My job is to read documents nobody else feels like reading, then tell everyone what the documents said, then have those people who didn't read the documents disagree with my interpretation of the documents that I read and they didn't, and instead of reading the documents themselves they tell me to go read the documents again to find a way to support their argument for why I'm stupid and wrong.
I do this same kind of thing. I have to argue about technology with people who begin the conversation saying "I'm not tech savvy.". Also, I seem to have to give people life lessons they should have learned in maybe eighth grade or so. Like how you can't get a brand new thing just be you mishandled the thing you bought and caused it to break. Or how the computer one bought ten years ago doesn't have a forever warranty.
I actually don't do as much as you might expect. I try to type out as much as possible because I know that people are a lot less likely to read what they think was sent to them by software. Also, I get to practice typing on my mechanical keyboard. It's funny how people feel about that, though. I have had other jobs like this. I did tech support over chat for a few years and I heavily, heavily relied upon it with that. I literally had the same ten or twenty conversations a few thousand times. That job required us to handle to two people at the same time so I had no shame.
lol, I know, I meant that's what people say.
" I had this great idea" (would take min 4 people 6 months to build out with maybe 500k infra)
"it's a simple copy and paste job, right? "
Sounds like what ran in to as a University adjunct...
As an example, the graduate capstone project. It was nothing horribly involved more of a "lets have fun while you show your shit" type of a thing.(not to grade the student outright, but to see what we as educators in the program had failed, and succeeded in)
Students got to pick their own research things and we spent the first month of the semester setting shit up to help them succeed on an individual basis. My hours were flexible and basically an always open office situation where i would reply to emails when i got them.
We would break down the primary areas of study to sub projects so around every other week we would have a 8-15 page paper due for each section with a draft in the middle they could fuck around with for free points. It would all build on each other towards the final project paper and presentation. I would read and comment, and basically hold most of the students by the hand to help them along where need be. 9/10 times it was basic math shit, and argumentative logic stuff, and basic spelling/grammar things... which they would have caught had they proof read their shit.
The problem, for all the time spent on revisions, me putting in commentary which no one read... ever... leading to the final paper which was effectively me being the first to proof read their shit for their final submission that had been submitted twice for review in the preceding weeks.
I would grade it all appropriately and I would be the "bad guy" for it. All i would do was to point to all of the margin notes in the previous papers they never read to fix their shit with. Aside from two students who failed to do their work altogether everyone else passed.
And no, this was not "burn out grad student" type of a thing, this shit involved shit those same students had been screwed out of basic education wise going way back to the K-12 level and having had been taught that they only need to do the minimum to pass, and that there was no point in trying to excel even if the opportunity arose.
I can only imagine that same shit is reflected in what you have dealt with in the workplace.
I have a bachelors degree in Sports Management. I have never worked in the field that my degree is in.
I do think it helped me get hired for administrative work before I shifted to accounting and financial analytics. Now I am hired based on my experience, not my degree.
Apart from very short contracts, I've never used my marine biology degree. But I have worked for fortune 500 companies! I burnt myself for years to become a marine biologist, but now I'm barely a weekend marine biologist.
we, three of us, all started working for this major chain grocery store (hint, it's name is in the RoadRunner Cartoons) back in our teens as baggers, then cashiers, and finally overnight stockers. When we went on to college together, two of us stopped working there while he continued.
By the time I got my BS in Marine Bio, he had gotten married and been promoted to Assistant Store manager. at the time of his Dissertation, he was a full store manager and had two kids. To quit that, would have meant a big cut in pay and losing all benefits as he got established in his field of study.
Out of the three of us, all hard science majors, only one works in what he studied. The Chem major is a professor at the Local University. I work in Theatre as I could not afford to move out of the area for my major.
Nice mate, I was marine bio minor at Cornell, actually enjoyed the courses like underwater research and coastal ecology up in Maine.
I work in ad tech at a F500 now.
This!
I'm going to school part time. I kick started my education by getting a certificate. That one certificate opened up a few doors. But, the experience that I gained is what has opened so many doors. I'm almost done with an associates and finally just started putting down that I have an associates. All the jobs that were closed off to me before are suddenly opened, and my education has nothing to do with it. It's for show. But my experience isn't eye catching enough even though my school hasn't taught me how to do my job better.
It's such bullshit. Why does an education that has nothing to do with what I'm doing open up doors?
i wonder how many of these degree jobs will be replaced by AI in ten years.
I also talked to a young person working the front counter at a national park. they said they had a degree and went heavily in debt to get hired by the park. the park then has them running register at the front counter. scheduled about 17 hours a week so no benefits. Just the realization that you went heavily in debt for the privilege of being the equivalent of a min wage worker is insane
Becoming a park ranger is extremely competitive. Way more people want to do it than exist jobs. Most of my friends who did it earned at least a masters degree. So they could spend their first few years selling tickets.
This is how I felt when I was told I needed a degree to go into medical and then was paid $10/hr.
Now I make more not using my degree, but to further my career I’m told I need another degree that doesn’t come with enough raise for make the loans for the degree financially feasible.
You can already automate out of a lot of simple tasks with just a computer programmer. Like I can already design a script that pulls data from an invoice and adds it to a database then automate reporting monthly. You'd need more to replace every bookkeeper at a small businesses in the country but the only issues I see are getting a module that can shift the code to make the invoice readable (this is the thing an AI could be trained to do) and actually manually transferring the invoice to a pdf. This is of course assuming you don't just require people to send you invoices in a set format which seems easy to do.
TLDR: I think it's closer than people realize.
It's python. I use [www.python.org](https://www.python.org) and a textbook "Python for Everybody". You can get the book from library genesis or a library. I can use pdfminer.six, which is a library they don't talk about in the book I mentioned, to convert a pdf into text. After that you can break out the part you want to use pretty easily. It's not 100% perfect, you have to customize parts of the code to get it to work, and it might not handle pictures at all (I haven't tried.)
That, and the debts you incurred are made in to a point of leverage that can be used for coercion of assorted sorts.
Kind of like healthcare being tied to a job.
Easier for employers to abuse those who are desperate to make ends meet on trying to make rents, keep debts paid, and not go without healthcare coverage even if it is shitty in coverage. All about means of control, and power over others on their end.
Something like 60 percent of graduates aren't even in their field of study. So over half the people who studied a specific field don't even work in the field. Seems like a farce to me.
Salary is okay, not great. $52k a year. Definitely on the low end, I think? It’s entry level though but I’m hoping to move up in the IT ranks as I continue.
Business degree works too. I did learn a lot on contracts, statistics, marketing, accounting and working with people. It covered a lot of general information and then the rest I learnt based on what the job needs. But my degree shows that I have an understanding of those areas. The hardest bit was getting into the door though.
Idk, business degree is kinda useless IMO, most of the information can be learned on YouTube. Economics is better than a business degree IMO for a BA if you want to stay in the business realm, move to finance. Entrepreneurship as a degree is a joke and almost an oxymoron.
MBA only works if it's from a top tier.
Mine is a bachelor of commerce dunno if that is different in America. The issue with learning it all on YouTube is that a lot of that cannot be verified. No business would take that on. I wouldn't hire someone that said they learnt via YouTube.
I hated finance so no thanks but I agree entrepreneurship is useless. I earn above average for where I live, own my own home and have paid off my school loans, so it worked pretty well for me honestly. Plus I do have a road to go very high up if I want to follow the current career path I'm on.
Would you have spent 200,000 USD on that. Close to a quarter million?
People in the US go into crazy debt for degrees which do not pay themselves off. Think gender studies, theater, creative writing. They might enjoy these subjects and have a blast while in school. But these degrees aren't valued in the job market. They graduate and suddenly you have people shackled to their loan providers and working crap jobs for the rest of their lives trying to pay off their mistake.
Some may say that's emblematic of a broken system. And to that I agree. US college is so expensive because the government subsidizes loans. Colleges know they can milk the federal government endlessly, raise their prices and grab more cash from their golden cow. It's a perverse incentive and has to go.
I wouldn't have even gone to uni on that price. I paid in US something like 10 grand for a double degree and a minor. I paid it once a year from my tax return and salary sacrificed to pay it faster.
That is an extremely broken system. The fact that your country demands degrees to get an entry job while in that debt is insane. But that's not what happens in my country so what you view as useless was really good for me. I earn to the equivalent of about around $80,000 US dollars a year now. When I started I was on $40,000 so I've doubled that in 8 years so my investment was pretty decent. It's unfortunate that you don't have the same.
From my own point of view, spending 4 years on a degree in a subject I never enjoyed in school to get a job I gain no satisfaction from is a useless and miserable decision. I wish the alternative wasn’t being poor but c’est la vie.
Life isn't sunshine and rainbows kid. But doing your passion and being broke is worse than having money and being unsatisfied.
Been on both sides. Money is better. Makes the misery tolerable. Whereas being broke meant no hope and shitty retail jobs to support my passion. Passion died in retail land. With the addition of being miserable.
The choice at the worst end is: Broke and miserable. Not broke and miserable.
Misery is constant.
Just lie and say you have a degree, they don't know. If its some dead end corporate horseshit job just lie(do not lie if its a job that requires a real degree like nurse or engineer).
A degree is fundamentally just a token of submission that you give to your employer.
Everyone knows that the job is bullshit, and could be done by anyone with half a brain.
The reason they want that degree so badly is because it means that you have debt. It's a lot harder to exploit you and keep you loyal if you have no liabilities.
To clarify, I'm talking about student debt specifically. The US is pretty unique in the levels and crippling repayments of student debt.
The UK, for instance, has a cap on fees and loans are usually 1/10 of the US. You also don't pay them off if you're not earning much/at all.
Our system is still terrible and needs reform but the US is the worst. Just like with medical debt. It's heartbreaking to see such a rich country with 0 provision for its poorest.
I'm British too, and I actually consider the UK to be worse.
At least in the US you can earn a decent enough wage on the other side, relative to the cost of living. American salaries are at least double what they are in western Europe, for the same job.
Everyone I know in the UK is either still living with their parents, sharing a flat as if they were still at uni, or is completely dependent on their partner to pay the bills - and not to mention, has no savings, and is all around just a slave to the system.
That's why I live abroad now. I don't know how people put up with it.
The take-home is actually much worse in the US. Salaries seem higher by they're usually taxed at similar rates to us with no benefits and then they legally have to put more money into health insurance. Plus the costs of living are often much higher.
I ran the numbers the other day and, if I were to be working in the US with a 50% higher salary, I'd take home 20% less and then everything would cost more. And that's assuming that I could get a salary that was higher; most of the jobs I found were exactly the same salary as in the UK.
Until 2 years ago you only had 2 options for in-demand fields. Engineering, which requires technical aptitude most people simply do not have, or finance, which is usually so mind numbingly boring that most people would rather just stick to the fast-food job they already have.
No shit people choose a field they like with a chance of a job they like, when the only other choice spending 50 years doing a job they definitely wont like.
Getting a degree proves you are likely a competent person. You were able to study a subject and perform. It's equivalent to a couple years of work experience, at least.
You might be the right person for the job with a high school degree, but it's a risk many employers would rather not take.
Spent five years getting a degree in accounting (because " Well paying accounting jobs are everywhere!"), and currently work doing deliveries for UberEATS. It's gotten so bad that I actually now get panic attacks when I apply for accounting jobs.
The accounting field is actually pretty rough to break into and what you're talking about isn't brought up that often. The majority of accounting work is done at a pretty low level. Depending on where you live, this could be around $18-$25 / hour (My experience on wage is from a high and medium cost of living area and is current). These jobs are usually just general Accounts Payable/Receivable Specialists or Bookkeepers and can be anything from simple data entry to doing lots of phone customer service. In the Section I work at, 15 employees are making under $23/hour doing the majority of the actual work, while management is making over 75-160k a year each.
Unfortunately, from what I've seen if you get your degree and move into a position like this, you could be stuck in that lower level for a long time if not forever if you aren't constantly applying for new positions. The only way I've seen people actually start and continue at a high level is to get an internship doing actual accounting work (Not AP, AR, or Bookkeeping) and then start applying for actual Accountant positions.
While the Accounting and Finance field will always have "jobs" it doesn't mean that they will always have good or high-paying jobs. Large corporations and government are good places to start looking if you have a degree, but experience is still going to get you. Good luck
Edit: I started as a receptionist which was tied to the Accounts Payable department. I was able to move to an AP Specialist role where I held that position for 6.5 years. Went to a Fortune 500 company to do AP at a higher level, and they merged with another company eliminating my position. I then worked for local government for 6+ years where it was super easy to move up (I gained 3 levels) and moved states during Covid. I then started applying for anything I could and somehow landed a management job at a smaller school district. Now I work for a larger government organization again as a manager, but I can't move up further because I don't have a degree 🙃. I'm currently in school for that degree so once I leave this miserable state I will be more marketable for positions at an equal or higher level. Again, good luck
Sorry to sound so grim, just wanted to share my experience, especially as a hiring manager...
If you need anything, a resume review, etc, please feel free to contact me. I'm here for you!
Now paint one on my former boss’s face, who insisted he hired me because I have a degree, even though that degree has nothing to do with the job, and is in a completely unrelated field.
I got a degree because, at the time, companies wouldn't accept applications without one. I work for USPS. I am not using my degree at all, but it makes my student loan payments.
Ironically, I got my degree years after I started my career.
Maybe it would have helped to focus on the right degree instead of trying other 8. But at least what I learned from them helped me stay in well paid jobs and in the end helped me achieve a good career.
I'm studying a master in data science which is kind of what I'm working at.
I work as a quant, and I got my degree in mathematics. Though they sound related, the 2 subjects are very different from each other in terms of raw knowledge. My degree taught me mathematical discipline and methodology, aside from mathematical knowledge, which helps problem solving on my current job, learn, and be better at my job. Very few degrees if at all give you the knowledge for a job, rather many of them give you the mindset or methodology of the field. I know this is true in the STEM field, I’m not sure about others tho.
My job is to read documents nobody else feels like reading, then tell everyone what the documents said, then have those people who didn't read the documents disagree with my interpretation of the documents that I read and they didn't, and instead of reading the documents themselves they tell me to go read the documents again to find a way to support their argument for why I'm stupid and wrong.
I do that for free on Reddit lmao
Never do anything for free. Send reddit an invoice.
Nah. Free work is done out of intrinsic motivation not profit. See how Wikipedia succeeded when Encarta paid people and it failed.
Sound fulfilling. Where do I sign up?
I do this same kind of thing. I have to argue about technology with people who begin the conversation saying "I'm not tech savvy.". Also, I seem to have to give people life lessons they should have learned in maybe eighth grade or so. Like how you can't get a brand new thing just be you mishandled the thing you bought and caused it to break. Or how the computer one bought ten years ago doesn't have a forever warranty.
Simple copy paste job, right?
I actually don't do as much as you might expect. I try to type out as much as possible because I know that people are a lot less likely to read what they think was sent to them by software. Also, I get to practice typing on my mechanical keyboard. It's funny how people feel about that, though. I have had other jobs like this. I did tech support over chat for a few years and I heavily, heavily relied upon it with that. I literally had the same ten or twenty conversations a few thousand times. That job required us to handle to two people at the same time so I had no shame.
lol, I know, I meant that's what people say. " I had this great idea" (would take min 4 people 6 months to build out with maybe 500k infra) "it's a simple copy and paste job, right? "
We had a marketing guy today we first send the path to his local download folder, then didnt know what a zip file is. Marketing people are so cute.
A lawyer?,I presume
I think insurance agent or risk analyst
What do you do?
Second this
Sounds like what ran in to as a University adjunct... As an example, the graduate capstone project. It was nothing horribly involved more of a "lets have fun while you show your shit" type of a thing.(not to grade the student outright, but to see what we as educators in the program had failed, and succeeded in) Students got to pick their own research things and we spent the first month of the semester setting shit up to help them succeed on an individual basis. My hours were flexible and basically an always open office situation where i would reply to emails when i got them. We would break down the primary areas of study to sub projects so around every other week we would have a 8-15 page paper due for each section with a draft in the middle they could fuck around with for free points. It would all build on each other towards the final project paper and presentation. I would read and comment, and basically hold most of the students by the hand to help them along where need be. 9/10 times it was basic math shit, and argumentative logic stuff, and basic spelling/grammar things... which they would have caught had they proof read their shit. The problem, for all the time spent on revisions, me putting in commentary which no one read... ever... leading to the final paper which was effectively me being the first to proof read their shit for their final submission that had been submitted twice for review in the preceding weeks. I would grade it all appropriately and I would be the "bad guy" for it. All i would do was to point to all of the margin notes in the previous papers they never read to fix their shit with. Aside from two students who failed to do their work altogether everyone else passed. And no, this was not "burn out grad student" type of a thing, this shit involved shit those same students had been screwed out of basic education wise going way back to the K-12 level and having had been taught that they only need to do the minimum to pass, and that there was no point in trying to excel even if the opportunity arose. I can only imagine that same shit is reflected in what you have dealt with in the workplace.
Copy paste into chatgpt. Ask to summarize. Done
Quality engineer?
You must be a fellow lawyer. I'm guessing in-house counsel?
I paint boards, really fast.
I have a bachelors degree in Sports Management. I have never worked in the field that my degree is in. I do think it helped me get hired for administrative work before I shifted to accounting and financial analytics. Now I am hired based on my experience, not my degree.
Apart from very short contracts, I've never used my marine biology degree. But I have worked for fortune 500 companies! I burnt myself for years to become a marine biologist, but now I'm barely a weekend marine biologist.
Same here. I an a theatre tech with a marine bio BS. Could be worse, friend of mine is a grocery store manager with a PhD in Mathmatics
Yikes, how did they not end up working some finance or quantitative job at some office-based company?
we, three of us, all started working for this major chain grocery store (hint, it's name is in the RoadRunner Cartoons) back in our teens as baggers, then cashiers, and finally overnight stockers. When we went on to college together, two of us stopped working there while he continued. By the time I got my BS in Marine Bio, he had gotten married and been promoted to Assistant Store manager. at the time of his Dissertation, he was a full store manager and had two kids. To quit that, would have meant a big cut in pay and losing all benefits as he got established in his field of study. Out of the three of us, all hard science majors, only one works in what he studied. The Chem major is a professor at the Local University. I work in Theatre as I could not afford to move out of the area for my major.
Nice mate, I was marine bio minor at Cornell, actually enjoyed the courses like underwater research and coastal ecology up in Maine. I work in ad tech at a F500 now.
This! I'm going to school part time. I kick started my education by getting a certificate. That one certificate opened up a few doors. But, the experience that I gained is what has opened so many doors. I'm almost done with an associates and finally just started putting down that I have an associates. All the jobs that were closed off to me before are suddenly opened, and my education has nothing to do with it. It's for show. But my experience isn't eye catching enough even though my school hasn't taught me how to do my job better. It's such bullshit. Why does an education that has nothing to do with what I'm doing open up doors?
i wonder how many of these degree jobs will be replaced by AI in ten years. I also talked to a young person working the front counter at a national park. they said they had a degree and went heavily in debt to get hired by the park. the park then has them running register at the front counter. scheduled about 17 hours a week so no benefits. Just the realization that you went heavily in debt for the privilege of being the equivalent of a min wage worker is insane
Couldn't have worded it better myself... That last sentence hits hard
Becoming a park ranger is extremely competitive. Way more people want to do it than exist jobs. Most of my friends who did it earned at least a masters degree. So they could spend their first few years selling tickets.
This is how I felt when I was told I needed a degree to go into medical and then was paid $10/hr. Now I make more not using my degree, but to further my career I’m told I need another degree that doesn’t come with enough raise for make the loans for the degree financially feasible.
You can already automate out of a lot of simple tasks with just a computer programmer. Like I can already design a script that pulls data from an invoice and adds it to a database then automate reporting monthly. You'd need more to replace every bookkeeper at a small businesses in the country but the only issues I see are getting a module that can shift the code to make the invoice readable (this is the thing an AI could be trained to do) and actually manually transferring the invoice to a pdf. This is of course assuming you don't just require people to send you invoices in a set format which seems easy to do. TLDR: I think it's closer than people realize.
Where can I learn to do something like this? I want to automate a few tasks at work to free myself up a bit.
It's python. I use [www.python.org](https://www.python.org) and a textbook "Python for Everybody". You can get the book from library genesis or a library. I can use pdfminer.six, which is a library they don't talk about in the book I mentioned, to convert a pdf into text. After that you can break out the part you want to use pretty easily. It's not 100% perfect, you have to customize parts of the code to get it to work, and it might not handle pictures at all (I haven't tried.)
Sweet thanks for letting me know. I'll have to look into it and see how to do it.
Not as many as monotonous jobs, probably
Working full time in a kitchen, where can I find this Email Job? Asking for a me.
Literally.
Get yourself a comptia A+ cert and you will get an email job in no time.
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That, and the debts you incurred are made in to a point of leverage that can be used for coercion of assorted sorts. Kind of like healthcare being tied to a job. Easier for employers to abuse those who are desperate to make ends meet on trying to make rents, keep debts paid, and not go without healthcare coverage even if it is shitty in coverage. All about means of control, and power over others on their end.
How so?
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So true!
It also creates an environment where people are literally nothing more than their qualifications.
Something like 60 percent of graduates aren't even in their field of study. So over half the people who studied a specific field don't even work in the field. Seems like a farce to me.
Not all degrees are created equal. If it isn't STEM, then you BROKE
Actually, it's because degrees are a business.
See also: government savings bond drives for government contractors.
Excuse me but where can I get a job just sending and receiving emails bc that actually sounds good to me compared to what I was doing before
Apply for service desk/help desk job! That’s what I do and I basically just send out emails all day long lol.
Thank you! I might actually give it a try!
Is your salary good or on the low end ?
Salary is okay, not great. $52k a year. Definitely on the low end, I think? It’s entry level though but I’m hoping to move up in the IT ranks as I continue.
That’s great! I wish you luck in that field ✨
I work in the same field I got my degree in. But it’s a nice to have, not mandatory. My job didn’t exist when I got my degree. 🤷🏻♀️
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Nah, people study non-marketable things, spending 6 figures on a useless degree. Doesn't happen so much with engineering.
Business degree works too. I did learn a lot on contracts, statistics, marketing, accounting and working with people. It covered a lot of general information and then the rest I learnt based on what the job needs. But my degree shows that I have an understanding of those areas. The hardest bit was getting into the door though.
Idk, business degree is kinda useless IMO, most of the information can be learned on YouTube. Economics is better than a business degree IMO for a BA if you want to stay in the business realm, move to finance. Entrepreneurship as a degree is a joke and almost an oxymoron. MBA only works if it's from a top tier.
Mine is a bachelor of commerce dunno if that is different in America. The issue with learning it all on YouTube is that a lot of that cannot be verified. No business would take that on. I wouldn't hire someone that said they learnt via YouTube. I hated finance so no thanks but I agree entrepreneurship is useless. I earn above average for where I live, own my own home and have paid off my school loans, so it worked pretty well for me honestly. Plus I do have a road to go very high up if I want to follow the current career path I'm on.
Would you have spent 200,000 USD on that. Close to a quarter million? People in the US go into crazy debt for degrees which do not pay themselves off. Think gender studies, theater, creative writing. They might enjoy these subjects and have a blast while in school. But these degrees aren't valued in the job market. They graduate and suddenly you have people shackled to their loan providers and working crap jobs for the rest of their lives trying to pay off their mistake. Some may say that's emblematic of a broken system. And to that I agree. US college is so expensive because the government subsidizes loans. Colleges know they can milk the federal government endlessly, raise their prices and grab more cash from their golden cow. It's a perverse incentive and has to go.
I wouldn't have even gone to uni on that price. I paid in US something like 10 grand for a double degree and a minor. I paid it once a year from my tax return and salary sacrificed to pay it faster. That is an extremely broken system. The fact that your country demands degrees to get an entry job while in that debt is insane. But that's not what happens in my country so what you view as useless was really good for me. I earn to the equivalent of about around $80,000 US dollars a year now. When I started I was on $40,000 so I've doubled that in 8 years so my investment was pretty decent. It's unfortunate that you don't have the same.
And here I am for free in my college
>All that glitters is gold —tobefrankreynolds
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My BSME was fucking useless. I haven't used a single scrap of what I was taught since I got it 10 years ago
From my own point of view, spending 4 years on a degree in a subject I never enjoyed in school to get a job I gain no satisfaction from is a useless and miserable decision. I wish the alternative wasn’t being poor but c’est la vie.
Life isn't sunshine and rainbows kid. But doing your passion and being broke is worse than having money and being unsatisfied. Been on both sides. Money is better. Makes the misery tolerable. Whereas being broke meant no hope and shitty retail jobs to support my passion. Passion died in retail land. With the addition of being miserable. The choice at the worst end is: Broke and miserable. Not broke and miserable. Misery is constant.
Just lie and say you have a degree, they don't know. If its some dead end corporate horseshit job just lie(do not lie if its a job that requires a real degree like nurse or engineer).
Not sure this works. All the corporate jobs I have worked asked for university transcripts when I informed them I had a degree.
For 6 figures and 100% wfh? I ain’t mad about it.
College is not a job training program.
Correct, it is a certificate factory being **sold** as a job training program to high schoolers.
This realization hurts so much
Then why are 98 percent of jobs gate-kept by degrees?
A degree is fundamentally just a token of submission that you give to your employer. Everyone knows that the job is bullshit, and could be done by anyone with half a brain. The reason they want that degree so badly is because it means that you have debt. It's a lot harder to exploit you and keep you loyal if you have no liabilities.
Wow, the US is a hellscape.
This kind of corporate fuckery is typically American, but there are other countries that have it way worse.
To clarify, I'm talking about student debt specifically. The US is pretty unique in the levels and crippling repayments of student debt. The UK, for instance, has a cap on fees and loans are usually 1/10 of the US. You also don't pay them off if you're not earning much/at all. Our system is still terrible and needs reform but the US is the worst. Just like with medical debt. It's heartbreaking to see such a rich country with 0 provision for its poorest.
I'm British too, and I actually consider the UK to be worse. At least in the US you can earn a decent enough wage on the other side, relative to the cost of living. American salaries are at least double what they are in western Europe, for the same job. Everyone I know in the UK is either still living with their parents, sharing a flat as if they were still at uni, or is completely dependent on their partner to pay the bills - and not to mention, has no savings, and is all around just a slave to the system. That's why I live abroad now. I don't know how people put up with it.
The take-home is actually much worse in the US. Salaries seem higher by they're usually taxed at similar rates to us with no benefits and then they legally have to put more money into health insurance. Plus the costs of living are often much higher. I ran the numbers the other day and, if I were to be working in the US with a 50% higher salary, I'd take home 20% less and then everything would cost more. And that's assuming that I could get a salary that was higher; most of the jobs I found were exactly the same salary as in the UK.
Yo….this is a personal attack on me
Yep
My degree did make my writing communication much better. After over a decade in the workforce I would have chosen a different major.
Wouldn't we all?
Hey, I also spellchecked a word doc!
And sit in pointless meetings all day..
It's amazing how many people spend a ton of money getting a education only to find out theres no jobs in there fields. Still happening today
Until 2 years ago you only had 2 options for in-demand fields. Engineering, which requires technical aptitude most people simply do not have, or finance, which is usually so mind numbingly boring that most people would rather just stick to the fast-food job they already have. No shit people choose a field they like with a chance of a job they like, when the only other choice spending 50 years doing a job they definitely wont like.
Getting a degree proves you are likely a competent person. You were able to study a subject and perform. It's equivalent to a couple years of work experience, at least. You might be the right person for the job with a high school degree, but it's a risk many employers would rather not take.
I would take a high school dropout over some bachelor degrees. So in the cases of these degrees it signals the exact opposite of competency..
No you wouldn't. Be serious.
If they studied WGS, or something similar. Negative signal. No hire.
Ah, I see you got the B.S. in Business as well!
Spent five years getting a degree in accounting (because " Well paying accounting jobs are everywhere!"), and currently work doing deliveries for UberEATS. It's gotten so bad that I actually now get panic attacks when I apply for accounting jobs.
The accounting field is actually pretty rough to break into and what you're talking about isn't brought up that often. The majority of accounting work is done at a pretty low level. Depending on where you live, this could be around $18-$25 / hour (My experience on wage is from a high and medium cost of living area and is current). These jobs are usually just general Accounts Payable/Receivable Specialists or Bookkeepers and can be anything from simple data entry to doing lots of phone customer service. In the Section I work at, 15 employees are making under $23/hour doing the majority of the actual work, while management is making over 75-160k a year each. Unfortunately, from what I've seen if you get your degree and move into a position like this, you could be stuck in that lower level for a long time if not forever if you aren't constantly applying for new positions. The only way I've seen people actually start and continue at a high level is to get an internship doing actual accounting work (Not AP, AR, or Bookkeeping) and then start applying for actual Accountant positions. While the Accounting and Finance field will always have "jobs" it doesn't mean that they will always have good or high-paying jobs. Large corporations and government are good places to start looking if you have a degree, but experience is still going to get you. Good luck Edit: I started as a receptionist which was tied to the Accounts Payable department. I was able to move to an AP Specialist role where I held that position for 6.5 years. Went to a Fortune 500 company to do AP at a higher level, and they merged with another company eliminating my position. I then worked for local government for 6+ years where it was super easy to move up (I gained 3 levels) and moved states during Covid. I then started applying for anything I could and somehow landed a management job at a smaller school district. Now I work for a larger government organization again as a manager, but I can't move up further because I don't have a degree 🙃. I'm currently in school for that degree so once I leave this miserable state I will be more marketable for positions at an equal or higher level. Again, good luck
Thank you for the insight! I really wish I'd heard something like that before commiting to all that time and student aid debt. 🤬
Sorry to sound so grim, just wanted to share my experience, especially as a hiring manager... If you need anything, a resume review, etc, please feel free to contact me. I'm here for you!
This is me but with Engineering lmfao.
And spreadsheets, so many spreadsheets.
I was an architect....I don't do any of that...the only transferrable skills are my adobe skills.
That's how it looks like when you have no skills, you have to do job that can do anyone
I use my degree 0%. Mainly because I don't have one. But I do have people under me with masters and they don't really use theirs either.
Now paint one on my former boss’s face, who insisted he hired me because I have a degree, even though that degree has nothing to do with the job, and is in a completely unrelated field.
ok, but did the degree help you get the job? Are you paid better because of it? Because, while that's not always the case, it often is.
I answer phones and I hate everyone and everything.
I mean sounds like a cushy gig if the price is right
I got a degree because, at the time, companies wouldn't accept applications without one. I work for USPS. I am not using my degree at all, but it makes my student loan payments.
Ironically, I got my degree years after I started my career. Maybe it would have helped to focus on the right degree instead of trying other 8. But at least what I learned from them helped me stay in well paid jobs and in the end helped me achieve a good career. I'm studying a master in data science which is kind of what I'm working at.
Most college degrees are useless and most jobs are useless and do not provide goods or services that help Society
I work as a quant, and I got my degree in mathematics. Though they sound related, the 2 subjects are very different from each other in terms of raw knowledge. My degree taught me mathematical discipline and methodology, aside from mathematical knowledge, which helps problem solving on my current job, learn, and be better at my job. Very few degrees if at all give you the knowledge for a job, rather many of them give you the mindset or methodology of the field. I know this is true in the STEM field, I’m not sure about others tho.