Looking forward to seeing some interesting jobs I haven’t really thought about. Bonus points if it’s an IT job.
I have been working in power plants for over ten years. Entry level plant operators can make six figures with a high school diploma. At a decent plant, you’ll be balls to the wall busy on 5-10% of your shifts, pretty steady with general routine stuff that’s mostly just confirming that shit is normal 80% of the time, and the remaining 10% is in outages which can vary between busting your ass and waiting around but it’s rough either way because you might be working every day for a few weeks. Every plant I’ve been to does 12 hour shifts with pretty frequent changes between days and nights, which is by far the worst part. You’ll have an easier time getting in and moving up if you are pretty good with STEM stuff, but you’re fine if you passed honors physics in high school. V=IR and PV=nRT will get you really far. Spatial reasoning skills are also really helpful.
I’m at a combined cycle natural gas plant where I started as an outside operator almost 3 years ago at $39.80/hour and am now a ZLD water treatment operator in the same plant at $52/hour; control room operators start at about $60/hour here. I had a really shitty 12 hour shift today so I earned every dime of that wage, but sometimes it’s only like 4-6 hours of work in a 12 hour shift and a bunch of reading or YouTube in between while monitoring everything. Even the tough shifts are kinda good sometimes because I get to work the puzzle part of my brain.
What starting jobs does your plant offer right now? Are they hiring? I’m not interested but I am wondering if your experience is colored at all by a different job market.
Did you have any experience prior to 3 years ago?
My plant in particular has a roster of only about 30 people, only about 5 of which are what I would call entry level. Right now we’re fully staffed, but every couple of years we get a few people who leave. We’ll have probably two retirements in the next couple of years, and who knows who will say fuck this place and go elsewhere. But this is all for in-house stuff. I got into the industry as a contractor with a few different companies making less money and running harder for a long while, so that made me a much more attractive candidate. But really I just carry myself well and know how to sell myself and appear respectable even though I feel like a 10 year old trapped in a 35 year old body most of the time. Idk what I’m doing half the time, but neither does anybody else in this stupid world lol.
A super easy way to get your foot in the door for the industry is to look into companies that support outages. It can be irregular work that requires travel, but companies always need bodies just to be a general laborer. You might just be carrying shit for “skilled” workers for a while but you get familiar with processes and can find advancement opportunities from there. I started with radiological decontamination and radiation protection for nuclear plant refuel outages. Most of those guys seem to have like an 8th grade education, so it’s pretty easy to stand out in a positive way and receive recognition.
Probably the best thing for my career to really get where I am was when I somehow talked my way into a job with a major company as a water treatment FSR to handle water treatment for a big nuclear plant. I learned a lot through that, and I’m still very much learning every day.
That’s insane. Good info though. Thanks for the details! If I ever need a career switch, I’ll consider it lol
Not gonna lie: When I started reading your comment, I was fairly sure this was gonna be some kind of Simpsons joke.
The real Simpsons joke is affording a big house with a garage, two cars, three kids, pets, and vacations on a single income from a high school education. My wife and I are a DINK couple each with associates degrees in a two bedroom apartment with no pets.
D’oh indeed, Homer. D’oh indeed…
The year is 2024, and we’re all Frank Grimes now: https://youtu.be/axHoy0hnQy8
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/axHoy0hnQy8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It was doable back in the day, especially if nuclear plant workers make as much as the OP says.
My family was exactly like the Simpsons in terms of what we could afford growing up and who was working. Although my dad worked in an auto factory as opposed to a nuclear plant. He was first a line worker but then managed to be trained to repair machinery.
In the year 2024, it’s hard to fathom how that was at all possible to do, but times were different back then. I will say, I’m fairly certain that my parents were also in a ton of debt when I was growing up. It’s just that they used to give loans to everyone (hence the housing market crash in around 2009 or whenever it was).
I don’t know if it was created by the show, but if it is, by mentioning “Dink” you seem to be a fellow Doug enjoyer.
I don’t think Doug invented it, but probably helped popularize it.
Yeah, I like Doug. Killer Tofu is unironically a fucking bop. But now that I’m older, Doug might have had some kind of social disorder or something lol. But he also has a ton of similarities to JD from Scrubs, another show I really liked.
I still blast it out every now and then. That and Banging on a Trash Can
Being a monarch or some kind of royalty seems to be excellent financially and often overlooked.
All these poor millennials are buying too much avocado toast. Here’s how I became a homeowner at 18 by pulling myself up by my bootstraps:
- Get your dad to spend 300k of his 1mil/year income on a house for you
Don’t forget a religious figure head. Worked for Mr. Hubbard.
Trades. Become an electrician or a plumber or any number of other skilled contractor position. Financially you’ll be set for life.
Helped change a water heater at my parents place. Got quoted 1k in labor. Took us a little less than 2 hrs of actual work to do it. Had to buy new flexible connectors and Teflon tape. Possible fire or water damage is no joke so i understand the hesitation to DIY, but the work is pretty straight forward.
Trades are absolutely a viable option. There will always be a need.
The difference between what you did and what a licensed plumber will do is liability insurance. If you somehow accidentally broke a pipe or something, home owner insurance might decide you’re the one to foot the bill for repairs, flood damage included.
It is totally worth it. That being said, I did the same thing a month ago.
Well, idk about set for life. Most trades I know spend all their money on toys, and get too old physically before realizing that maybe they should’ve been saving for retirement all those years.
I had a travel job broadly under the umbrella of trades, we were pulling like 85k+ between overtime and per diem working 6 days a week. Maybe 2 months into this job we were having some meeting about the upcoming 2 week break for Christmas and one of the younger guys makes some comment about missing out on hours and says ‘man we’re broke’.
I’m just sitting there like ??? I thought you guys were exaggerating about the $1k+ nights at strip clubs. I had already maxed my ira contributions and run out of things I could think of to waste money on.
An Arborist I knew made bank, but threw it down the sink with every paycheck.
Be sure to learn how to invest kids, compound interests pays well and you don’t have to work doing something you hate if your money works for you.
This is not a universal truth. I am a union electrician and I make decent money but I am most certainly not set for life. It takes some significant overtime but it’s not uncommon for guys to take home 6 figures.
Union trades. That’s where the money is, unfortunately for this conversation few areas have full union coverage.
I’ve worked in NYC. You can not do much in commercial buildings without union help.
18 hours too slow, I was. Should’ve read the comment section before throwing my two cents in.
Garbage truck driver
Honk honk
That’s one of the perks, yes
Mmmm… geese.
🎶 I’ll take out your junk
And I’ll crush it doooown
Jesus in the rear view
And the highway patrol
Is up ahead 🎶
Learn FORTRAN, and you’ll be set for life.
COBOL
That sounded like outdated advice 20 years ago, and it still does, but somehow it still isn’t… yet… 😅
And it never will be. The o̸͎̎̔͆͂̆͝l̶̨̠͇͉̺̃̿̈̌͐̇̆ͅͅd̷̛̤͔͍̼̟̭̏͐͌̌̚ c̸̫͙̫̰̜̝̒́̌̃̉̅ǒ̴̢̗̺́d̷̥̣͎́̐̅̒ͅe̶̥̾̽͐͜ endures, evermore.
I’m listening… Where will I use it?
Where will I use it?
In the heart of every financial company that has been around for longer than 30 years, lies old code.
The keys to their kingdoms are made from the old code. The old guard has a foot in the grave, and the finance people will pay through the nose to keep everything exactly how it is.
Got it, curious though, don’t they use ( or somehow switched) something like oracle technologies (java, SQL, etc), with all the promises they claim everywhere?
Problems.
Maintenance costs are relatively small. You can hire another pricey custodian, or remake a building from the ground up.
Domain Specific. Finance tends to require truly accurate floating point math, which can be achieved with modern languages, but is not intrinsic. All it takes is one junior to cause a very bad day.
Security concerns are large. Java is a language not known for it’s safety, stability, nor native performance. No offence to anyone who likes Java.
If you really want IT. Then telecom
Most people in telecom are old and are analog phone people, they don’t know ip/sip and don’t want to learn.
It’s basically a small networking job that you never get calls on nights and weekends about and if you do it’s a system you can reboot remotely. If it’s not the system it’s a switch and its someone else’s job.
Telecom isn’t sexy but it’s still needed, no one’s going into it as it’s not ‘sexy’ and to be honest it’s easy AF.
Telecom seems fantastic except it’s really hard to get into At&T or Verizon at the moment
You don’t need to work with the big guys.
Small businesses, managed service, utilities, hospitals all need telecom guys. Ive been out of telecom for years and I still have recruiters occasionally reaching out to me.
All of this is true. I work with telcom and it is needed in all these areas. I’d add schools, government, anywhere with lots of phones.
How would you prepare for telecom? I’ve got a background in IT and have been trying to switch to Software Engineering by learning React and TypeScript. Would the skills compare at all?
No idea if those skills would be transferable. I was on the small to mid sized biz side. Never worked for a provider or anything. Mainly managing, installing and configuring systems.
Once you understand the basics of telephony it’s pretty easy. It’s getting more complex now since it’s all ip/sip based but because that’s a skill that is lacking because everyone who does know that wants to be a network or security guy, not the phone guy/gal.
If you are working it now. Figure out who’s doing your phones and express interest in learning. It’s how everyone I know got into it.
System admin skills are key. Your script skills are great. Tons of good resources online. Check out teams, Cisco, 5nines, and their competitors
Tech support for factory machines. I used to work in a fairly modern (in terms of products) factory, and the SMT assembly machines were positively archaic. Most were decades old by the time I quit, they all had their own quirks, and very few people who could troubleshoot them. The factory was shut down every weekend, and getting the machines to talk to each other and the server on Monday mornings was a ritual just short of praying to the Omnissiah.
Piggybacking off this, CNC machining has a lot in common if you don’t mind getting your hands just a bit dirty. It’s a lot less manual labor than you’d expect and you typically won’t ever have to deal with a customer.
GCODE is simple to pick up the basics if you have any familiarity with 3D coordinates and many colleges will offer a fast-track course for around $2-3k. Depending on the area, some shops will even cover this cost while you’re starting.
I’ve done some gcode but moved onto other programming(mostly c# so completely different. One thing I HATED about gcode, I don’t know if it was just my machines or gcode in general(most of mine were based on fanuc cnc controllers typically seen as top of the line) , we were not able to name variables.
I create a variable and assign it #315. What does #315 do? What does it mean? Who knows… Better have notes or comments to explain or your fucked. I can’t say variable x_offset_tool_15 nope…just #315.
I worked with Fanuc control machines for 20 years up until 2023. Sounds like you were needlessly in macro hell. Just declaring an offset will use either an H (typically height) or D (typically a radius offset in Fanuc controls, but sometimes they are setup for diameter).
It would go something like this:
G40G49G80G90 (CLEARS OUT POTENTIALLY PREVIOUS GCODES); T1M06 (EXECUTES A TOOL CHANGE, LEAVE OUT M06 IF JUST DECLARING THE TOOL); G43H01 (DECLARES H01 AS THE HEIGHT OFFSET); G00ZO.O1 (MOVES THE TOOL 0.01 ABAOVE WORK); G41D01X1.0 (DECLARES LEFT HAND TOOL OFFSET AS D01);You don’t need true macro variables for 9/10 applications, or general operation. I feel like you got placed on some overenginered solution.
There are a lot more jobs in the medical profession than doctor or nurse. It’s indoors so climate controlled. There’s 2 yr programs that start out around 60k a year.
Unit Clerk here is a 4ish month course plus a practicum. GF is union and gets shift premium for working outside business hours.
Electrician, especially if you’re ok with relocating. So many places around the world lack electricians when the infra just keeps growing everywhere.
What’s it take to learn to be an electrician? Like where do you go to learn?
Your local electrical union will place you in an apprenticeship.
In the IT field particularly, if you like programming, Ada and COBOL are easy to learn, not desirable for young people because they’re not fashionable languages, and pay well because the old people that know them are retiring.
If you learn to code in COBOL, there will always be demand for your coding skills. But you’ll want to kill yourself because the only code you’ll ever get to work on is half-century-old spaghetti that has absurdly high uptime requirements.
Currently working on a programme of work for a huge client whose core system is still running the same COBOL spaghetti that was written in the 80s. The demand for COBOL developers to support or update these systems, and the compensation they get, is wild.
Ok, installing COBOL now 😂
The course I took in college had 2 required classes for COBOL. A large majority of students did not like it, but I understand why it was (and still is) being taught. Huge demand. I enjoyed it at first, but then gradually started to dislike it, especially when getting into more complex problems. I’d have commically large files where 60-70% of the file itself is taken up by data definitions. Not to mention that the logic itself could probably be a fraction of the size in higher level languages… Not forgetting to properly tab your code was also hard to get used to. I’d consistently lose marks on that.
If you can learn to love it, it’s probably a fantastic career path…
Those who do enjoy it, I really do envy you. I really did want to like it, but it just didn’t work out.
I was thinking the same thing lately… Which organizations do you know of using these?
In the last fifteen years, I’ve worked at banks, insurance companies, and telcos on COBOL, and defence contractors and telcos with Ada.
There is always talk about replacing these huge legacy systems with something in Erlang, or Rust, or even Java (!); but some of these systems are more than fifty years old, with patches on patches, so in my opinion, replacement is going to be cumbersome and impractical.
Give it a decade or two, and Java will be the new COBOL
People have been saying that for like a decade now
A decade ago I said it was 3-4 decades away
If you aren’t risk adverse I hear undersea welders make a ton.
Damn man not even “not risk averse” I’d say, so much as “if you died or were permanently maimed you’d be okay with that”. I have heard too many stories about how horribly wrong those jobs can go. I know that’s kinda what “not risk averse” implies here, but it also feels like what I’d say about someone who doesn’t lock their car after parking in the bad part of town.
Getting sucked into a pipe through an opening that’s a few mm thick isn’t my idea of a fun death
Yeah, nah, fuck water. I’m good
Idk I guess at least it seems pretty quick???
At any rate, I think I’ll stay above water personally.
Dental Hygienist. They make like $40/hour to clean people’s teeth. It only requires an associates degree and you can get it from community college (aka cheap).
Dental hygiene is a pretty awful field for most people though - there’s a lot of depression and heart problems from having to cause people pain (even if you logically know it’s good for them). This is a great option for some people but if you consider yourself empathetic I’d urge some caution.
Some people also don’t brush or just have putrid breath
Sounds like the perfect job for a sadist with a busted olfactory bulb!
HVAC. Takes just as much to learn as other trades but you make way more money.
Machinist, electronics, or glass shop at a large university. Half make more than most professors (although that isn’t saying much)
Database Administrator (DBA) can be a lucrative position with a low barrier to entry. Can bridge nicely into data science/AI if you want to go that route. Data is the new oil, and AI/LLMs are the refineries.
