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I live in Finland and work for the government. I'm a lawyer and have worked for the government in several different positions. Right now I'm working as a temporary district court judge, where the person whose position it is, is on parental leave. Previously I have worked for the public defenders office / legal aid office, did our version of clerking with a judge etc. My position is temporary, but I do enjoy the work and it is a meaningful job. Previously working in a government in a few different government offices, I have come to appreciate the concretenes of my current job and my job a the legal aid office. Working for the nameless beaureaucracy shuffling papers from one pile to the next, was not for me, even though now I have to work more hours. I don't see myself moving to the private sector partly because I make enough money and the government holidays are much better. The government provides a really good work-to-life balance, which I doubt I would be able to have, if I worked for the private sector, unless I worked as a lawyer at a big nameless corporation, where everyone is on the clock. In attorneys offices the work culture here is much like what I imagine the U.S. is, where the most important part is being present for 10+hrs a day.
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Aug 28, 2018 10:51
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Ytlaya posted:Edit: Put another way, you're creating a false dichotomy that assumes good pay is mutually exclusive with better worker representation, as well as ignoring the fact that good pay is not characteristic of our economic system for most people.
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Aug 28, 2018 12:31
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glowing-fish posted:
I would say not. Since it's basically a bunch of fixed jobs paid on a regular schedule and I have like, an office, in some of the buildings. It's a weird middle ground between having a dozen separate jobs and just having one with a bunch of sites. I don't think it's a very common setup and I don't think I have a good name for it.
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Aug 28, 2018 12:53
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In aviation, progression is mostly handled via seniority, which is just based on join date. You have checkups every 6 months to make sure you can fly safe, but otherwise there isn't really any performance metric for progression, with the exception of a command course that moves you from the right hand side (first officer) to the left (captain), which also usually resets your seniority. Flying, particularly international, is still relatively well compensated but certainly does not have the prestige it once did, the very expensive training is no longer sponsored and has to be paid for by the applicant, and the very generous perks (known in the industry as the Ts&Cs) have been whittled down significantly. The interesting part of this decline from a political perspective is why it's happened. Sure, some of it can be laid at the blame of corporate greed, but a lot is simply to do with the transition from a high margin low volume business to a low margin high volume business. Low cost carriers have put a huge pressure on costs and most flights will not break even unless they regularly fill 80-90% of the seats. On long haul, economy seats are there to essentially fill the plane, with the profit coming from the premium seats (where there is no pressure to cut costs to compete). It's good for passengers (and probably society) though, because when things were the best for pilots, only an extremely tiny minority could afford to travel.
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Aug 28, 2018 13:00
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I live in Canada and work in animation. Currently experiencing a layoff after 4 years of consistent work since the studio didn't have a new project lined up. The industry is contract and project based and pay hovers around $20 an hour for a more experienced CG animator. Some less respectable studios only pay when a shot has been approved or, if its a 2D studio, pay by drawing. But most pay hourly. Many do not pay overtime unless a project forces people to work 48+ hours per week, and even then most studios will try to avoid paying overtime. I've been lucky to have only experienced overtime on 2 of the 8 projects I've worked on, but even then coming in on weekends and not getting paid for it kinda sucked. Contracts are usually between 4 and 8 months depending on project length. It's very feast or famine and sometimes studios will be stuffed to the gills with 3 ongoing projects and desks jammed in whatever space is available. Other times there will only be 1 project which is finishing and the compositors will be huddled in a small corner rendering out the last shots in the middle of an empty office. Most studios don't offer any kind of employee-matching plan or benefits. Thankfully Canada has universal health care so it's not as bad as it would be in the States. The US has an animation guild though which means animators there make much higher pay and get benefits and matching plans. But that's also why a lot of work has migrated to Canada. The other reason for all the work is the tax credits. Well, they're called tax credits but they're actually subsidies. Depending on province the production can get between 35-65% of their labor costs paid for by the government. They maneuvered this deal through lobbying and by saying its a form of support for the arts. Support for the arts that also juices job numbers is better than support for the arts in the form of art classes. So while art classes in schools are being cut to make room in the budget, the vfx/animation industry is given more money to import foreign workers to make productions for Netflix and Amazon. Unfortunately these tax credits could also be cut at any time if politicians turn sour on them, which would mean the end of the industry. It's just not economically viable at this scale any other way. That said it was a really relaxing job most of the time. Sit at a desk and listen to podcasts and music while addressing supervisor notes on acting choices and composition. Currently I'm using this time off to try to break into VFX animation which has more of a future (higher pay on the higher end.) If that doesn't work out I'll try and go back to TV animation, but I feel I have to break through to either feature or VFX by the time I'm 35 (7 years from now) or this career will be a on a severe downward slope.
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Aug 28, 2018 16:13
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Ocrassus posted:In aviation, progression is mostly handled via seniority, which is just based on join date. You have checkups every 6 months to make sure you can fly safe, but otherwise there isn't really any performance metric for progression, with the exception of a command course that moves you from the right hand side (first officer) to the left (captain), which also usually resets your seniority. Flying, particularly international, is still relatively well compensated but certainly does not have the prestige it once did, the very expensive training is no longer sponsored and has to be paid for by the applicant, and the very generous perks (known in the industry as the Ts&Cs) have been whittled down significantly. What is the management structure like as a pilot? I imagine that it is confined to basically monthly meetings, or something, maybe obligatory trainings about safety/technical issues, etcetera. But, like pilots don't have offices where there bosses stop by and remind them to use the proper fonts on their TPS reports. I imagine it might almost be like being an independent contractor.
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Aug 28, 2018 18:13
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So anyone else here a "straddler"? That is, someone who grew up blue-collar and ended up in the white collar world with all the WASPy pretension that comes with it? I've been meaning to read Lubrano's "Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams" (decent review here) but in the meantime I'd love to hear from others who've been through similar experiences. The concept of being "bicultural" is something I hadn't considered before, but it really hits home. For me personally I was raised by a unionized public city employee and a homemaker/house keeper and was the first in my family to attend college. I was lucky as hell to get into an insanely good school with financial support and ended up at a massive manufacturing/aerospace firm in a very mixed blue and white collar environment. The culture is very much a mixture of government/military bureaucracy, old school "I'm a captain of industry" business types and new school consultant business types. It's a very odd culture to be sure, I can go into more details if folks are curious. I do data analysis which is very white collar work but the data is about the stuff the blue collar folks are working on, so I work with them a great deal. Solkanar512 fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Aug 28, 2018 |
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Aug 28, 2018 21:11
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Solkanar512 posted:So anyone else here a "straddler"? That is, someone who grew up blue-collar and ended up in the white collar world with all the WASPy pretension that comes with it? I've been meaning to read Lubrano's "Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams" (decent review here) but in the meantime I'd love to hear from others who've been through similar experiences. The concept of being "bicultural" is something I hadn't considered before, but it really hits home. So much, so much, but even beyond that, because I was raised in a below blue collar environment and then later found myself at least partially on the side of the upper class. Its a complicated story, but relevant. My grandparents on both sides were pretty middle-class, and both of my parents were raised in a pretty middle class environment. When they reached their teens/early twenties, they were hippies and "outsiders", although still pretty regularly employed. I was born when my parents were in their early 20s. The best way to describe it is that they were pretty middle-class in their outlook, but that they were "slumming" for a bit. This was in the early 1980s, when two people with high school educations could afford a ranch home. My parents got divorced when I was 5, and for some of my most formative years, I was the child of a single mother on food stamps/public assistance. I don't really know if the bad poverty lasted for long, but when you are 6 or 7, it leaves a big impression. So, like, my first way of looking at "blue collar" jobs were as a step above anything I could imagine. Like, one of the parents on our street worked as a road flagger. Another one worked as a bank teller, and made 900 dollars a month! (This was in the mid 80s, but that was still not a lot of money objectively). Like the idea that people made actual, four figures a month amounts of money seemed hard to believe. Being on food stamps, having our water cut off, waiting in line to get cheese, hoping my mom could find a daycare so she could work a minimum wage job...all of those are reasons that I have shown some disdain for "blue collar workers" and how sad they are, because those were the people looking down on me, or at least who I thought were. Anyway, at the same time as this was happening, my maternal grandmother was writing successful books, and was getting pretty rich and famous. I mean, as a kid, I thought she was rich because she had both a microwave and VCR, but by the time I was ending my elementary school years, she was actually getting rich. It was a weird dichotomy, one that I find hard to explain to a lot of people. Like, when I was 7, we didn't have money for the water bill, but my grandmother bought me the fanciest Transformer for my birthday. There are two big things that I find hard to explain about my life as a straddler. First, is that I didn't really, as a kid, connect academic success to financial success. In fact, the opposite. Reading books and going to the library was something that I did because my family didn't have enough money to do the more common things my classmates talked about doing. "Normal people" got jobs as bank tellers and construction workers and bought RVs or went to Disneyland, and being smart and academic was a sign that you were bad at society, not good at it. Second is something kind of specific to the Pacific Northwest: my town, like most towns in the Pacific Northwest, grew quickly after World War II, and was inhabited by people who had moved in from all over. None of my friends parents knew each other beyond casually. There wasn't a small town infrastructure of shared employment and recreation. It wasn't like a similar small town in Ohio, where everyone would work at "the plant" and then go to the Elks meeting or go bowling together. Even if my parents had stayed married and I had stayed in that small town, there wouldn't have been an opportunity where my father would say "Well, son, you are 16 and my friend Jim from the Elks club needs a new stockboy at his grocery store"... like, I have no idea of how a blue collar milieu of having guidance and easily understandable entry lanes into employment would work. This is one of the few things that I do feel sympathy for the mythic Midwestern Economic Anxiety Trump Voter for--- what would it be like to live in a world where your social life and community life naturally led into your economic life?
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Aug 28, 2018 22:50
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glowing-fish posted:What is the management structure like as a pilot? I imagine that it is confined to basically monthly meetings, or something, maybe obligatory trainings about safety/technical issues, etcetera. But, like pilots don't have offices where there bosses stop by and remind them to use the proper fonts on their TPS reports. I imagine it might almost be like being an independent contractor. General contact with the company comes every 6 months when you go through your checkups. Otherwise you tend to just show up at the airport, fill out a bunch of paperwork and meet your crew for a briefing. When you become a training captain or chief pilot (the main representative of the pilots to the company), then you become much more heavily involved with management.
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Aug 29, 2018 00:01
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roomforthetuna posted:I've been employed at small companies, and a very large company, and also self-employed both as an independent contractor and as a direct "I own the IP, I get the money" producer. I found it to be the opposite, but I'm also very lucky. I was hired out of college by the professor I was doing research under, to join his company (and being the first employee), and do work as a software engineer. I've been there for 10 years now, and we've grown to around 15 employees. Everyone in the company gets benefits: health insurance, 75% matching of IRA contributions, start at 2 weeks of paid vacation per year (I'll be getting my 5th week of vacation shortly, although nobody really keeps track of the time off). Also there's profit sharing, which is of varying amounts but our xmas bonuses are greater than the median household income of my state, so that's nice. Today, most of the employees can give input into projects that we are interested in, and we all have influential control over ideas, implementations, or even if we're going to turn a potential client away. Our workplace culture is extremely relaxed, most people roll into work in jeans and a t-shirt, sometimes a bit flashier if they have something to do after work. We don't have much to worry about bullying, although sometimes arguments about ideas get heated, but in the 10 years I've been there, we've never had a "problem" come up, and nobody has ever had a conflict with a co-worker. The makeup of our company is fairly diverse, I'd say about 30% are women, and 50% are non-white. I've worked for larger companies before, and they always seemed like office politics and petty grudges were the norm, and it drove me nuts. I live and work in the suburbs of Detroit.
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Aug 29, 2018 00:06
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I work for a gas and electric utility in the pacific northwest. I am a customer service representative so I answer the phones. My job is unique because I am actually a union member. We have shop stewards and everything. Benefits are very good as is the pay, at least when compared to other call center jobs. We have a base pay and it increases every 6 months until it caps out after about 3 years, then gets COLA increases annually. There is differential pay for time worked from 6:00 P.M to 6:00 am. Time and a half pay for any time worked over 8 hours in a day and after 50 hours of overtime in a year it goes to double time for pay. We also get a bonus every year and a pension. Health care, depending on the plan you opt for and who you are covering, is free or fairly cheap. We are however held to strict standards as far as the quality of our work. We are expected to handle every call a certain way and have a fairly low handle time. We are also expected to know a lot of information and processes that surround our utility work and of course the billing. It can be fairly exhausting on busy days and mistakes are easy to make. Working conditions are good. We have ergonomic chairs and work stations that can go from sitting to standing easily. We work in an air conditioned building which is nice since my apartment only has heating. There are occasionally catered lunches which is nice. Even though I talk to people all day it isn't hard for me to go all day without actually saying anything to another person who works here, it is a strange environment in that way. I am going to try and move on to a different job in this company as soon as I can, but for now this is a pretty good job all things considered.
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Aug 29, 2018 01:24
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CRIP EATIN BREAD posted:I found it to be the opposite, but I'm also very lucky. I was hired out of college by the professor I was doing research under, to join his company (and being the first employee), and do work as a software engineer. I've been there for 10 years now, and we've grown to around 15 employees. Everyone in the company gets benefits: health insurance, 75% matching of IRA contributions, start at 2 weeks of paid vacation per year (I'll be getting my 5th week of vacation shortly, although nobody really keeps track of the time off). Also there's profit sharing, which is of varying amounts but our xmas bonuses are greater than the median household income of my state, so that's nice. Yeah, count me in as another one who got lucky with a small company (<10 employees). It's also a software development firm, in Germany, which is currently my first full-time job after university. The atmosphere is extremely chill, there's no dress-code to speak of, everybody's on a first name basis with each other from day one. There's hardly any hierarchy, there's very much the sense that everybody is working cooperatively towards the same goal. There's a similarly relaxed trust-based stance on work time: I'm nominally working a 40 hour week, but as long as the workload gets done and I'm there for relevant meetings nobody's really keeping count. If need to leave an hour early for an appointment, or take a day of home-office on short notice, that's no trouble at all. Also, we've got two office dogs, which is just about the best thing ever  .To throw out some further stats for comparison: I make a gross of 4166€ a month (=50k a year), which after taxes and (public) healthcare comes out to ~2400€/month. That's around the average for a (junior) software developer around here and quite a bit higher than the national median, as computer touching still commands a crazy premium. I get 25 vacation days a year, 20 of which are the legally mandated minimum. The company is 100% dudes, which the owners have recognised as a problem they'd like to fix, but apparently so far haven't found any female applicants. One additional factor there is that they only started expanding very recently, with me being one of the recent batch of newcomers. The actual work is pretty relaxed and independent, largely operating according to Scrum. We (the development team) get told which features need to/should be implemented within the next couple of weeks (with our input w/r/t feasibility), and then we're more or less left to our own devices when it comes to how we go about making that happen. Once that's done there's a retrospective, where we can give feedback as to what might have given us trouble with the product or the process. The company only recently adopted this process, so there's still a bit of experimentation going on there as we figure out what actually works best for us. So far it's a pretty good mix between always having a feasible short-term goal in front of you, without feeling like you're being micromanaged.
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Aug 29, 2018 09:32
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Solkanar512 posted:So anyone else here a "straddler"? That is, someone who grew up blue-collar and ended up in the white collar world with all the WASPy pretension that comes with it? I've been meaning to read Lubrano's "Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams" (decent review here) but in the meantime I'd love to hear from others who've been through similar experiences. The concept of being "bicultural" is something I hadn't considered before, but it really hits home. Yup. My dad was a truck driver who spent the last few years of his life working as a Wal-Mart greeter because the DOT pulled his license, and I grew up government cheese poor in a very rural area, 6 people in a ~1300 square foot farm house. We didn't move from my grandparents' place into town until the early 1990's, and holy poo poo what a culture shock. I just happened to get obsessed with computers about that time after working with Apple 2's at school, and it eventually paid off. Took out loans to do some community college work that never went anywhere, then went back to cooking for a decade or so. Thanks to help from another goon who vouched for me on my very first real tech job got into an industry that actually pays survivable wages and worked my way up to management via being competent and handling situations like I was managing a kitchen. Going from kitchens to white-collar middle management was a real change of perspective. Fortunately, I just kept living the blue collar life and started socking away all that new pay into my retirement accounts and paying off ill-advised student loans.
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Aug 29, 2018 12:03
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I work in Canada in tech, although my last few jobs have been for San Francisco based startups as a remote worker. I've worked at every level from programmer to running all of development for a 150 person company, although I mostly do the individual contributor thing these days. Mostly for startups, with a few bigger companies here and there. I'm technically a contractor, which sort of sucks since it puts things like health insurance squarely on my shoulders, which is probably overall better than it would be in the U.S. but with some really crappy aspects (Pre-existing condition exemptions are still very much a thing which means I'll have to face $15K / year in prescription costs in a couple of years). Pay is good though which makes up for this, and I have no major complaints from a financial perspective. While the stereotypes of crazy hours and no work life balance in tech are true for some companies, it doesn't take long to learn how to root those companies out, and there's plenty of companies that are pretty flexible on hours. I wouldn't say I'm underworked by any means, but I put in a solid 40 hours and only in extremely rare cases (like 1-2 weeks a year) does it go over that. In my experience, the idea of big companies being less lovely due to reverting to the mean is somewhat true, but larger companies also tend to be less outwardly lovely due to bureaucratic layers and policies being added bit by bit to address some shortcoming. So on one hand, there's less room for a single person to be lovely (or exceptionally great), but in addition there's more explicit controls around bad behaviour. In my experience working in bigger businesses, it can definitely make things run less smoothly, and at least some of the policies are misguided or overly blunt. I think in terms of how companies run best - this is obviously going to be specific to tech and I'm not sure how well it can be generalized - but I think a lot of people worry about control and how top-down decisions are made, while in a lot of cases businesses would benefit from not making these top-down decisions in the first place. It was an obvious but always unspoken truth in one of my companies that the products and add-ons that were the main revenue drivers were usually a result of developers, CS people, or other individual contributors thinking of something and hacking away on it for a week or two, while the top-down 6 month strategies that management came up with were always embarrassing failures. There's a strong cultural expectation that decisions need to be top-down, but if you really think about it, a very small percentage of what a business does really needs to be controlled / approved / whatever by managers. I think unlike governments, companies are a place where anarchist-type principles and practices can really work (probably provided the company is small enough). Another cultural expectation that's somewhat lovely in tech startups, and I imagine really a lot of professional white collar fields, is that there's an unspoken assumption that labour laws just simply don't apply to you. Even if you're not exempt from overtime legislation (IT workers are exempt where I am), it would be absolutely unthinkable to suggest that you're paid overtime. Even though Ontario has a strong labour board and you generally can't be fired without cause, it routinely happens (usually by being "asked to resign" with the unspoken threat that your reputation will be ruined if you force the companies hand on this). I've worked in companies where the sales team was literally locked in their basement sales pit until 10 PM (I think it was until they hit a certain number), and the company and the sales team treated this as some wacky goofy startup thing. enki42 fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Aug 29, 2018 |
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Aug 29, 2018 14:30
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I also am straddler. Grew up in a retirement trailer park in Florida. My salary now puts me solidly in the professional class and I got there by access to a good education at an Academy. I could make quite a lot more independently.
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Aug 29, 2018 16:32
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glowing-fish posted:Where do you work now, and where have you worked previously? I own my own business in Chile. Previously I've worked in the USA at a small family-owned retail shop, in finance at a couple of multinationals, at a tech startup (that didn't), and doing various other things. glowing-fish posted:How do you feel about the possibility of democratic, egalitarian or decentralized work environments? Depends on the details? Every business is on something of a spectrum in practice - it's not that the organization is democratic OR autocratic, egalitarian OR hierarchical, decentralized OR centralized, etc - and the same organization can even go different ways when faced with different challenges. I am pretty skeptical of radical implementation of workplace democracy, non-hierarchical organizations, and total decentralization but I'd also be pretty skeptical of radical implementation of their opposites. glowing-fish posted:What is the relation between the purpose of an organization, and the work structure? For example, has anyone worked at a big multinational corporation that was personally pleasant for the employees, or worked at a non-profit that had major issues of worker mistreatment (I have seen both). I honestly never had an unexpectedly bad experience working at a multinational. My experience (but YMMV. There is probably a lot of variation here) has been that with big companies the culture is usually pretty settled and not dependant on any one person, so what you see up front is more or less what you get. If you ask enough questions going in you can get a pretty good idea of what to expect while you're at work. In contrast, the environment in mom-and-pop operations or startups or etc highly depend on the personality of the owner and the circumstances the business is in right that moment. glowing-fish posted:Have you had experience with businesses overtly or covertly trying to break employment law, either in terms of wages, hours, or worker safety? How did you respond? Have you experienced bias or discrimination in worker hiring or promotion based on race, gender, family status, etc? How much have businesses you worked for taken sexual harassment seriously? What about workplace bullying? Every large business I've ever worked for in the U.S. has taken sexual harassment seriously. At one company I worked for a pretty highly paid sales executive started and was fired in the same month because he got creepy. In Chile it's kind of a different story, though the culture is slowly changing. One thing that's maybe unique here is often as an employer you're asked to bend the law in an employee's favor. For instance if someone's feeling lovely and wants to work from home, that's strictly speaking illegal. Either you're on vacation, in which case your employer is not allowed to make you work, or you have a licensia medica (medical pass, basically) that allows you to be home and your employer is not allowed to make you work, or you're available for work in which case you should be in the office (if you're not, presumably, your employer is forcing you to work while out sick or on vacation). Or someone will ask if they can skip lunch and leave early and even though the hours are the same, a lunch hour is an unrenouncable right and your employer can't make that kind of trade (because presumably they're forcing you to do it, even if you suggested it, etc). In general I do things like that for my employees regardless, but many employers won't because it creates a potential liability later. edit: More Chile info. Standard work day is 8:30-6:30 with 1 hour for lunch. Standard vacation is 3 weeks, mandated by law, though a few companies may offer more. In general, Chilean companies tend to be hierarchical and workers are expected to stay in their lanes. Workers are entitled by law to severence of 1 month plus 1 month per year worked if they're laid off (but not if fired), and there is a labor inspection court that determines whether a firing or layoff is justified in case it is contested. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Aug 29, 2018 |
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Aug 29, 2018 16:37
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wateroverfire posted:I own my own business in Chile. Previously I've worked in the USA at a small family-owned retail shop, in finance at a couple of multinationals, at a tech startup (that didn't), and doing various other things. ¡Como tay, weon! I also live and work in Chile, and have for two and a half years. (Actualamente, vivo en Bellas Artes). I am assuming you are in Santiago? I work as an English teacher here, which is not a "standard" job at all, so I am outside of the normal employment system. It shifts a lot, and depending on the season, I might work only very odd hours. For example, tomorrow, I only "work" between 8:30 and 10:00 at night. It can be a fun adventure, and it can pay well, comparatively. Chilean workplace culture would probably be a big surprise for people in the United States, because stereotypes of Latin@s being fun, spontaneous and sexy don't really apply to the work culture here, which is very serious, bureaucratic, and long. The labor laws are in general much stricter, but in certain aspects (especially about discrimination) the US has stronger laws. As an English teacher, I've worked at dozens of companies in Chile, and its been a happy surprise. I've worked with lots of senior people, and I've been impressed with how conscientious and aware they are. I've worked with a few that weren't, but given the fact of Chile's classist history, most of the senior executives I have met are not that type of person. I mean, part of it is that the people who are learning English are by definition interested in change, like they know they have to learn more about the world, and they are not "The Old Chile", where you get a job because of who your uncle plays golf with. BHP, which on paper might seem like a bad company ("World's Largest Mining Company" doesn't sound very progressive) is one of the best companies I've ever worked with as far as diversity and awareness and sustainability go.
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Aug 29, 2018 19:50
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glowing-fish posted:¡Como tay, weon! Yeah, I'm in Santiago. The multi-nationals that are working in Chile are very different culturally from purely national firms, so you might notice a difference depending on which type you're working for. You also enjoy a very priviledged position, in a lot of ways, as an American man working in Chile that shields you from a lot of bullshit you would experience if you were a local or a woman (lol) or a local woman (roflmao). Chile is a pretty weird place to work. If you don't mind my asking, is the institute you're working for paying you over the table? I've heard about a lot of shady arrangements (ie: paying teachers under someone else's rut to avoid having to go through the process of sponsoring them for a visa, etc).
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Aug 29, 2018 20:08
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wateroverfire posted:Yeah, I'm in Santiago. The multi-nationals that are working in Chile are very different culturally from purely national firms, so you might notice a difference depending on which type you're working for. You also enjoy a very priviledged position, in a lot of ways, as an American man working in Chile that shields you from a lot of bullshit you would experience if you were a local or a woman (lol) or a local woman (roflmao). Chile is a pretty weird place to work. Yes, I am working legally, I am a permanent resident. I don't understand all the stuff with payments, but as far as I know, all the work I have been doing is legal.
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Aug 29, 2018 20:37
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I have a BA in Psychology, but just having a BA is almost the same in the field as not having any degree, it seems like. at any rate, my year as a tutor for AmeriCorps convinced me I'm not quite ready for primetime in terms of providing life assistance to people. So I applied for a bunch of lovely retail jobs, and now I work at a Safeway in the deli department. It's...an experience. I work closing shifts, and get at least 28 hours a week, which given I live in Washington and Safeway is union, is enough to get by comfortably. and closing means my shifts with the deli managers only overlap by a few hours, if that. Some weeks I don't see them at all, and my only management contact are PICs. Who are almost all good people who care way more about their job than any of the deli managers, so that's nice too. This store has crazy high turnover, partly because it hires a lot of kids, and partly because...our customers are loving lunatics. We're centrally located in the downtown of a large Seattle suburb. and also a gigantic apartment complex comprised of 12 seven story buildings opened a couple years ago....right across the street. And the majority of it is public or subsidized housing. also because we're centrally located, we get all the transients. I try to use the employee bathroom and avoid the restroom as much as possible - a couple weeks ago I saw someone getting high in the stall. I wish we could lock the bathrooms and have a code or something, but the store would probably get sued. also up until recently there was only security one or two days a week. yeah. Theft is absolutely rampant. I have a mental list now of the regulars who don't actually pay for what they get from the deli, so if I see them again I can politely suggest that I can ring them up. or call a PIC, in a couple of cases. But a lot of the time I just don't care, because nobody else seems to, at least not in management or corporate. This is my first proper customer service job, and since I started in October, I've had a steep learning curve. It's some kind of insane miracle that I've been able to hold down this job for ten months, despite being on the autism spectrum. And I actively choose to stay up front! In part because I'm trying to get some serious practice interacting with people, and managing my own impulses. Also because gently caress doing dishes or cleaning the fryers. I still need to get better at not letting irritating people get to me. I have gotten a lot better at not escalating situations with shitlords, but dealing with very dumb people is still a challenge. especially when they order fried chicken and then get angry at me that I am not giving them baked chicken.  but there's a real sense of camaraderie with my deli coworkers - everyone agrees the majority of our customers are either awful or not very smart. There's definitely sort of an us vs. them mentality, although we also do have favorite customers. That us vs. them mentality is pretty dominant among people who've worked in the store a long time. Out of sympathy and SOLIDARITY, I tend to be very polite when serving coworkers. Some customers are really eager to complain to managers about us for no adequate reason, to the point that it's a real Boy Who Cried Wolf Situation. PICs seldom take customer complaints about bad service seriously, and the worst I've ever gotten is a friendly talking-to. I used to be really reluctant to send assholes to the PICs, but now I'm like "yes, please, go bother them, see where that gets you". Also I like responding to "constructive" customer suggestions about the running of the deli with "yeah, that sounds like a great idea. sucks it'll never happen, but great idea anyway. thanks!  "Overall, I like ragging on this job, but it's weirdly not completely terrible for a lovely grocery store job.
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Aug 30, 2018 04:09
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How to get a job in 2018: Did you major in comp sci? You'll be fine. Did you major in humanities like this poster did? Insert loaded gun into mouth, disengage the safety, point at the roof of your mouth, pull the trigger. I really need to find my .270 and do the right thing 
Star Man fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Aug 30, 2018 |
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Aug 30, 2018 04:14
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Star Man posted:How to get a job in 2018: Please don't joke about suicide! And even more, please don't think about it seriously. Also, there is one job where it is easy to make a lot of money with a humanity's degree...the job I have currently!
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Aug 30, 2018 04:45
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glowing-fish posted:Please don't joke about suicide! And even more, please don't think about it seriously. Man, I can't even get an interview at a community college in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming (ie: outside of Casper, Laramie, or Cheyenne) with qualifications that meet or exceed the requirements for a job that pays $29k a year. I can't even interview.
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Aug 30, 2018 04:59
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If you're that desperate consider commercial sailing. It's awful to sail, but it's not prohibitively hard to get a unlicensed book.
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Aug 30, 2018 05:07
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Star Man posted:Man, I can't even get an interview at a community college in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming (ie: outside of Casper, Laramie, or Cheyenne) with qualifications that meet or exceed the requirements for a job that pays $29k a year. I can't even interview. I was in the same situation, only I was in Montana! ...have you considered ESL teaching overseas? Its basically a job that any American with a college degree can get, and you are automatically considered cool and knowledgeable! It obviously has a lot of costs, but it is fun.
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Aug 30, 2018 05:17
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Star Man posted:Man, I can't even get an interview at a community college in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming (ie: outside of Casper, Laramie, or Cheyenne) with qualifications that meet or exceed the requirements for a job that pays $29k a year. I can't even interview. That's a lovely situation. Ever considered a trade? I know most of the unions around here are looking, and plumbers and carpenters make a hell of a lot better than 29k a year.
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Aug 30, 2018 08:16
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Cicero posted:See, this is interesting to me. My perspective is, yes being "exploited" isn't exactly great, but I'll take a higher-paying job where some of my productivity gets "stolen" by my employer, over a lower-paying one where I keep everything. Because the tangible outcome of the former is superior. The attitude of, "yes I get less money this way, but at least I keep everything I make" to me feels like cutting off your nose to spite your face. "I'm fine with being exploited!" says highest paid goon in the thread.
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Aug 30, 2018 16:35
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WampaLord posted:"I'm fine with being exploited!" says highest paid goon in the thread. The part of your labor product you aren't paid is the rent you pay to the rest of your organization to help keep it operational, and for allowing you to use it to make money.
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Aug 30, 2018 16:42
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WampaLord posted:"I'm fine with being exploited!" says highest paid goon in the thread.
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Aug 30, 2018 16:53
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Cicero posted:Way to miss the point. poo poo, if anything if I had a lower income that'd make me even more desperate to eke out more money. You are unable to make unbiased comments about anything in our society because you have such massive wealth it has blinded you to the suffering of the common man. "If I had less money, I would just make more money!"
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Aug 30, 2018 16:56
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wateroverfire posted:The part of your labor product you aren't paid is the rent you pay to the rest of your organization to help keep it operational, and for allowing you to use it to make money. There is another flow outta that. The most important flow. The part of your labor you aren't paid is the shareholders. They're very often perfectly happy to allow the organization to cease to be operational if they get paid more.
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Aug 30, 2018 16:57
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WampaLord posted:"If I had less money, I would just make more money!"
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Aug 30, 2018 17:03
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BrandorKP posted:There is another flow outta that. The most important flow. The share of the business's income paid to the shareholders in compensation to them for the use of their money, which they wouldn't put into the business if they couldn´t expect a return on the investment. A business needs money to operate and to expand and that money has to come from somewhere. Providing capital is every bit as important and deserving of compensation as unloading trucks or touching computers. And while I'm sure in some circumstances you can find investors who would rather eat the goose than wait for eggs, that is definitely not the norm.
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Aug 30, 2018 17:19
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wateroverfire posted:The share of the business's income paid to the shareholders in compensation to them for the use of their money, which they wouldn't put into the business if they couldn´t expect a return on the investment. A business needs money to operate and to expand and that money has to come from somewhere. Providing capital is every bit as important and deserving of compensation as unloading trucks or touching computers. Come on dude, you can’t make a post like that and completely ignore the insane amounts of stock buybacks and massive dividends paid out at the expense of business investment and compensation.
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Aug 30, 2018 17:40
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wateroverfire posted:. No since the transition from stakeholder to shareholder it's not just the norm but the fiduciary duty.
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Aug 30, 2018 17:43
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wateroverfire posted:The share of the business's income paid to the shareholders in compensation to them for the use of their money, which they wouldn't put into the business if they couldn´t expect a return on the investment. A business needs money to operate and to expand and that money has to come from somewhere. Providing capital is every bit as important and deserving of compensation as unloading trucks or touching computers. my god, we found him. quickly, there's not much time. one, maybe get out of the housing market, bad times ahead there. two, you'll make a lot betting on Obama to be a two-termer. three, see if you can get any early money on Trump winning the presidency in 2016. don't take it too harshly, time traveler from 2007. once, many of us were like you.
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Aug 30, 2018 17:45
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It's also why buybacks (to raise share price) and dividends happened instead of raised wages with the tax cut.
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Aug 30, 2018 18:00
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Solkanar512 posted:Come on dude, you can’t make a post like that and completely ignore the insane amounts of stock buybacks and massive dividends paid out at the expense of business investment and compensation. We could go one by one and debate the merits of individual actions! That would probably be pretty interesting. In a small business, at least, pumping money into comp is a tricky proposition. There are going to be fat times and lean times, and cutting wage expenses (which means either letting people go or getting them to work for less, which at least in Chile would be more difficult than letting people go) is a lot harder than not paying out as much in the first place. Ditto for investment. Once you've put time and money into a project that doesn't work out you generally can't get any of that back and you're in a worse position than when you started. So at least in a small-medium business context, you look at the above and go "I am on the hook if this goes sideways" and might decide not to commit a lot of money to across-the-board raises or commit to expanding unless you're confidant the environment is good and the circumstances are right for that to pay off. You tend to be more risk-averse than an outside observer might be when assessing the same decisions. I think for large or publically held companies the dynamics are probably a little bit different but management is going to collectively look at whether they can meet shareholders' expectations and if so, not stick their necks out on many additional risks. It's pretty safe to announce you're paying out a little more per share vs raising your operating costs into the indefinite future because you have some extra money or engaging in the scale of business investment that would move the needle for a public company.
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Aug 30, 2018 18:11
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BrandorKP posted:No since the transition from stakeholder to shareholder it's not just the norm but the fiduciary duty. I'm not following this. Could you please explain what you mean?
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Aug 30, 2018 18:14
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Come on dude, just tell me why my employer needed to spend nearly TWENTY BILLION on stock buybacks. wateroverfire posted:We could go one by one and debate the merits of individual actions! That would probably be pretty interesting. But we're not talking about IPOs, we're talking about assholes trading shares between each other. The company isn't getting that money, yet they somehow demand instant and ever growing returns at the expense of everything else. That includes long term growth.
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Aug 30, 2018 18:22
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