Started applying today to put my feelers out there to see if anyone even responds. Like the best I can find is $18 an hour factory work. This was the same kind of work that existed during covid, nothings changed! It’s still shit!!
$18 an hour is about the most I’ve ever made at any job.
Until you get everything financially lined up, it’s better to have work than no work.
Seems like more and more job listings are also just fake. This year my work started requiring a full job listing and application process (including interviews) for promotions within the same role where all that changes is the pay scale. You ask the people in HR why we’re having to do this for roles where literally no external candidate could ever possibly be considered (because they deliberately understaff and wouldn’t hire a new employee) and they just stare at you blankly.
Legal, you have to post all positions
I don’t know what’s sadder, how little $18/hr really is with today’s prices, or that despite that it’s still more than twice the national minimum wage.
the real jokerfying thing is that even low paying jobs are now competitive
Trvke. Like I know they’re getting a sick enjoyment out of it.
“Ooooh, we just had sooooo many GREAT choices for this cashier position. We went with the Harvard PhD. Sorry, but that flimsy master’s in Computer Engineering from Berkeley just ain’t good enough in this day and age.”
ikr? You think, “wow $18 that’s like twice minimum wage!” then you realize minimum wage needed to be $18 back in 2019 to match inflation, and now with the very same inflation running away, well.
I told an older contractor today that 6 months is the minimum amount of time to expect being unemployed and I don’t know if she believed me.
Like yeah, I’m not looking forward to the next time I’m unemployed. Thanks to the ever increasing cost of living plus living in one of the worst USA states for unemployment help, I’ll probably have to start paying my chunk of rent with debt 2-3 months in. I suppose I could do gig work, but then it’s basically picking between ruining my car (the market for used cars is fucked rn and you absolutely need to be employed with half decent credit just to not get screwed on interest) and credit card debt.
This is why i’m trying to get published
But apparently publishers are afraid of a book where cops die by the hundreds and the ending has the protagonists taking over the US’s nuclear missile silos and starting a 2nd Civil War
I figure i might need some more clout before anyone wants to touch that right now
Which is why i’m writing up something called I KILL WIZZARDS
I think it’ll probably end up a comic or animated series
Wait until you find out getting published is not lucrative!
Perhaps, but it’s something to pass the time while I struggle to find decent work
My current literary project has the Chinese invading the USA. I can dream, can’t I? 🥺
This was the original version of the 2012 Red Dawn, but they changed it to the DPRK so they could make money in China. Apparently it still wasn’t released in China
Except don’t the good guys lose in red dawn? My book has the USA attack china, lose badly, then get invaded and fracture into warring states. I actually wrote the first draft before the iran war started so it’s kind of outdated now 😳.
I don’t remember what happens in the shitty new one (all I really remember is the Subway product placement), in the old one all the ”heroic” high school kids die by the end and it’s at least a little ambiguous.
Oh lol I only saw the old one and got bored when the kids started winning. It was pretty good until that point though.
Yeah same. I watch a lot of old Cold War crap just 'til us commies start losing, though, most of it’s good til then and crap the rest of the way to the end.
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I’m about a 3rd of the way through a SciFi novel about an frozen mining planet that’s under occupation but the resistance gets it’s hands what’s basically a large version of a Star Trek replicator to start 3D printing rockets.
a book where cops die by the hundreds and the ending has the protagonists taking over the US’s nuclear missile silos and starting a 2nd Civil War
Lemme know if/when you get it published, sounds sick
You got something against Rincewind?
Rincewind isn’t an immortal god-king forcing the people to toil for his own benefit
I mean, i don’t think he is, I never finished all the Discworld books
No but he is the foremost and only wizzard among the disc’s wizards
I didn’t even notice I spelled wizard wrong until just now
Oh well
Why let publishers gatekeep you? Indie publishing is easier than it’s ever been (not joking). You do probably have to make a deal with the devil (Amazon), but it’s definitely doable.
I’m considering it, but I am shy and really don’t want to have to self-promote
But at the same time, it would be nice if I could find an option where I maintain control over my work
Can I read that first work?
I’ll post some snippets soon
I’m going to do some edits over the next week so you’ll be getting the real deal
Hell yeah
FlakesBongler now in all good book stores
Also, the bad book stores
Buy my book
Buy my book
Buy my book
I recently had 1 phone screen and 2 in person interviews for a fucking GROCERY STORE and still got ghosted
You’d think all they care about is a heartbeat for those sorts of jobs
i think the job market is so fucked even grocery stores can choose to be picky about who they hire
I have a master’s degree in physics and the labour agency has tried to push me into jobs that don’t require having finished the German equivalent of high school. It’s genuinely insane right now, I don’t know a single person with comparable qualifications who wasn’t unemployed for at least half a year.
I consider myself lucky to have got a “sorry fam u didnt get the job” email from the shitass grocery store job.
Let me guess, 10+ years experience and a degree to stock shelves?
I promise you that I passed a coding interview in a language I never actually wrote a line of in my life (SQL) for a job that required 6 years with the language. It took 36 hours of study. It’s not even on the order of a college exam.
These numbers couldn’t mean less
Not stated but that’s probably the case yea
-be the store owners friend/relative
I be getting told i didnt get enough xp during uni despite working in the field for 2 years.
There’s no winning with employers.
You’re either too overqualified with not enough experience, or just qualified enough without the right experience. Sometimes they’ll say you just don’t match their company “culture”
Fuck off and die, assholes.
Just work a trade. You can make bank working yourself to death digging ditches until you start learning more advanced work that’ll propel you to cushier (but still sometimes backbreaking) work. It’s what I did, idk. Last time I looked for a job I literally applied to 12 places, had 3 interviews, 2 offers. In 2023 after leaving my job of 7 years when they were pushing me into a desk job. I make 35.50 now with unlimited OT and double time on Sundays. Last year I made over $80k. It’s great.
unlimited OT and double time on Sundays. Last year I made over $80k.
Love to work myself to death for wages best described as “acceptable”
Big shrug. I live cheap AF in an old home I bought during covid that’s from the 1800s and along the river in Pittsburgh, where our cost of living is one of the lowest in the whole country. I’ve been renovating it for years now, the kitchen is coming along pretty nicely, it’s going to be huge soon.
We split our bills three ways between me my fiance and our roommate, I have no debt other than the mortgage, paid off car. Total bills out the door is like $400/mo including utilities. There’s things you can do but luck and a combination of devoting yourself to work and things is a big part of it.
There’s something about blue collar work and getting jobs done on time and things running smoothly in heavy industrial settings (specifically electrical) that drives me to put in the hours and work behind it. It’s not like office work that can wait til tomorrow
Nah fam you good. A lot of people here are crabs in a bucket because they don’t have the disposition to succeed in the workplace and have been disenfranchised by bad luck, poor decisions, or starting out from a bad home situation.
And that’s okay, it’s not like that can be controlled. We should build a society where that doesn’t stop someone from living a respectable life.
But that doesn’t mean some of us didn’t work our fucking assess off starting from dirt poor for our salaries against a strong headwind the entire time. People here act like anyone making more than $0 an hour just simply lucked into it and was born with a golden spoon.
There are plenty of professionals kicking around here, we just tend to not butt in.
I hear ya. Last week I did back-to-back 12 hour days that turned into 14 or 15s to meet a planned outage for a steel mill. It’s basically the only time they allocate to changing equipment since they run 24/7. This was also as water was coming thru the walls due to extremely bad thunderstorms and the sump pump failed resulting in 3 ft of water in the basement next to the main electrical feed for the building lol. Then after doing that I tore out my whole subfloor and replaced it over the weekend, got drunk, burned it all, woke up and did it all over again.
I don’t see me continuing this forever. It’s just not sustainable. But I do take some pride in this lifestyle especially as it makes things materially better for my partner and I. I’d do anything for him, he’s the love of my life and we’ve been together thru thick and thin for 12 years at this point.
It’s easy to forget that work can be enjoyable when not everything is shit.
You gotta keep in mind that not a lot of people have opportunities like that. You seem to have hit a rare sweet spot of decent job within a low COL area and an ability to save enough money to buy a home straight up. That’s just not the case for the vast majority of people. Pittsburgh, for example, has that absurdly low COL for a city and the housing market really hasn’t exploded there either. Or at least not for areas outside of the immediate suburbs.
You should tell them you’re about to level up and they look like just enough XP
I tried but then i got stat checked by the job description. 30 points is way too many
Some channel, I think How Money Works, broke down some recent statistics that were doing the rounds in the capitalist press and why they actually spell doom for the job market. New business registrations are at record highs - but that’s because more and more people are giving up on the job market and deciding to try their luck at a small business instead, not to mention people who have a job but are starting a business anyway because it doesn’t pay enough, stuff like that.
Anyway I’m one of those people, and I’ve found that I really like working for myself even if it kinda sucks at times. idk what industry you’re in or what credentials you have but if you can make a play for 1099s I would do it.
I was just in a job interview cycle for a great position and after 4 rounds didn’t make it. Only a full month of prep time and technical interviews wasted, doesn’t make me feel like im losing my mind at all. Second position like this this year
Graduated college around 2010. It’ll get marginally better. If you’re lucky and get an advanced degree, you might get a job making 25$/hr like me (no bennies)
Fuck working. Find your passion and starve. If we all just work on our projects and dont go into work the US will collapse.
unfortunately nobody is giving me rent or food money for my godot and javascript arcade game remakes so
it’s good to dream
like that racist WWII propaganda poster but good
Yeah, things are getting more and more shit. As much I get stressed out with my current job, I know that if I was to leave I would be unemployed for a while and of I did get a job there’s a good chance it won’t pay as much as I earn now. Everything is so fucked.
Hey we’re in the same boat there. But, honestly I might take less pay if this job continues to ruin my health.
i can’t even give my labour away for free (well, not quite for free - i deviously intend to eventually get a reference from them so that i can trade my labour elsewhere for food and housing when i’m well enough).
nobody. ever. responds. even the fuckers who came to an event at the jobcenter where they said they don’t require references or experience and it’s “basically a guaranteed position”.
They literally have no idea what is actually going on in the hiring process, they are just told to say things lol…
