Comment by capableweb
3 years ago
Yeah indeed. Coming from someone who had to work with physical labor before I started programming, software developers don't know how good they have it.
"The pay isn't great", "treated far too shabbily", "dealing with bugs and bad decisions", "inadequate processes" and so on, sucks when development is the only thing you've dealt with, but you have no idea how it is to actually have a blue collar job if you're actually complaining about those things.
I think cs137 and others like them should try to have a part-time job at McDonalds (or whatever that is not in front of a screen), because it will make you love your software engineering job again.
My first job was fast food too. Except for the pay, the grease, the unpredictable and strict hours, and the cleaning of bathrooms, I'd love to take a job like that up again.
There's stress, but it ends at the end of the breakfast/lunch/dinner rush, not a constant low-grade stress over the whole day and often lingering into the night from unfinished JIRA tickets.
Then there's mostly chatting and hanging out with interesting people, either kids with dreams or adults with off-the-beaten-path lives (not an endless stream of white collar adults who only have stories about how they went to a bbq or just had another kid) while cleaning or prepping food, helping a customer here and there. Some customers were assholes but they'd be gone a few minutes later and you'd go back to other things. And because it's a public facility sometimes my friends would stop by just to say hi and shoot the shit for a few minutes.
And I was much healthier then too, despite working fast food. Mainly because I spent my day moving instead of being stuck in a chair.
I also worked a retail, a warehouse, and a factory job. The retail job was even better because you didn't have to deal with the grease or cleaning bathrooms, and the customers were somewhat nicer. If it paid remotely near what I make now I'd probably switch to that tomorrow.
Factory job was probably the toughest. More isolating, no A/C in the summer, more constant stress, more physically demanding, mandatory 10 hour days for weeks sometimes, and there was an incident where a drunk forklift driver almost knocked a tower of heavy steel racks on top of me. I quit the next week.
Any white collar job looks better than McDonalds. It’s a ridiculous comparison.
I could say McDonalds workers don’t know how easy they have it. They should try picking fruit as a seasonal immigrant, because it will make them love working at McDonalds.
> picking fruit as a seasonal immigrant
And those seasonal immigrant fruit pickers don't know how easy the have it. They should try being kidnapping victims chained in a basement, waiting to be tortured to death by an axe-wielding maniac.
That's the problem with "you can't complain, somebody else has it worse" - I can always think of somebody who has it worse.
I'd argue being kidnapped and chained to the wall is software engineering. Our handcuffs are just gold
> Any white collar job looks better than McDonalds. It’s a ridiculous comparison.
I've had a colleague who was paid worse as a software engineer than his previous job as a McDonald's burger flipper. I also have software engineer friends who were paid minimum wage as software engineers.
I learned from that that having a high-value skill means nothing if you're not willing to take action to extract that value.