What do you do? WHY?

I used to be an attorney at a big-ish law firm in NYC, but after 14 months I got laid off, couldn't find any other work, so I was forced to move back home and live with my parents.

Now I spend my day working on my blog (shameless self-promotion time: bl1y.com). I also guest write for BitterLawyer.com occasionally. I'm volunteering on a political campaign, writing free lance articles for local publications, and working on a book about how hilariously awful law school and the legal industry are.

 

I used to work in the legal field. If I described what I did all day, your genitals would fall off from boredom. Yes, that can happen. So, I quit.

One day, I will do something worth talking about. Right now, I'm trying not to get trapped doing something that will make me hate myself. Beyond that prerequisite, I don't have a fucking clue.

Frankly, my fingers are crossed for the zombie apocalypse.

 

I am a Peace Corps volunteer, currently serving in Central America. I teach basic accounting to a bunch of subsistence farmers in rural credit unions,teach IT and business basics among other projects.

Day to day, this job is a roller coaster. On the whole, it has been a fantastic experience. I've been doing this two years this coming Saturday, with 2 months left to go.

Things that are awesome: complete freedom to do work as I see fit, with the ability to go anywhere to accomplish my goals. If I don't feel like doing shit except watching Venture Brothers all day, I don't. Things that are not: being isolated. I am the only blonde for 70 miles. Also, in the developing world, things are typically fucked up for a reason, everything is an uphill battle, even the simplest projects.

Note: I fucking hate hippies, and vehemently resist any notion of becoming one.

 

I am a Nurse Practitioner, recently graduated and just started a new job. The job entails seeing patients, diagnosing them, and determining the appropriate treatment plan, although I haven't exactly started doing this yet so early in the career, this is what I will be doing. I'll give you the positives that I have seen so far though. While I was still in grad school and coming up on graduation I interviewed at several different places, each very different from the other (hospital, Internal Medicine practice, Specialty practice), and was offered the position at each. This is before I graduated and before I passed my boards (which I still haven't done yet). I got to negotiate for more money and better benefits while the entire national economy has gone down the crapper. Several of my friends with 6 figure incomes have gotten laid off and have very few prospects earning that type of money again in the near future. There is just alot more job security in Healthcare. The pay is decent, but I will never get rich doing this job. You get to talk to people and hopefully help them. It is very rewarding in that aspect. As far as cons go, sometimes you have to give people a bad diagnosis, which can be difficult. Occasionally the patients themselves may be difficult, the insurance companies are more often than not difficult. You have to be a nurse first (hopefully you don't go straight to NP without some experience under your belt as an RN first) which is a wonderful job in which you get shit on in all aspects of the word for way too little pay (treat your nurses well, they work really hard). I really mean the wonderful job part, there are little moments that make stressful 15 hour days all worthwhile in the end (seriously, be nice to your nurses). I took a job in the specialty practice, which I won't tell you what it is because it is icky, but suffice it to say that the majority of you here would see the types of exams that I do all day as a very large con (it doesn't bother me though). Plus, with all the speculation of how healthcare will be handled in the future, who knows what changes are in store. For right now though, I think it was a pretty good career choice

And for what it is worth, this is a total change in career for me, I worked several years with a systems engineering group at a large telecommunications company doing requirements gathering and documentation. It sucked the life right out of me. My mom told me during my first round of college that I should go to nursing school, I didn't listen. I hate to say it, but she was right.

 

I'm a lawyer. I used to work in general commercial law specialising in construction, property development and credit. I got out of that because it was battery hen type work, and the startups I was in needed me full time.

Now I'm the legal director and part owner of a number of companies that:

- Do business and bridging finance;
- Sell diamonds;
- Provide internet payment facilities and invoicing solutions to small business;
- Build spec homes;
- Do residential and commercial property investment;
- Import and sell heavy machinery from the US; and
- Advertise and event manage in Thailand the Philippines.
(to date)

My advice is to learn and understand the principles behind everything specific that you're taught; and then learn how and when to apply those principles in other circumstances. This makes adapting to new situations a lot easier, and often gives you a head start in learning new disciplines that have a common foundation.

 

I'm a Front Office manager (Assistant General Manager really, as our hotel is 117 rooms or medium in size for our area).

I went to college for Hotel Management, which although it was a fun course, it was a waste of money in relation to what I know now. I started waitressing when I was 16, moved to a hotel restaurant at 19, and then to the front desk at about 21. I am 25 now.

My days usually include:
looking at every reservation for 2 days (history, loyalty membership, corporate rates, etc)
looking at every check out daily
making sure our physically inventory is being sold via the internet
groups sales
delegating to GSR's (guest service rep)
making sure GSR's actually do work
making sure housekeeping does work (as Executive Housekeeper does nothing)

I know I have a lot to learn, but I am more than happy to share what I know

 

My passion in college was History, but I took a look around and realized that the History Factory wasn't going to be hiring any time soon, so I majored in Business Economics and only minored in History.

Shortly after graduation, I landed a job as a Financial Analyst for a large semiconductor company. After 2 and a half years of that I went to work as a Revenue Analyst for one of the largest media companies in the country.

While those two are very different to someone who is in my field, to most of you reading this they will be essentially the same.

I spend a lot of time working on spreadsheets, forecasting revenue and cash, analyzing the business to see how it can be improved, etc. I make decent money and the job prospects for this seem to be good. I guess my only gripe is that being a spreadsheet jockey can be tedious at times and this is job isn't exactly a panty-dropper. But I'm pretty good at what I do, so it's not nearly as stressful as some of the other things out there..

I don't know that I'd follow this path if I could do it all over again, but I also don't know what else I'd be doing either.

 

I'm a chef. Been slingin' hash for almost 12 years now. I have my journeyman's papers, skin like a leather jacket, a knife hand with callouses so thick you could stop bullets, and the physical stamina to withstand even the most brutal of services.

I'm damn proud of that.

I've had the pleasure of working in some excellent kitchens, and I've also had the pleasure of running a few of those kitchens. However, even in the best of circumstances, with the best of equipment, with the best of staff, with a horseshoe up your ass and the hand of god helping you out, running a kitchen is a nightmare. You work all day, everyday, getting it setup properly, constantly tweaking every little thing, dealing with purveyors that could give less than a shit about whether your shipment arrives on time or even on the right fuckin' day, watching over everyone's shoulder to make sure they're doing exactly what you asked, dealing with OHS and Health Inspectors, working with an inventory that's not only expensive, but also highly perishable, and on top of all that, trying to maintain some semblance of an outside life.

It sounds like hell, but it's worth it.

What gets my ass out of bed in the morning is knowing that something as simple as a properly prepared and cooked meal can change the way a man feels on the inside, if only for a moment. If you get the chance to watch as someone is served such a meal you'll see something that words simply cannot describe, something that will travel with you throughout the years if you choose my profession. I've worked in a couple of open kitchens, where you can see everyone you're serving and they can see you. In those places my love for the industry was cemented in place, and when I had the time I would just stand and watch as meals were delivered, a smile on my face and it was for those short moments that the years I've put it were made worth it. Nothing will ever top that, not even sex. I mean that.

My dream is to open a little pub, which serves a strong assortment of fine drinks and some truly inspiring pub food. Homemade pizzas with tomato sauce made to order, deli sandwiches made with fresh bread and house-made sliced and smoked meats, hamburgers grilled on a char-broiler and served with pepperjack cheese and cherrywood smoked back bacon...you know, the good things in life. I don't give a damn if I spent the rest of my life living in a room above the fuckin' place, broke as fuck. To know I've crafted and created meals that leave you starry-eyed and satisfied is payment enough.

Simply put, if you want to be rich, stay the hell out of the kitchen, and understand one simple truth about the culinary arts: It's not so much what you serve, as the effort and love put into it. Pizzas, burgers, sandwiches, they all have the potential to be on top of the food chain. It doesn't have to be fancy to be great.

 

I'm a senior systems engineer - which is a step below what Nettdata does.

My basic schtick is that if it has a keyboard, I can make it work. I specialized in hosted services and microsoft technologies - but about 95% of computers inthe world and about 95% of the software they run - I can troubleshoot and fix about 95% of the problems they encounter that don't require active development. I can fix about 50% of issues that require code re-writes.

My job ranges from solutions architect to product engineer to systems engineer to technical account manager to technician at the moment - meaning I go from designing large and complex solutions to run entire businesses to developing products for my company to sell, to setting up, installing and configuring servers and maintaining infrastructure for the company I work for and our clients to managing the technical concerns of our large clients to fixing faulty memory sticks and updating anti-virus software for our customers.

Because I work on the fringe of a rural center - I get to spend a lot of time driving to bumfuck nowhere so I can walk through cow shit to temporary building where I install anything up to $300,000 worth of hardware and software - with anything from 20-80% of that value being my time.

Previously I've worked in the mining sector - where I got to fly once every 2 weeks to a hell hole in the middle of nowhere for an obscene amount of money and fix the computers that tracked how much of what kind of shit the trucks were moving from the big hole to one of the big piles. Before that I worked for E-business companies and hosting companies where I sat around all day at my desk and worked through a list of broken shit untill I had the broken shit pile down to just boring stuff, then I built shit for the company I was working for.

Because I'm reasonably senior - I spent a lot of time coaching junior staff, helping other people with problems they can't solve and writing documentation or training customers.

That said - my typical day at the moment involves coming into the office at 8:30, reading some RSS feeds, answering some emails, fixing some problems, post random shit on the internet, progress a build in progress or some other ongoing works, calling a few customers to make sure that they're happy and helping our sales guys do time estimates and design and price solutions to sell to our customers. Then write off my entire day in 6 minute intervals to one customer or another.

An unusual day invovles anything from 3 to 8 hours of travel, and either installing something I spend 3 weeks building, or trouble shooting something that I've never seen or heard of before, while a bunch of people look over my shoulder and assume that I magically am familliar with cattle weigh bridges or visual recognition systems that identify livestock through high deffinition imaging as they're loaded onto trucks or practice management software for doctors or the process by which medical practices get pathology reports from near by laboratories or how CAD software works or how accounting software works.

As an example, at 5:25 this afternoon, I got a note telling me to be at a defence contractor's site an hour away from our offices at 1:00 PM tomorrow - to do something. No information on what. I've never heard of this defence contractor before either as a client of ours or as a group in general and there's an excellent chance that I won't know anything other then their address before I leave tomorrow. There's a pretty good chance that I'll fix whatever the problem is though.

And sure, I've considered throwing myself off a bridge to escape the monotony of what I currently do. I'd much rather be writing or doing something more involved with fetish (I figure this job is a kind of masochism). But unfortunately - this shit pays way better then selling bondage toys or writing about why all catholics are assholes.

 

Just finished my Master's degree in accounting and been working in my old man's accounting firm for a little over seven years.

Can't really complain about the setup. As other folks who work in a family business, it's nice to have a decent gig, especially at a time like this. Accounting is like the poor man's law -The work is probably just as, if not moreso monotonous at times, get deal with complete obnoxious/asshole/moronic dipsticks except our profession, I don't think is held in nearly high as regard. You do get to hear some great lawyer jokes in accounting seminars, although. Such as, "What do lawyers and sperm have in common? Each has a one in fifty million chance of turning into a human being." Great days.

Is this something I want to do for the rest of my life? I can't really see it. I really don't see myself running a busines. I can do great work, I'm just really not leadership/management material. The reason the old man's business has been successful is because of the man he is, and while we may share a number of similarities, we differ greatly when it comes to work. He always takes an extraordinarily active role in improving what we do and how we do it which makes the job easier all around. He probably works fewe hours than other firms but still produces comparable billing because he knows how to work smarter than most and is not afraid to bill for work. Working somwhere seems less and less like a good idea considering I'll be working with people similar to my classmates in college. And I really don't want to live out the rest of my working life surrounded by a bunch of type A overworked nutjobs.

As many others have mentioned, writing seems like a path I could seriously consider myself taking. Ideas I have, plenty of them in fact. Some of them are even halfway decent. The actually prose and writing the narrative seem troublesome, though. I've considered taking some creative writing classes at the college I went to just to get a handle on writing a story, crafting a plot. It'll probably be a couple years before I finally get certified as a CPA so I have time to put down some ideas, work on my writing skills and maybe try to put something out there.

 

Right now, I work at my Dad's furniture store. I am also in law school but had to take a semester off due to some legal issues of my own.

I work at Dad's store because it is a family owned business we have had for 35 years. It's near a military base so there are a lot of GIs that come in. As my father and grandfather get older, they are getting more and more surly and rude. They need me to add a bout of niceness and civility.

 

Currently, I work with Autistic adults while going back to school for nursing. Prior to this I was a high school English teacher. I'm also in the Navy Reserve attached to a USMC unit.

I left the education field because I hated the fact that I felt that what I was doing on a daily basis was damn near useless. I'd stand in front of the class everyday, coming up with interesting activities for the students to do, hustling to get papers graded asap so they'd have them back, calling parents to tell them little Johnny has really been applying himself this marking period, etc. But the bottom line was that no one really gave a shit. Half of the class would have their heads down on the desk, not paying a bit of attention. The rest stared at me idly or chit chatted with their neighbor. Ninety-seven percent of my students did the bare minimum to get their desired grade, and when finished, moved on and dumped whatever information they had just learned. I couldn't cope with the fact that I didn't feel like I was making the slightest iota of a difference in the world, naive as that may sound. I realized that medicine was my real passion, and am in the process of getting a BSN and go on active duty as a nurse.

As for my current job of nursing with people with developmental disabilities? You really need to be a certain type of person to deal with them. One resident of mine has a VERY violent past, where he's sent people to the hospital before. He's mellowed out a lot, but is still a very hostile person capable of lashing out any day. Once you learn each resident's pathologies and the best way to handle them, it's not a bad job. You feel good for taking care of people who can't even do everyday tasks like dressing themselves or brushing their teeth.

 

I have a BA in criminal justice and some graduate credits in crim as well.

I am currently working as a parole officer in Special Assault, focusing on assessing and profiling high risk sex offenders. Basically, anyone that's a level III that needs to be watched like a hawk is put into my unit. My boss and I interview each offender and we score their answers with an assessment tool that tells us what level of supervision they need. Most level IIIs need a high level of supervision and routine while others can have a more lenient level of care.

Despite the gruesome subject matter, I love it. I consider myself incredibly lucky that I have loved all things crim for the last 12 years; going to work is not a chore for me at all. The subject matter is fascinating (to me anyway).

Not that the job is great all the time. There have been interviews so awful that I've gone home traumatized. That sort of thing is unavoidable no matter how much you remain professionally distant in this career. Some of the offenders are deeply antisocial and will sit and blame the victim all throughout the interview or they'll see two women interviewing them and try to manipulate the situation. I told my boss to interview someone without me because the man's crime hit too close to home for me to remain neutral - the offender was a domestic violence rapist.

A lot of the offenders have girlfriends, some of the girlfriends have minor children. This is a major no-no as every single one of these offenders can't have contact with children. Cue months of telling the offender in a nicey way during treatment "no, no, tell me how you plan to make this work." We live in a very liberal area and sadly, sometimes that can backfire in situations that call for a more hard-lined approach. However, sometimes a hard line approach can make a situation 100 times worse.

The DOC is a bureaucracy. Enough said. They just finished a massive round of layoffs and nobody was safe, even those with 20 years seniority. To cut costs, they're talking about disbanding our unit and disbanding the assessing my boss and I do in July. That's all we need: a bunch of high risk sex offenders going into overworked and understaffed units that can't meet the offenders' needs properly.

People are very self-righteous in their beliefs regarding ALL sex offenders getting a bullet. While I agree that some of the guys I see are pretty worthless, I can't justify a 19 year old kid that got a rape of a child 3 charge for sleeping with his 16 year old girlfriend being shot dead. When I point this out, usually I get silence or a nasty glare for daring to disagree with someone's views on murdering a sex offender. The silence gets even more deafening when I point out that I haven't busted an offender on a violation for a sex crime because in 99% of the cases, they don't go on to commit another sex crime.

We are one of the only states that civilly commit offenders after their sentence is over. Meaning, if they're too dangerous to be put back into society, we hold them at a special prison after their sentence is complete. The criteria for this is ass-backwards. Someone that has mentioned how he'll rape after he's released was rejected while they're getting closer to committing a voyeur that enjoys looking up women's skirts. Um...while both are pretty bad, methinks the rapist is a tad more dangerous, no?

Other than those minor annoyances, I look forward to work every day. Never a dull moment.

How did I get into this? Just a love of all things crim and a job opening within the Special Assault unit. Anything else you want to know, PM me.

Oh, one more thing I had forgotten...there have been threats made by offenders. One said he wanted to come in with a couple of 9mm and blow us all away; another one cut someone's brake lines. Perhaps because I'm an idiot with a false sense of bravado, I greet these with an attitude of "come get some, asshole." I have a feeling this might get me in trouble in the future.

 

I started in the ad agency business when I graduated college and eventually moved to the other side of the desk into ad sales and publishing. A good portion of that career was spent as an independent contractor working from home. I was very good at working smarter rather than harder, made a good living, and kept an easy pace which facilitated my drinking and drugging. But I grew bored and burned out from doing the same thing for 20+ years, so when I was let go last January (6 months into sobriety) I seized the opportunity to make a change, but didn't know what I wanted to do. I recalled the experience I had with my counselor in intensive outpatient treatment when I got sober. While she was very knowledgeable about the clinical aspects of addiction and alcohol, she wasn't an addict or alcoholic and had a very hard time relating to her clientele, and us to her. That led me to investigating what it would take to become a chemical dependency counselor, and embarked on that path. 2/3 of the way through satisfying the educational requirements for LCDC licensure, one of my professors encouraged me to apply for the masters program and go for a higher level of licensure (CRC-Certified Rehabilitation Counselor and LPC-Licensed Professional Counselor), so here I am, 47 years old in the first semester of graduate school. Getting awarded a scholarship certainly helps, but even without it, prudent saving and investment afforded me the opportunity to make such a career change later in life. Why this path? It may sound corny, but I really want to help people. I feel a sense of usefulness, purpose and self-actualization I've never felt before. The best advice I can give based on my experience is, save. If you want to make a career change down the road, you'll have greater financial flexibility. If not, retirement will be all the sweeter, and possibly sooner.

 

I work in sales for a corporate IT services company. We basically help companies save money on post-warranty server and storage maintenance support costs. Big manufacturers like HP, DELL, IBM, Sun, etc. sell companies a 3-year warranty on their expensive IT equipment when initiailly purchased, then proceed to jack the maintenance rates up after that 3 year period expires. They do this so the company will "upgrade" to newer, more expensive equipment, which in most cases, is completely unneccesary. They instill as much FUD (fear, uncertainty, & doubt) as possible to their customers to get them to buy new equipment to ultimately increase their own bottom line.

We sell this service for 50% less than what major manufacturers charge. The economy has been a blessing for us, as companies across the board are looking to cut costs and IT usually has a lot of room to be cut. Our service practically sells itself; it is really only a matter of making the customer feel comfortable with a third party working/fixing its equipment. In initial sales calls with prospects, I make an effort to "enhance" the truth, as customers generally have concerns about situations that rarely occur. Most prospects, especially IT people, are taught that the sales person is the enemy and are prepared to ask about topics that could give them a potential reason to kill the sale.

 

As a principle partner for one of the big brands you listed (and the poor schlub who gets to try and patch fix DELL crap that's been deployed to businesses past it's warrantied lifespan) - I'm just saying dude - there's a reason why we view you truth enhancers as the enemy.

 

I'm only 19, but I still think I can contribute to this thread**. I didn't exactly take the standard path, and it has worked out very well so far.




I am a professional poker player. I was a bit of a nerd growing up, always liking video games and such, and it just sort of naturally led into this. It is a very meritocratic job. All you need is desire and hard work and you can succeed in poker. There is very little natural talent required, most intelligent people can succeed if they put in the effort. The main areas which will help a person be successful at it are emotional control, math, logic, and psychology.

My typical day involves waking up, relax for a while and eat while reading some poker forums. I then play for about 1.5 hours, take a break and go work out or eat lunch. I'll then play for another 2 hours or so. After that I will either read a poker book, watch some instructional videos, or discuss strategy on the forums. Take another break to eat or just do nothing, then play for another 2 hours while being coached. That's another nice thing about poker, once you get good, you can charge 200-500/hour to coach people.


Pros :


Scalability - you can always make more money. If you work hard, after about 6 months you should be able to make anywhere between 50 - 100$/hour. If you continue working hard it is pretty reasonable to expect you can get up to about 500$/hour within a couple years. The best people in the game can make anywhere from 6,000$ - 30,000$/hour. The ceiling for the pay will also increase as time goes on. A few years ago the most you could make was around 3000$/hour.

You can work your own hours. You decide when you want to play, or even if you want to play. This makes it very easy to travel. Some people put in 40-50 hours a week, but it really isn't required. It is obviously beneficial though. Lots of people put in 20-25 hour weeks, including most of the best players, although they all put in lots of work when they were first starting.

Its fun and constantly challenging. There are always new things to learn.


Cons :


Its a pretty antisocial job.

It isn't super consistent. You will have lots of losing days, losing weeks, and some losing months. It is similar to investing - the short term is filled with ups and downs, its the long term that matters.

If you don't have good emotional control, the swings can affect your mood. Losing 5 - 10% of your net worth in a day sucks.

You don't really contribute to society, but you can always do that through different things.






**Mods, you can delete this if I shouldn't be posting.

 

I'm a CPA. Right now life is busy as all hell and I'm working quite a few hours per week. However, my job is pretty great most of the time. I have 3.5 months where I have to work all the time, but it's during the winter and I don't ski, so it's not bad. The other 8.5 months I work anywhere from 32-40 hours per week and can play golf most Friday afternoons. I only prepare tax returns, not audit so I don't have to travel.

As a partner here told me, with public accounting, if you don't like what you are working on, just wait a week and it will change. The variety of work coming in keeps my attention and always provides something to learn. The only issue with being a CPA is that everyone asks you tax questions assuming all you do is 1040s. I prepare about five 1040s per year and mostly do passthrough and corporate work.

That doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing with 1040s; a lot of passthrough work deals with the effects that the transaction will have on a personal return - I just don't prepare many of them.