Best thing is I’m retiring in 18 days, at age 58.
Worst thing is the next 18 days.
I’ve watched enough buddy cop movies to know this is the most dangerous time in your career.
Just when I think I’m out… they PULL ME BACK IN!
(not gonna fukn happen)
The best thing is that I work for myself.
The worst thing is that my boss is an idiot.
Best: I’m busy, we’re always making stuff, shipping stuff, it’s productive and interesting. Rarely is any single day the same. No scope for boredom.
Worst: Bloody hell, I’m busy. I need to prioritise better, and delegate more. There’s never enough time in the day to get through everything, and my low priority items are perpetually shifted forward into the next week.
Best: setting my own hours
Worst: having to actually follow the hours I set two weeks ago
Best: Get to solve logic problems, create, and learn. Somehow get paid for this.
Worst: Interviewing between jobs requires a different set of skills than the everyday work.
Source: Unemployed software engineer.
Solve this series of textbook algorithm problems using OOP in 5 minutes or less so we can see if you’re good enough to spend the next 5 years maintaining a site designed in the early 2000s that is basically just a bunch of JavaScript and one giant main as a backend
Best: helping the animals, improving their living conditions and treatment, giving them toys and treats
Worst: killing the animals and witnessing some horrible diseases/injuries
Worse is going to work, best is leaving work
Pro: huge impact, great pay, awesome coworkers, always something to learn with being at the forefront of datacenter server architectures.
Con: it’s a technical job but we have an admin manager somehow. Admin/non-technical managers don’t have any purpose so they worry about metrics, creating meetings no one is interested in, and volunteering other people to do favors to make themselves look good.
My manager is great in that he knows his primary purpose is to filter the bullshit admin stuff away from us so we can get work done. He’s pretty good at it.
Software engineer. My company has been hiring low budget contractors instead of full time engineers. Training and onboarding people always has a cost, so the revolving door nature of this hiring method is already a problem, but the people we’re hiring are also very low skilled and take more of the rest of the team’s time hand-holding them through easy tasks
OK, so what’s the worst thing then?
Best: I get to be outside.
Worst: I get to be outside.
Surgical Tech
Best: Helping people to not hurt/die is super gratifying, and didn’t need to spend a million dollars and years of my life in secondary education to get here.
Worst: I’ve seen things that will haunt me all the way to the grave. Also the pay is kinda shit.
Best thing about my job is the flexible hours. I get to spend a lot of time with my kids, even do my hobbies sometimes, ride my bike, play video games, cook, visit friends, etc. I mean, I don’t really have a ton of time for that stuff after the chores, but at least work doesn’t ask much else of me and it’s fairly low stress.
Worst thing about my job is it doesn’t come with a paycheck. I’m unemployed.
Best: Casual work environment, Monday-Friday work schedule, Day shift
Worst: Small businesses shenanigans and problems like lack of health insurance and occasional late paychecks to name a few. The workplace is dysfunctional. There are very little safety standards. There is a complete and utter inventory mismanagement problem. There are no standardized procedures, especially for training. There is difficulty in hiring new and retaining new employees. The long time employees are leaving due to retirement, health issues, or just utter frustration and dissatisfaction, and they’re taking all of their knowledge and experience with them.
Some long-timers recently quit, including the business owner’s son who’s also the person who hired me. They quit because they were doing the jobs of multiple people and having more responsibilities and job duties tacked on to them. Even the IT guy is trying to fix the inventory situation at the off-site warehouse even though the business owner said he was looking to hire an inventory specialist.
Branch Manager
Best: Freedom. My day can be over at 11a or it could go to 5p. I could work in the office, in the field, or from home. Developing people is awesome when you see the light bulb go off and they start excelling.
Worst: Expensing receipts/invoices. God I hate Expensify.
I also hate expensify. Whenever I get someone green with me I set them up with the app and suggest it would be better if everything came through one person also that it is important for them to learn the system.
Usually takes them about a day or so for them to figure out the real reason I made that suggestion. I know it’s a dick move but in my defense I really fucking hate expensify.
Expensify, really? Not that I’ve used a ton but I found that one really easy. Probably depends who set it up though. And I wasn’t a heavy user.
Also IIRC they give a ton of money to good causes so I’m willing to put up with a little more BS, not that it was ever necessary.
When it works it’s fine. But usually when I need to get my end of month finished the login page goes down. It will also fail to save my categories and descriptions after I’ve moved on. That’s irritating. I also don’t like that if I expense a receipt as soon as I’ve purchased and then a day later it finally sees the transaction it’s too dumb to know it’s the same transaction. I don’t even get a, hey, are these duplicates? Nope. Nothing. It has so much more potential to make expensing easier.
That sucks. I had none of those issues at all, it just worked for me. Maybe it has gone way downhill in the past year?
Best: Trusted working hours and WFH(no time keeping but you lose overtime)
Worst: Deadlines and many many projects
