The Best and Worst Jobs in the U.S. (2009)
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
18. Computer Programmer
What's the difference? We can barely decide what to call ourselves. Is there a correlation between job satisfaction and a disposition towards calling yourself an engineer?
There are the people who work at large corporations - think insurance, banks, major enterprise apps etc. They work on "boring" problems, but they also get paid well, and probably don't have a ton of stress.
There are startup people who get paid OK, plus owernship packages who work long hours, regularly have some heavy stress, but they "live the dream" - many are truly happy with their work situation.
There are folks like game programmers who are always on a death march, have 80hr weeks, but don't get paid very well to chase some dream. By many accounts, the end up burnt out/used up fast.
With such widely varying roles - it makes sense that there are multiple rankings in fairly different places on the list.
And in the organizations where I've worked - mid- to large-size, programmers are perceived - rightly or wrongly - as folks who just code, while the software engineers are perceived doing more than just coding - although a lot of people with that perception can't really explain what they think the "more" is. Don't shoot the messenger. :-)
The dictionary has any number of definitions for the term, but the most common seems to be "An unskilled laborer who lives by odd jobs."
If that's indeed the intended description, then we need to take a deeper dive into this issue. I suspect that we have quite a few "roustabouts" getting stuck at the bottom rungs of our labor force, and I'm not talking about illegal immigrants. There are large swaths of the country (particularly in the South and rural Midwest) where people are simply not keeping up with the education or "skills" necessary to remain relevant to the modern workforce.
In large part, this is where I hope services like Khan Academy, Udemy, etc., can start to make a serious impact. It's all well and good for highly educated, well compensated, relatively comfortable folks in the Bay Area to teach themselves a course or two in their spare time. That's awesome. But I'd love to see someone really tackle the training and education of those in our country being left behind.
It boils down to being a maintenance man / janitor at an oil drill site. All the weather, some of the danger, cruddy locale, but the pay isn't much better than working plant maint in a factory.
Probably a negative stereotype but roustabouts don't seem to sweat as much as the drill crew. Then again losing life and limb is kind of business as usual for the drill crew (well, its improved over the years...) but its moderately unusual to kill/maim a roustabout.
If you think about it, someone has to be stuck doing minor onsite maintenance. I mean, you're not going to pay the toolpusher $175K/yr to paint over rust, are you?
I had to LOL at the claim you need to live in the Bay Area to learn how to program, or somehow Khan Academy does IP blocking so only bay area folks can watch.
If you need 50K roustabouts to keep the oil flowing, and you teach them to be "CSS developers", then all you're going to do is crash "CSS development" into poverty and not get any oil. I'm not sure there's as much "force" or lack of choice as you think, and selecting a job you don't personally want doesn't make someone less of a person anyway.
I didn't say or imply either of those things, so I apologize if I wasn't clear. Rather, I'm suggesting that such sites have a lot of potential to make a serious impact in areas where people are most in need of skills.
I did come across oil field roustabouts in my Googling, and if that's the primary definition of the term as implied in this article, I stand corrected.
"selecting a job you don't personally want doesn't make someone less of a person anyway."
Again, I'm not sure where you're reading this into what I wrote. In no way whatsoever did I say, or even suggest that.
My personal policy is that, if someone's misinterpreting me, it's probably my bad. I probably wasn't clear enough. But honestly, I think you're reading a lot into my post that simply wasn't intended and/or wasn't there.
You may not like being called out, but it doesn't mean I was misinterpreting or reading into.
"I'd love to see someone really tackle the training and education"
Basically how can a plant maint / building super move up. Although, why exactly do they need to?
One logical upgrade path is trades, like electrician / plumber but that runs into license and union issues, and they mostly do OTJ anyway. I don't have the figures, but some roustabouts get killed OTJ trying to upgrade themselves without actually knowing as much as they think they do, aka I know I'm not an electrician but I'll "help" with that damaged wiring or whatever. An effective way to get killed is to think you're a rigger or think you're an ironworker, but not really know how to do it. This career field given actual training and OTJ supervision is a logical upgrade path for roustabouts.
Sticking in the oil field business you pretty much have to trade risk for money and promotion opportunity so you'll easily go into manual labor roughneck work on the drilling crew, but that's primarily OTJ and what non-OTJ exists seems to do pretty well. All the way up to petroleum engineer from a university.
Really the only gain you'll get from online would be transfer out of the biz entirely, go into "CSS web developer" or whatever. And you're not doing online from the middle of nowhere on land, or a offshore platform 250 miles from the nearest wifi... maybe satellite link or something you could download? Even if a roughneck decided to become a Scala coder in his spare time, now you've got a Scala coder in the center of north dakota with no job prospects within hundreds of miles... Because of this, I don't think online classes would have any impact at all?
Finally if you succeed, and "trap" a guy who likes to work outdoors and walk around eight hours/day and do hardware work into writing source code in a cube for 12 hours a day in the downtown of a city, you might have won by some popular societal standard of human worth, but has the guy who was trapped won? It can be a difficult perspective problem, but there are a lot of people who genuinely like working outdoors, or genuinely like working with their hands. Forcing them not to do that, is not exactly "fixing" them.
First: "Archaic insult" was in reference to the word itself, which, as I was saying, is something I've only ever heard as such. (Hence, the Monty Burns example). That was not a value statement; that was basically my saying this: "I've only ever heard the word used as X, therefore, I was surprised to hear it used as Y."
Second, in reference to "getting stuck," "left behind," etc., those are economic facts, not value judgments. Unemployment and underemployment are serious issues in our country. You seem to think I am looking down on the unemployed or underemployed, for whatever reason, and that is where the misinterpretation seems to begin.
My intent is just the opposite, in fact. I am suggesting that we have some interesting technologies capable of providing skills and training to those having a hard time finding steady or reliable work. (FWIW - I am not talking specifically, or even necessarily, about computer skills -- though that seems to be the strawman you're making of my post here). I am not making value judgments about blue collar workers, about oil field roustabouts, or about any of the categories of workers you're talking about. I am specifically talking about the underemployed, which is what I originally thought the word "roustabout" was being used to reference in this case. As mentioned, I stood corrected on "roustabout."
Somehow you're reading condescension or insult into what I'm saying, and once again, all I can say is that that was not the intent. I am not sure what more I can say. You're reading something into my posts that simply isn't there.
"You may not like being called out, but it doesn't mean I was misinterpreting or reading into."
Now you're just being dickish for no particular reason. I've gone to great lengths to explain my intent, and you seem insistent on misreading me. If I'm saying something you find stupid, great, that's life. I'm bound to say things others find wrong, and every now and then, I'm bound to say things others like. I'd like to think most of us here are like that. On the balance, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. Evidently you don't. Fine.
Nevertheless, I would suggest this: not everything is an argument. Not everything is a matter of "getting called out," or "winning," etc. I am honestly scratching my head at where you're getting all this from what I've been saying. But I'll give up on trying to explain myself further.
14th best job: Parole Officer
The other problem with the low rated occupations is the author doesn't want to work outdoors, therefore surely no one wants to, but part of the reason pay is so low to work outdoors is because so many people want to work outdoors (despite supposedly no one wants to do it). So that's how you end up with biology grads as foresters at $20K/yr (oh wait the article claims bio is 4th best job, now I'm confused)
The final distortion is several of the high ranking jobs are "winner takes all" much like professional sports. Yes a pro football quarterback is a great job; of course most people who want that job will never be able to get it. Lets see... I know a degreed mathematician working in a call center, an ageism-fired actuary not working at all, a biologist working at a retail food store deli, a sociologist working as a call center supervisor, a PHD philosopher working as an electrician, an astronomy grad working at a bookstore as a clerk. IF you are one of the small fraction of grads who get a job in the field, its great, but you'll probably be working retail. Of course accountants and parole officers DO always seem to be in demand.
This also happens in computers. Yes the top 1% of grads works at GOOG for $150K/yr, but the bottom half is unemployed or at best works a call center resetting passwords.
In the article, they're comparing the job security, high pay, etc. of a mathematician with the « it's not much, but I like it» of the lumberjack. Working as an actuary, I am impressed by how many of my coworkers got there because « hey! It pays » and are in fact (not so) secretly dreaming of changing jobs.
"What is the difference between an introverted actuary and an extroverted actuary? An introverted actuary stares at his own feet during a conversation, while an extroverted one stares at the other person's feet."
depends on the job. a software engineer could be stuck writing business forms.
conversely, you could be Nate Silver, the world's most famous and exciting actuary. in this case meaning "well paid guy who does stats and math".
When I went to university (late 90's), the web was still one big geo-cities, there was no such thing as smartphones. I lived in Australia, and unless you were extremely talented you would probably end up working a fairly low paid job doing fairly boring work. The world seems to be a far more exciting and potentially lucrative place for software engineers now.
The low-paying dangerous occupations are only that way because there's so many foolish men to take them up.
And you can blame the education system for turning out those foolish men - so a lot of that can be directly blamed on the corrupt teaching unions - whose main interest is in increasing pay and lowering work requirements.
This is where edu startups can come in and help society while earning money.
- Retrain the low pay workers into web designers and app developers. Gamify the education system and make profits by selling high-scoring students to corps that need them.
- Disrupt the teachers union with apps and websites that allow people to form ad-hoc schools outside the system - homeschooling 2.0.
As PG says - kill hollywood and kill government education.
* All sociologist jobs are government jobs? Citation needed.
* Dangerous low pay jobs are the result of public education system? This model lacks explanatory power. There have always been low-pay dangerous jobs. These occur in times and places where there is no public education system. They occur in times and places where there is a public education system. They occur in proportions (as related to other available jobs) that seem unrelated to the existence of teacher unions. Rather they seem to be a function of economic development level, with a healthy mix of labor law based restrictions.
Essentially, this rant seems to be off topic soap boxing. Given the "green" username - probably some form of sock-puppetry.
The sociologist in the article - getting paid over 120k. Read the article before jumping with rage.
Basic economics - the low pay is a result of oversupply of people willing to do the work. The oversupply is because many uneducated men being churned out from k12. k12 is run by teachers.
I'm quite sure you're a teacher or your parents were teacher, that explains the rage (By the way, one of my parents was a teacher, but I'm not going to use that to excuse the system).
The model you are proposing has great post-hoc explanatory powers within the united states - however it does not appear to have predictive powers over what we will find in other places and times. Therefore I question it's validity, until you can show how the same model applies to other situations, and can show exigent factors that are relevant when it doesn't apply. Again, this is not rage - this is merely not accepting an insufficiently explained model at face value.
FWIW (not that it matters): I am a software engineer/programmer, my parents are in sales and HR, my other family members are not in education either. I just think overly simple explanations should always be questioned.
As for the salary of a government worker - that depends on the job they do, the value they create etc. I don't know the details to make blanket statements. I think there is a tradeoff - good people doing the job requires competitive salary, paying bad salaries is generally more expensive as it requires more workers to do the same job.
The models are pretty simple - they are called supply and demand. They work for everything else in economics. Low pay for dangerous work is not so exceptional situation.
In poorer countries, there is even less pay for even more dangerous work, because education is even worse there. There's a few data points there.
And there's quite a lot of literature on the education system and teacher unions. To start off with their's Waiting For Superman (2010).
As for the attempt to derail over "politeness concerns" because I used the word rant - I won't bite.
By the way, very few of your comments have data backing them up, and often are just simple 'models' with some variables you wrote down mixed in with rudeness to other commenters.
I am merely requesting more information on your claims.
They said that the going rate for a single 12 hour weekend overtime shift was $2350 and that some of their "young lads" could clear 125k in a year. This is around 4 times the UK Median wage.
Miners in Australia also could command a very good wage