- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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Be me
Min wage job
Go to college for game programming in 2019, think ill be a game developer
Degree in '23
130k debt
Companies hiring Grok over actual programmers
Still only min wage job
MFW
I don’t envy anyone trying to break into the games industry right now - you graduated at exactly the time all the investment left, layoffs hit, and jobs dried up.
It’s hard enough trying to find positions right now if you have years of experience, let alone as a fresh grad with none.
Me in game dev school right now 🥲 Fortunately I have previous experience and while I’m studying for design I’ve already been a programmer for a number of years. I’ll make it but yeah… Applying for jobs won’t get me anywhere I’m gonna have to know a guy who knows a guy
Ain’t that the truth. I’ve worked in games for about 15 years and almost every job I’ve had has been because I knew someone at that company already.
Not saying regular applications without a referral never work, but the odds against you are astronomical.
You all happen to have an open position?
Fortunately, the indie scene is still booming. If you went into games because you love it, you still have a fair shot at making something you want and finding an audience.
Exactly. Shits fucked, I dont think i deserve the debt im stuck with.
Anon discovers capitalism and for-profit post-secondary education.
Could be worse. Could be living in China with even more capitalism.
I got my degree in 2014 at 22, and it still took scores of applications to get even a handful of interviews and one job offer for $17 an hour. I can only imagine what young people deal with today. I know it’s only worsened in the last half decade or so.
We have come to the point where me must accept that it is normal for people to spend their early 20s smoking weed and masturbating
was it ever not normal for people from middle class and upper middle class families to do that?
I only did 1 of those and managed to get a house by my late 20s a few years ago.
I did both, quit the weed a long time ago.
To compensate I still crank my hog like it owes me money.
This thread has a lot of people saying things like “don’t get a degree” or “get a trade cert” or “work in a different field to get experience” which I feel completely side-steps many issues and the realities that many people face. It’s just a fundamentally broken system. The value of degrees fluctuates so much because of a political climate that has the stability of a pane of glass being violently thrown off of a building and a job market that prioritizes either posting ghost jobs to overwork employees to death or outsourcing its candidate search to whoever can guess the most buzzwords in an application.
gets a degree in public health to help humanity
Trump completely ousts public health and replaces it with dodgy supplements
The social contract has been destroyed. Time to get the pitchforks!
I graduated into Bush’s recession, so I went to get a PhD in education. They pay you a small wage to do research, guaranteed for 5 years in my program. Graduated that into a healthy economy that… old professors weren’t willing to retire from. Finally give up after several second place rejections and take a simple adjunct professor job just in time for the pandemic, cutting my classes to a third.
But hey, at least I didn’t get that job at NCES; Trump 2.0 royally fucked all those education PhD federal jobs.
the problem with folks and their degrees is they fall into sunk cost fallacy. you have to get a job in your field or you have wasted your entire education. oh and if you can’t do that, you have to get another degree in another field to get another job that field.
no, you don’t. what you need to do is learn to market your skills to appeal to a broad range of employers, many of whom are looking for skills more than degrees. you may also have to be willing to move, or take on other compromises to find work.
but many folks can’t do that because of a sense of pride, arrogance, or stubbornness. they’d rather work shitty low wage jobs ‘in their field’ and be forever fucked, than like, try something different. and they view those of us who chose that path as ‘traitors’ or something. it’s totally absurd and is entire a problem of not being willing to give up ‘the dream’ and all the emotional expectation tied to it.
i’m glad i quit my PhD and tried something different with my life. higher education has distorted itself into a bureaucratic ponzi scheme run by petty people.
i won’t even get into the stupidity of ‘useful’ vs ‘useless’ degree nonsense that so many mostly use as a way to punch other people who had different courses of study than they did, despite the fact generally higher education kind of teaches most students the same skillsets, but then again, the students are go out of their way to avoid learning those skills and part of how they justify that is by claiming such skills are worthless,
such a stupidly vicious circle of stupidity and laziness. that influences and idiots also exploit by defaming higher education as a whole based on loud cohort of people who choose to be helpless and blame their uni for not getting them a job they thought they deserved.
That’s a fairly broad take that didn’t really apply to me. I wanted to impact education policy in the US because I noticed how decrepit it was. I was denied that opportunity but managed to get some top tier data analytic skills through the process that I could capitalize on if I was willing to work in the private sector (such as health insurance or financial industry predictive models). There is still massive demand for those skills.
But I don’t do that, not because of sunk cost but because I don’t want to contribute to systems I find immoral. I took a job in a Psychology department, which isn’t my field, since it lets me teach while taking care of my children.
You are right, though, the research field has some serious issues that need to be resolved. There has been some push for open source materials that people can contribute to, but given the current state of affairs globally, it’s not something people can really deal with right now.
That said, a PhD in any research profession is a passion project. You don’t do it for money, but for intellectual curiosity or some other reason. Towards that end, they should be stubborn – they’re already rejecting the idea that education is a means towards profit.
Unfortunately, that also means most PhDs are already wealthy going into it (especially those who can actually afford to finish) which means, at least in education and politics, those perspectives dominate the field. It’s a real problem when they don’t understand how 99% of the rest of us live.
Out of curiosity, which field did you need to leave? Each has their own problems.
This is me but I’m in my 40s with over 25 years experience in my field. My ex left me hi and dry when she left me and I can’t find a job despite my applying anywhere and everywhere that might pay more than minimum wage. I’ve still got my own place, but the shame I feel having to ask my parents for money is unbearable at times.
I’m currently trying to start my own business, but I still need money to pay bills in the interim. Capitalism is a fucking cancer on society.
If you got the degree you can land a basic government job that isn’t in a major city. Process permits for 20 an hour in a small town easily. And the smaller more rural towns don’t usually require a degree and will consider someone who will just live in town.
And from there you can work you way up way better than any corporate environment.
Honestly? You don’t need a degree for any of those admin jobs in mid-sized cities either. At least in the US, give or take.
I don’t just mean the admin jobs though. There’s some field jobs, especially in water (drinking and waste, which I followed) and food (inspecting restaurants I avoided.) Health departments, for example, are in need of staff across the country, especially after the 2023 culling of covid funding. Public service is retiring fast.
Agreed, I think I sorta group those types of jobs as admin in my head which is inaccurate. Like working in a health department seems administrative, but clearly there’s field work there.
Public service can be hard to break into as well. It often takes months to years to land a local government job.
Definitely can be, though I walked into a rural health department who had paper applications. They didn’t use online applications as a screening method. Got the job that month. They were also a weird teamsters union department, and probably wouldn’t have hired me if I weren’t white. So the mileage definitely varies.
(And yeah I processed paperwork 80% of my time there.)
Don’t look down on trade schools. The trades are a great way to make good money and not likely to be replaced by AI… If I was that age today, I would be very strongly looking at that type of work. Or something in the medical field.
I feel so sad for the younger people. At least companies seem to be hiring again, people are getting cold calls. I told my son not to go to college, he’ll just become a debt slave.
My advice would be to find any entry level position at a company that does tuition reimbursement. Call centers often do this so they can hire from within to avoid paying market rates.
I got my career start as a customer service rep and ended up a senior IT engineer, and got my IT degree in the process, of which they covered 2/3. That’s why I didn’t mind being paid 50% market average.
My second piece of advice is to get your basics at a community college. Substantially lower costs, smaller class sizes, and the exact same classes as a university. Just make sure the desired university accepts the credits, but there’s often agreements between universities and near by CCs. If you get your associates, some universities have scholarships for that.
Although if you’re interested in IT, certs are a better use of money. A degree shows knowledge of theory, but many certs show technical knowledge.
College is not only about a degree it’s part of our social culture and you’re making your child miss out on that due to fear.
Can confirm a Masters is pointless. Especially when everyone else at your table in the pub has a PhD.
I’m laughing to think what happens when the market is saturated with PhDs.
Will everyone need to be a professor to be competitive?
I wasn’t actually in competition with them at least, as they were all post-docs I know. The masters never did anything for my career in software that starting a year earlier wouldn’t have done better, except that the state paid for my ales.
While college sure aint the answer to everything, spending your days jerking off and watching TV sure aint the answer either.
Pretty sure wanking doesn’t take him all day. Jerking off is not the problem.
1: is your name a reference to the stormlight archives
2: the person self describes their life as jerking and TV watching, don’t think OP is being unfair
1: no, what’s that?
2: yeah but still. I mean, don’t put us all in the same bucket, I jerk off too. OK maybe not 7 times per day. But even then there’s time to do stuff. Watching TV is the real issue there.
Character in those books named Adolin Kholin
If you described yourself as only doing anything all day I would say it’s probably unhealthy and not the path to success
It can take a surprisingly long amount of time and a lot of energy 😁
This is how revolutions start. Some smooth talker is going to come along and motivate all these people to do something wonderful or terrible.
My group of buddies always say that if gaming hadn’t become so wildly popular a revolution started by young men would have happened already.
The US is really good at placating the masses with media. Stay distracted, stay oppressed.
Don’t worry, gaming is quickly becoming unaffordable to anyone without a serious income stream.
im broke and im gaming on a borderline e-waste pc (which i bought for cheap used) and a steam deck from pre-price hike and buying games off humble bundle and deep discounts on steam
i also have a ps4 pro (which i bought used for next to nothing) from before i moved to this tiny apartment and could do couch gaming
it’s possible but you gotta not buy the latest and most expensive games. idk why anyone would do that in the first place tho, theres so many games to play that are just as good and are way cheaper
but they fund the development of those games tho so i dont mind i guess 🤷
Gaming systems are made for the top 10% now. They are fully rejecting regular consumers and focusing entirely on the high end market.
Basically they want to cater the economy to the top 10% and neglect the bottom 90%. This is one reason why everything is so damn expensive. Budget options aren’t a thing anymore.
Hahaha ! “We would start a revolution but we’re too busy gaming on the couch”. What a bunch of losers indeed.
If you look into it at all, America is a really embarrassing place.
I mean, we just started an unprovoked war by bombing a school full of little girls.
If someone has done that to America, there’d already be memorials about it and several random brown countries bombed back to the stone age, but since we did it, it’s actually totally cool.
It always has been. That’s why alternate history is taught.
We can’t even get gamers to stop pre-ordering games from even just the shitty companies. They literally can’t simply go play any of the thousands of other amazing games because they’re too busy letting themselves get rat-fucked by companies like EA and Ubisoft who actively hate their customers.
Uhh, yes. Unironically. Revolutions happen when a sufficient number of people can’t afford to game & jack off any more, so their only source of entertainment is to LARP overthrowing the government, which they do so realistically that it actually happens. Open a history book smh.
deleted by creator
4chan and reddit were instrumental in the election of Trump (45). CMV.
Reddit’s boner for Ron Paul in 2008 was a proof-of-concept for leveraging social media to astroturf. CMV.
Why do you think ghislane was power-moderating reddit until 2019 and eglin was [redacted] {user has unfortunately died in a vehicle collision and subsequent lithium fire}
Just as soon as the porn stops being so abundant and interesting to occupy all of OOP’s free time
Why are people talking like being a mechanic is bum work, or like there’s a huge overhead cost in being a mechanic, or that you have to go to trade school to be a mechanic, or like mechanic work is going away?
None of these is true.
Mechanics will always have work, usually with overtime, and usually pay is very decent.
No degree required. Certs optional.
Tools are very affordable when you’re not buying them all at once.
Lots of room to change specializations.
ICE mechanics are still going to be hugely in demand because the Internal Combustion Engine isn’t going anywhere, even if they stop putting them in some/ most automobiles. But there are dozens of other mechanical disciplines, and as long as you know how to (when to) then a wrench, you can always get a job.
A bearing is a bearing, whether it’s on a crank shaft, an electric motor, a tail pulley, or a garage door.
do you know any mechanics?
every mechanic I have met hates their life, unless they work for like a really high end place. and those jobs are far and few.
i had family in auto work, electricians, and line workers. they all basically said ‘go to college working in the trades is fucking shit.’
working in an office is a lot easier on your body and doesn’t leave you with medical problems. my electrician uncle lost one leg in his 50s and then other in his 60s. the mechanics i knew all worked for their dads and were townies we never left where they grew up, etc.
they made decent money, sure, but i would never ever want to trade live with them. i’m in my 40s and healthier than I was in my 20s. money isn’t everything.
I… uh… i am a mechanic. I just don’t work in a car shop that pays only billable hours. Why would you do that to yourself?
That would be like getting a minimum wage serving job and hoping the tips will be reliable. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I never struggle for hours, I have great benefits, non- union, no certs, degrees, or specialization required. I make enough to pay all my bills, invest in retirement, and still have money left over for life afterward. I work with a gang of guys all doing the same. We work in a field where we can go pretty much anywhere and get another job paying about the same.
I’m not sure why the mechanics you have met can’t find these jobs, but they have all misinformed you.
i work in IT. it’s so easy, just get a six figure job like me.
it’s not that the vast majority of positions in the field… are part time contract work that pay shit… and jobs like mine are difficult and rare to find and typically only go to those with tons of experience or elite degrees, like myself. it’s not that 22 year olds even struggle to get those shit jobs that get their foot in the door.
or that it took me over a decade of experience and working to get to this wage level… no it’s not that.
i also don’t understand why 22 year olds don’t have 500K in assets and just buy houses instead of renting and living with roommates, it’s so easy!
Wow, you have it hard in IT i guess. Maybe you should have looked into being a mechanic.
You don’t need a degree to get jobs as a mechanic, so no formal education necessary. You don’t have to worry about jobs being hard to find because basically everything that moves has bearings that need to be changed. You don’t need to worry about contract work because there are substantial amounts of mechanic jobs that pay hourly and offer tons of overtime.
I’m not sure why it’s so offensive to you that plenty of people don’t have the experience you heard about from “every mechanic you met.”
the average mechanic wage is 50K a year. average IT job wage is 100K a year.
that’s not a livable wage unless you live in bumfucksville parts of the USA, and the mechanics that live there are not making 50K, they are making like 30K.
but please tell me how everyone should go be a mechanic and they’ll make 150K a year? i guess?
just because you got lucky or did well, doesn’t not mean every other person will have the same luck or skill in their career.
you certainly are not educated. you’ve made that very clear but your insistence ignorance that being a mechanic is ‘so easy’.
Wow, for someone so educated, you sure make a lot of odd assumptions.
Perhaps I am more educated than you assume, even if a formal education is not required for my job.
Also, I’m gonna make an assumption now about your education, based on things you’ve said here… someone as condescendingly smart as yourself and using averages to discuss things like this has certainly taken at least some statistics classes and understands what a “standard deviation” is… and how that might be affected by extremely low paying jobs in one sector, even if those are not the most prominent paying jobs or abundant positions in that sector.
I think the standard deviation of pay for mechanics is much wider than you think, and possibly skewed by other factors than just simple geography.
I’m not saying that all mechanics make IT wages, but i am saying that I didn’t have to spend 10 years in school and $150k in debt to compete for a position that I earn 6 figures in. My job is not competitive for positions, they’re pretty abundant. Base pay for this position in my area (not a big city) is substantially higher than the national “average.” No formal education required.
But I must ask, why u so mad bro? Sounds like you’re living the dream life, no need to have an aneurism about other people’s money
Basically nobody has 150K in debt form an undergrad degree. They have like 30-40K of debt, which is easy for them to back back over 10 years with when the starting salary is 50-60K and in 10 years they will most likely double that salary.
but keep telling me how everyone should be a mechanic and college is stupid. Please. because anyone who went to college is a dumb loser or something, or i dunno, maybe you are talking about your own poor choices when you were younger? I definitely have met very dumb folks who have 150K in debt from college, who were very mad about it, who also terrible employees and people in general.
A mechanic making over 100K exists, yes, but they are rare, and would be in highly specialized areas and likely late in their careers. There are bicycle mechanics who make over 100K a year, but for every 1 of them, there are about 1000s of them making 30K a year with the top end wage being about 45K after decades of experience. Should I tell folks to go be a bike mechanic because it’s a good career path because like .01% of professional race mechanics make good money? Becuase yeah, they have about a 1/10000 change of that career path, and a 99999/10000 change of working 40 hours a week in some crappy bike shop making 20 bucks an hour for the rest of their life.
Oh my life is the dream life. I get mad other very dumb people tell me that I’m the richest bastard in the world, or that i’m a poor piece of shit. of which there a lot of on lemmy. Instead the boring fact that I’m in the 85th percentile of income and the 90th percentile of asset wealth. I even was a landlord for a few years, which you know, makes me capitalist hyper scum.
But i prefer facts, statistics and reality, to emotional reasoning, which makes folks very mad. but they tend to respond to that stuff wtih ‘u mad bro? lolz i so smart u dumb because anecdote anecdote anecdote’.
Trade work is admirable work. Never downplay fields that allow overtime. My best salary years are in an industry that allows unlimited OT.
I must be a psycho for thinking people should be paid more rather than work themselves to death.
It’s a cold world to live in when people think like this.
I’d rather have the ability to pickup an extra shift when times are tough. I have my friends that are on a strict 40 hour week and when the check doesn’t cut it they are fucked. OT has allowed me a lot of luxuries I otherwise would have had to scrimp and save for.
Meanwhile most people are fucked if their car breaks down. I just pick up an extra shift and the problem goes away.
I’d rather times not be tough, but it seems that’s no longer allowed.
Thats exactly the point, if you are on a 40h week and that doesnt cut it, something is very wrong. If you say to work extra as a bonus, well maybe. But if you need it to make ends meet it’s completely fucked imo.
It can be both, can’t it?
People should be paid a living wage. If you do more work than is the defined norm you should be paid increasingly more sums of money.
The intent of overtime laws was to encourage companies to hire someone else instead of making someone work 80 hours a week.A business saying that they’ll pay you more if you work more at your discretion doesn’t bother me. Even with a perfectly good wage and benefits you’re going to have cases where people want a touch more more money. I had a coworker who did contracting jobs to pay for a new deck. He didn’t have to, but it kept his budget from getting weird.
I worked 3300 hours a few years back. I was not prepared for what the overtime would do to my taxes. Still brought home more than I ever had before (or since). Also was not prepared what the overtime would do to my personal life or my mind.
Yup two years ago I worked just over 3500 hours. I basically lived at work to help put my wife through college and hold down the fort.
It was very difficult but worth it.
HAAANK DONT ABBREVIATE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE HAAANK
shop rate around me $180/hr now. the mechanics better be making at least a quarter of that. my company only charges half that rate for custom machine building
Mechanic pay is ass these days. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless it’s like specialized and unionized.
How much do you think mechanics get paid today?
They make a good living, but they are paid flat rate, and there is no guarantee that there will be steady income. If there’s a lul, the mechanic might make $0 in a given week. Also, if for some reason a job takes longer than the billable hours for that job, they are essentially working for free. Of the trades, it’s the shittiest one to make good money in imo.
so many bozos on the internet they know what these fields are like, and it shows they know nothing.
folks who post how wonderful it is have survivorship bias. your average mechanic/plumber/electrician isn’t making bank, they are making average to below average wage. and the income is not steady, it’s sporadic. you might make 100k one year and 60 the next, or spend 2 years with minimal income because construction market or similar is slowing down.
