenty of restaurants that will hire an 18 year old with no experience and literally no qualifications to be a waiter. Lots of places when they are looking for experienced staff just hire anyone who had any waiting experience. They aren't nearly as picky as development managers.
I don't know of any software companies that will just hire an 18 year old to write their code without any training or experience. Without a 4 year degree I've seen it take people usually a year or longer of spending all of their free time coding to get their first coding job.
But if you think it's as easy to get your first waiting job as software engineering job(which is very different from my friends experience who has done both), what do you think is the cause of the wage discrepancy?
And they'll likely be working in a chain restaurant barely making more than minimum wage, not breaking $20K per year.
> Lots of places when they are looking for experienced staff just hire anyone who had any waiting experience.
And again, waiters in such a situation will likely not be making much money.
To actually make $60K or more as a waiter, you need to have selling ability, wine knowledge and the skills to get into a better restaurant. You likely won't see anywhere close to this until you have 5 or more years of good experience (not unlike getting a traditional education).
If you're working at Chili's (or equivalent), lets say the average person spends $30. You serve 30 people in a night, that's $900 in sales (18% is $160). Now let's say you work in a high end steakhouse, steaks can run $50 each, appetizers $25 each, and then there's wine. Bottles can run anywhere from $50 to thousands. But let's say you sell a $120 bottle, which is a pretty common price-point in those types of restaurants. For a table of 2, 2 appetizers, 2 steaks and that bottle of wine adds up to $135/per person. Times 30 people per night, around $4K in sales, with tips being $780 (although, in reality, some of that goes to your support staff - bussers, host, sommelier).
Anyhow no, a coder won't get a great job right away. And a server won't get a lucrative job right away. You still need to build up to that point in the restaurant industry. You can't just do what cooks and waiters do at places like Eleven Madison Park, Benu, Saison, etc... without lots of training and experience.
So why shouldn't it be a possibility for a restaurant worker to make a 'professional' income?
I'm not arguing that a restaurant worker shouldn't make a professional income, I'm arguing why they don't.
Do you think it's a conspiracy by restaurant owners to keep down wages?