Comment by Cldfire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cldfire | Hacker News Reader

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I share this view myself, neat to see someone else feels the same way.

I'm a CS student and I've been working at a Panera for about a year now. I love my particular store and the work environment is great; I genuinely look forward to going to work every day. I'll miss my coworkers when I have to quit soon to start my programming career.

That being said, I understand why those jobs could never realistically pay anything near what a good software dev job can. If you could make the same amount of money working a job like that, why would anyone put in the effort to get stressed out as a programmer? It wouldn't make sense.

The solution is to fix dev jobs so they're more balanced and less stressful :)

I work in cybersecurity now, but worked retail for 7 years, fast food (Subway) for 6 years, and a ride op at a major theme park (Cedar Point) for 2 summers.

If I could work the ride op or fast food jobs at my current salary, I'd take them in a heart beat. Hell, I might even take the ride op job for half the salary because the job could sometimes be a lot of fun.

But retail? Hell no. You could offer me double my salary and I'd still hesitate before accepting it. People treat retail employees like utter garbage. We once had a customer berate a cashier to tears, yelling at her and literally calling her an "incompetent stupid bitch", because his credit card was being declined and he was insisting she was just entering his card wrong.

What if, to make it more interesting, we throw in the perk of having a cool boss that allows you to be rude back to customers?

I worked for a mom and pop hot dog/Italian beef joint in the Chicago suburbs in the 90s and that’s exactly what it was. A totally un-PC Italian family that didn’t take any shit and insisted you didn’t take any shit either.

It was a blast.

That...I might really consider.

There are a lot of dev jobs that are balanced and not stressful at all. Some dev can even come here during work hours ;)

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