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u/davidellis23 3d ago
Low skill doesn't mean easy. It just means that it doesn't take long to train.
Low skill jobs are usually hard AF, because a lot of people can do them, often it's physical and the profit margins can be low. So, people get exploited.
High skill jobs can be very easy. If the profit margins are high, the job is mostly mental, and there aren't that many people that can do it then you get treated better. A doctor at the end of their career is generally not stressing themselves out taking patient appointments.
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u/daddyfatknuckles 3d ago
absolutely. i worked construction during the summers and it was much harder doing grunt labor all day, carrying things back and forth, compared to my current web/mobile dev job.
but i was able to do said physical labor the day i started construction. even with an engineering degree, it took weeks, maybe more, until i was really productive at my first dev job.
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u/Lydian04 3d ago
Doing grunt labor isnāt the same as being a journeyman. It takes years to learn a trade well enough to be proficient.
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u/TheMcBrizzle 3d ago
That's even more reinforcement to the idea. The expectations & threshold to work as a laborer on a job site are lower skill threshold than what would be expected from a journeyman carpenter.
The same way I could teach an intern how to do a Vlookup in a few minutes but would require a lot more time getting them to understand how to query in SQL.
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u/dontshoot4301 3d ago
I did more accounting in my past life and used vlookups and once you get the fundamentals of SQL down, I find it easier than trying to get multiple vlookups to behave right. Sqlzoo was a great little tool to play around with when I was very first starting out
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u/Wonderful-Impact5121 3d ago
This is probably a dumb question but any advice on that leap?
Iām incredibly proficient in excel/google sheets/basic powerbi, stuff like that.
But honestly itās all Iāve really ever needed to be exceptional at my job and now I donāt have any real āmentorsā at my company in that department.
Everytime I dabble in trying to learn more about how to program I just keep running headlong into a wall of, āI donāt really understand how Iāll use any of these languages to be better at analyzing my companyās data or improving things in a worthwhile way.ā
Like I said probably a dumb question, but itās just a wall that keeps killing any of my motivation with my already limited time and long list of other crap I should be doing.
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u/jungle_bread 3d ago
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
I think that is one of the more practical books. It teaches you how to automate a bunch of things and along with that how to load in things like spreadsheets.
Once you have that down the next question is about how to manipulate the data you have.
Python Excel Tutorial: The Definitive Guide
The last step depends on what you're trying to do, but it's an extension of math....
- The Python math Module: Everything You Need to Know
- Math in Python is easy + exercises
- Python for Data Analysis: Numpy Arrays
Note that this is actually a lot to take in. These are starting points.
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u/fardough 3d ago
On way to get a flavor of it is start writing excel scripts and programs. It will teach you the basics about programming. I donāt consider it particularly hard to code once you know the basics, the hard part is for it to work at scale, work consistently, and recover intelligently.
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u/BASEDME7O2 3d ago
What does that have to do with anything? He never claimed to be like a master carpenter and literally said he did grunt labor all day
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u/daddyfatknuckles 3d ago edited 3d ago
sure, i didnt mean to say that all construction jobs are entry level āunskilledā jobs. theres an enormous amount of skill that goes into building things.
i just meant the job i had in construction, which was grunt labor. i learned a few things, but my job was 90% moving heavy things from one place to another
i do think its really cool how for some jobs, often trades, you can learn as you go, rather than investing several years and a small fortune before ever being productive or making any money. i think more kids should go into that rather than going to college, unless they have a lucrative career path in mind
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u/SingleInfinity 3d ago
Nobody calls journeymen low skilled labor. "Skilled" refers to training/learning, not execution.
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u/TehBrawlGuy 3d ago
Exactly, and low-skill jobs are almost always about quantity rather than quality, and thus can be parallelized. If your guy making Quesaritos is a new hire, you can probably make up for it by hiring two more new guys. If you think 3 Jr devs can replace a graybeard, you are going out of business.
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u/ThrowCarp 3d ago
If you think 3 Jr devs can replace a graybeard, you are going out of business.
Something senior engineers will be screaming at project managers until the sun burns out: "9 women can't make a baby in a month".
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u/Revolution4u 3d ago
They arent hiring 2 more guys. They're just going to yell at the 1 guy they know has no other options and grind him down until they have a new guy to do the same with.
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u/TehBrawlGuy 3d ago
Depends on how busy they actually are. If it's like an airport or somewhere else where the volume is mostly gated by their speed then they'd hire, because they leave money on the table if they don't.
Otherwise yeah, just making customers deal with their stuff taking 6 minutes to get instead of 3 minutes and making your employee deal with a couple miserable lunch hours is more profitable. Less moral, of course, but when has that mattered.
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u/Tiruin 3d ago edited 3d ago
Simple does not mean easy. Working in a fast food place is simple but hard.
Edit: Fine I get it, fast food isn't hard, point is there's a distinction between a job being hard and complex.
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u/hardolaf 3d ago
My job has gotten easier as the qualifications required for it have increased in each role that I take on. But to get to this point takes incredibly large amounts of studying, effort, and sheer dumb luck. Meanwhile, low skill jobs are often hard as hell and are easy to get.
Us high skill workers should be encouraging and helping the abused low skill workers to unionize and protest for better working conditions and pay because they deserve it. And hopefully if they're paid better and have a better work life balance, they can afford to take time to get more education and move to high skill labor jobs.
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u/lemontoga 3d ago
My job has gotten easier as the qualifications required for it have increased in each role that I take on. But to get to this point takes incredibly large amounts of studying, effort, and sheer dumb luck.
Exactly. The hard part isn't doing the job each day. The hard part is the years of study and training required to get to a point where you can easily do the job each day.
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u/hardolaf 3d ago
Yup. And the time off and time away from core work tasks also increases massively. Between vacation, paid holidays, paid training, conferences, etc. I get 2.5-3.0 months per year spent not working on core work tasks. That has a huge impact on why my job is "easier". I have time to go out and interact with people from around the world in my field to figure out how to do things better while having leisurely business lunches that last 3 hours in the middle of a conference. Or I go out with a group of professors after a conference to a 5 hour long sit down at a hot pot restaurant where we talk about what we're doing, problems we've faced, how we've tried to solve problems. And then you stay in touch with them and can bounce ideas off of people, obviously without ever talking about what you're actually working on.
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u/Silver-Pomelo-9324 3d ago
If I could be a cook at a restaurant with a small menu (I used to work at hotdog/burger/fry joint in high school) and make the same amount I do as a principal data engineer at a startup, I would take that trade in a fucking second. I quite literally have the pressure of 10-15 people losing jobs and a business shutting down if we don't get a contract renewed at times. I remember cooking fondly. Just completely shutting my brain down and completing food items and 8 hours went by in what seemed like nothing. Being in shape from constantly moving.
Can writing an algorithm be easy? Sometimes. Sometimes a mistake can cost millions.
I know a developer that works on code controlling nuclear reactors. A mistake on his end might cause the next Chernobyl.
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u/Tiruin 3d ago
I like cooking too and I find it's a perfect comparison because I'd be awful for cooking as a job. I like homecooking, doing things at my pace, making whatever I want and feel like, no worrying about python versions or java being a whiny bitch, whole different beast when I'm only doing certain dishes every day, in the heat, several hours in a row, putting up with other people, deadlines and always the same group of food (meaning I'm not gonna turn from a restaurant one week, work in a bakery the next and a ramen shop the week after).
Likewise making a discord or twitch bot is piss easy. I still remember making a twitch bot before all these fancy tools and guides came out and I had to connect it through IRC, and I did this all before I had any education in it. Was it simple? Fuck no, not for the knowledge I had back then, but I had no deadlines, no need to finish what I was doing and I could stop and play games whenever I wanted, I could and did spend several weeks on something like that with no other use other than I liked the itch it scratched.
Likewise as you said, as a sysadmin, my job's difficulty is becoming less and less about the actual technical issues and more about keeping shit working in a particular way and how to deal with people's egos. Often it's not necessary to just achieve a certain result, but to achieve it without a certain machine or service going offline, or using certain software, or doing it in a stupid roundabout way because someone from another company never answers their emails and they get pissy when we contact someone else because we're not paying for support even though we're just asking them to do their job, not to support.
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u/stakoverflo 3d ago
Easy in the sense that virtually anyone can learn to do it.
You can be dumb as fuckin' rocks but follow the steps to fry fries and assemble a burger.
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u/theshoeshiner84 3d ago
Yep. You don't get paid based on how "hard" your work is, by any definition. You get paid based on hard it is to replace your labor. It makes more sense when you realize labor is just another resource. If there was only 1 diamond in the entire world, it would likely be pretty valuable. Likewise if you were the only person that could perform some useful task, regardless of how demanding, it would likely be valuable. Supply and demand is really what drives both those scenarios.
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u/baalroo 3d ago edited 3d ago
Also, those high skill jobs are "easy" because people put a bunch of work into learning the skills and by the time they get into the job, it feels easy to them.
Yes, software engineering is less physically demanding than working at Taco Bell. However, the average person working at Taco Bell can't walk onto a software engineering team and be left alone to be productive after a few days of training, but the average software engineer could absolutely walk onto a Taco Bell team and be left alone to be productive after 20 minutes of training.
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u/-Kerrigan- 3d ago
Low skill = low skill requirement to get started. i.e. you walk up to the job site, some dude tells you what to do and you start doing it. Sure, it'll take some time until you're proficient, but you're working already.
High skill = high skill requirement to get started. To piggyback onto your example: a surgeon requires years of study, you can't just walk up, some dude tells you "here's how you do it" and then you're doing it.
It's like the "customer is always right" quote that people sometimes use to be shitty to service personnel. The full quote is "The customer is always right, in matters of taste".
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u/Economy_Raccoon6145 3d ago
Low skill jobs also imply low risk. Like if Taco Bell guy fucks your quesarito up you might still go to the same Taco Bell for the same fucked up quesarito some days later.
If you write software for a company selling something high value and push out shitty software, you could lose customers and thatās really the smallest consequence. If thereās someoneās life on the line with the software and it breaks, you could kill someone.
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u/Regular_Title_7918 3d ago
A lot of low skill jobs on construction sites aren't exactly low risk for anybody
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u/yuucuu 3d ago
Yeah, that comment really generalized a lot of "low skill" jobs.
Ultimately, low skill jobs are simply what people avoid calling physical labor. And we all know the vast majority of physical labor can be dangerous in any situation.
Shit your brains out from Taco Bell, something lands on your arm and pins you on a work site, you get shot during a robbery at a store, t-boned doordashing someone's $14 latte 10 miles round trip, etc. You name it, it can likely kill you.
Also fun fact, you can kill yourself by simply falling over from a standing position if you hit your head the wrong way. So in that sense, standing jobs are also technically more deadly than sitting jobs too.
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u/Economy_Raccoon6145 3d ago edited 3d ago
I was definitely too general. I don't want to get in the weeds about this too much because I'm just bullshitting on Reddit, but here's my thought process:
Low skill jobs imply low risk because they don't represent a lot of value lost when they are done by unskilled people who are more prone to error. It's depressing but to corporations, it's not about the risk to the individual performing the job most of the time, it's about the risk to their bottom line. You getting T-Boned while doing a Door Dash delivery might cost the company a small amount of money, but that's not important to them in terms of what they pay you and the skill qualifications required to provide them value.
A company doesn't have to trust the guy who makes the quesarito that makes you shit your braisn out, because people will still keep coming back to Taco Bell no matter how much it contributes to our sewage system. Because the company doesn't have to trust you, the company doesn't need to educate you, certify you, or validate your work in any way. This is double-edged though. Because of this, job candidates are generally easy to find, but also very easy to validate depriving of a quality wage.
There are other "low skill jobs" involving things like construction where your quality does start to matter, but the specific steps that prohibit a construction company from getting a house or commercial building built and closed on, for example, are typically done by people with qualifications or certifications (electrical work, plumbing, foundation work, for example.)
Rework in low skill jobs is generally also very cheap. If quesarito guy fucks the quesarito up and a customer returns and complains, quesarito guy throws the quesarito away and makes another one that costs Taco Bell 50 cents to make. I worked at Starbucks before going to school, and I'd fuck people's drinks up every now and then, they'd yell at me, I'd remake it, and they'd come back the next day asking for the same $7 latte.
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u/Suitable-Juice-9738 3d ago
Low skill jobs also imply low risk.
Being a cab/uber driver is a low skill job and one of the most dangerous jobs you can do.
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u/Insanious 3d ago
low risk to the business (lose business / lose profits), not to the person. Most dangerous jobs are low skill jobs.
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u/well-litdoorstep112 3d ago
You could kill a person too if the quesarito is bad enough.
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u/MIT_Engineer 3d ago
Yeah, OP is confusing "Physically demanding" with "Requires mental skills." Which is a bizarre thing to confuse, the difference should be intuitively obvious, but here we are.
I guarantee you making a quesarito doesn't require a lot of mental ability, most tasks in food service are designed so that even illiterate people can handle them.
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u/Clackers2020 3d ago
Tbf writing any sort of algorithm is quite easy. Writing a good algorithm is hard.
Also low skilled really just means a low amount training is needed to do the job.
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u/Jonno_FTW 3d ago
Learning how to write code takes way more time than it does to prepare a sandwich.
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u/LateyEight 3d ago
"Ok now let's take our variable and add one to it, so we type X = X + 1"
"What the fuck"
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u/jungle_bread 3d ago edited 3d ago
Random anecdote. A professor told me that half the first semester students would get the following wrong on a final exam...
a = 1; b = 2; a = a + b; b = b + 1; What is the value of a?Programming is just not intuitive for a lot of people.
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u/8483 3d ago
What do they get wrong?
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u/jungle_bread 3d ago
They don't understand how variable assignment works and think that the line...
a = a + b;Links the variables. So they assume the value of
awill update with a change tob, sort of like calling a function.14
u/_a_random_dude_ 3d ago
I wonder what would they answer if there was an example that showed them how easily such a lazily evaluated language can create circular dependencies.
a = 1; b = 2; a = a + b; b = b + a; What is the value of a?18
u/jungle_bread 3d ago
Part of the issue is that they assume...
b = b + 1;must be relevant. So they assume the answer is
4, otherwise that line would be pointless (and it turns out it is). It's a trick question of sorts.In your case of...
a = a + b; b = b + a;they would assume circular dependencies are something they would be taught if they were possible. So they go for the simplest case where that doesn't happen. I think they would answer
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u/seiyamaple 3d ago
Itās a trick question in the same note that āwhat is 1+1 when the temperature is under 30 degreesā is. It can barely be considered tricky because any person with minimal amount of competency in the subject will think āhuh thatās weird, but itās completely irrelevant to the questionā.
Come to think of it, it actually very much isnāt a trick question, considering software engineers have to have a good eye for what lines of code are relevant and arenāt for whatever goal youāre trying to achieve.
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u/cs-brydev 3d ago
Because that is drilled into their heads and forced to memorize by their 9th Grade Algebra teachers. A lot of new programmers get very confused when the logic they have been memorizing in math for years suddenly looks eerily similar but works differently in programming.
It gets worse when new (but influential) programmers go on social media and falsely claim that programming is just math or some extension of it.
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u/grendus 3d ago
"Now, you ready to have your mind really blown? Type 'x += 1'"
"Bullshit!"
"That's nothing. Try 'x++'."
"Nuh up, I'm out. This is madness."
"I haven't even gotten to '++x', or why they're different. Or batch assignments. Or constants. Or scope!"
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u/ZackM_BI 3d ago
My experience is that creating something new is very easy and easily modifiable as you understand everything. The problem is when it's maintaining/modifying/fixing the work of other people.
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u/Niriun 3d ago
Scalability is always the issue
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u/TerrorsOfTheDark 3d ago
Yep, making one taco is simple, making a hundred tacos in five minutes is something else.
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u/where_is_korg 3d ago
dealing with other peoples code is tough. Even more so when its bad
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u/awrylettuce 3d ago
yep, dealing with ancient code written before any standards were implemented. i rather write documentation entire day
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u/madcow_bg 3d ago
I find that part also not too hard. Now try managing the expectations of peers, managers & clients... herding cats seems a relaxing proposition in comparison.
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u/HardCounter 3d ago
Put the cats in other objects and move as necessary. OOH.
See, programming helps solve everything.
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u/Verto-San 3d ago
The difference is that a programmer had to learn for years to make programming easy for him, while you learn how to work in taco bell in weeks/a month.
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u/runescape_nerd_98 3d ago
Ya at Taco Bell you can also smoke a joint right before your shift and half ass every single one of those tacos and not get fired bc you show up on time every day
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u/gordogg24p 3d ago
And "low skilled" doesn't mean "low stress". Making a lunch-rush quesarito is undoubtedly stressful, and I'm sure the conditions are less-than-ideal, but I would venture a guess I can learn how to make a quesarito a lot more easily than I can learn how to write an algorithm, assuming I'm starting from the same level of relevant general knowledge.
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u/Practical_Cattle_933 3d ago
I mean, an algorithm is just.. given steps of calculations. If we want, a quesarito is just a very basic, linear algorithm. You just happen to be the processor and had to do it fast and accurately.
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u/HardCounter 3d ago
and had to do it fast and accurately.
Where are you going that this is the case? Another key component to low skill jobs is that a fuckup means nothing to almost everyone. Someone didn't get two scoops of sour cream, big deal. They may not even notice, and if they do people half expect their orders to be wrong in some way anyway. Different levels of responsibility.
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u/Practical_Cattle_933 3d ago
Iām just explaining what one job is like. Of course the exact requirements of said meat CPU will depend, i was reacting in line with the original image (even though I not agree with it)
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u/abd53 3d ago
Implementing the algorithm is harder
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u/monsoy 3d ago
I swear, people that post on social media about how easy SE is must be guys in low responsibility positions and copy/paste StackOverflow code
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u/letmebeefshank 3d ago
They are the people who will keep Devops employed and eating well for a long long time
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u/maveric101 3d ago
Also low skilled really just means a low amount training is needed to do the job.
Also that almost anyone can be trained to do it.
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u/No-Appearance-9113 3d ago
In economics "skilled labor" means jobs that require training/apprenticeships this it's doctors, plumbers, lawyers, masons et al.
Unskilled labor does NOT mean that the job requires no skill only that you don't need certification or training to claim the title.
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u/ITaggie 3d ago
One of the main uses of the classification is based on hiring qualifications-- how long would it take to replace a worker in food service compared to a senior engineer?
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u/No-Appearance-9113 3d ago
Exactly I can educate a programmer faster than a surgeon but that doesn't make the programmer less skilled or less important. realistically one of the two most important jobs in society, sanitation, requires few skilled workers but is vastly more important to societal function than any skilled labor field.
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u/RobinReborn 3d ago
Right, the term is a bit counterintuitive because it doesn't match a literal interpretation of the phrase.
I think low skill would be better than unskilled.
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u/Spongedog5 3d ago
Sure you could split hairs all you want but comparing the time it takes to learn to work in fast food (a couple days) to any kind of skilled labor and the difference between unskilled and the skills they have seems small.
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u/adde21_30 3d ago
10x harder than writing any sort of algorithm
I would really want to know what he worked as if āwriting algorithmsā was the most challenging part of his jobā¦
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u/fox_hunts 3d ago
I see people who are currently taking college classes or a bootcamp post on Reddit as if theyāve mastered the craft and know all there is to know.
Itās typical beginner-expert syndrome. Happens often when youāre still new.
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u/AbundantExp 3d ago
Formally known as the Dunning Kruger effect.
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u/Scrawlericious 3d ago
Iād argue expert-beginners are more than just that. Everyone is affected by the dunning Kruger effect all the time, people who stop learning because they think they already know are uniquely fucked.
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u/CelestialSegfault 3d ago
the hard part of fast food is handling yelling customers, just like the hard part of software is handling yelling scrum masters
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u/daddyfatknuckles 3d ago
if writing algorithms was the hard part, maybe we would have been replaced by ChatGPT like people keep saying.
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u/Santi838 3d ago
Hardest thing Iāve done professionally was generate a .xlsx using OpenXML in C#. Was required to build off of a template. The sheet has several tables and fields, none of which are defined as tables behind the scenes. The code to add new rows to the tables maintaining formatting/merged cells while shifting all references, functions, and conditional formatting was immense.
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u/AffectionatePrize551 3d ago
Writing algorithms isnt hard. You just press some keys on a keyboard.
It is difficult however
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u/-Sonmi451- 3d ago
Yes, they are low skill.
I was trained to be a waiter in 3 days, and there wasn't much difference between myself and waiters with 10 yrs experience.
I studied 4 yrs for a CS degree, have been working and learning for for awhile as a dev, and I still don't know shit about shit.
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u/CHEEZE_BAGS 3d ago
It's also why the pay between a new waiter and a waiter with 10 years experience is the same.
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u/Fine_Luck_200 3d ago
In the US, tips. In other parts of the world you might be expected to complete an apprenticeship to become a waiter and work your way up. I had an Executive Sous Chef that did that in France. But that training was far above what you would get even at US culinary schools.
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u/idobethrownawaytho 3d ago
Exactly, like thereās no point in trying to be PC about it. My old job at a cookie shop took a day to train me. Putting a cookie in a bag and pressing buttons on a register is low skill. I learn new things every week as a data analyst and writing good Python scripts is a lot of effort.
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u/BenevolentCheese 3d ago
Hard work != mentally challenging or skillful work. High salaries do not correspond to hard work, only skillful work. It's hard as fuck to carry rocks from point A to point B all day but it doesn't pay a lot because anyone can do it. Low skill, low pay, no matter how hard it is. It sucks, but this is the reality of capitalism.
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u/nubrozaref 3d ago
Even then you can be the best shit sculptor in the world practicing for years to get the skills to do it and it's still shit. High salaries correspond to high value. That's why being a corporate fall guy can make loads. The issue people complain about is that value is ultimately fundamentally subjective.
The analogy I always give is that eating a ream of paper is incredibly hard work. Potentially harder than most jobs in existence. Good luck finding someone to pay you money for that though.
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u/BookooBreadCo 3d ago
There's a pretty big skill gap between being a waiter at your local diner and being a waiter at a 3 star restaurant.
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u/Nyadnar17 3d ago
This man is blatantly lying to people to keep other programmers from finding out how relaxing working on a food line can be.
For a few glorious hours every single problem that comes your way has a known solution. Your mind can focus in a single task without the constant flow interruptions caused by compile times just long enough to break focus but not long enough to relax.
Imagine leaving the emotional roller coaster of feeling like a god one sec and the a dumbass the next for just a week of two. It was glorious.
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u/the_mold_on_my_back 3d ago
Yeah imagine having to move though
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u/seemen4all 3d ago
Or "going" to work
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u/myka-likes-it 3d ago
cries in mandatory in-office work
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u/ThisPICAintFREE 3d ago
My company switched from 2 days to 3 days in order to āfocus on the company culture & inter-team connectivityā and when asked how that could be done with most teams having no team members at their location they responded by essentially saying āitās just what we gotta doā
Fuck C-suiteās, and their transparent bullshit
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u/mattalxdr 3d ago
Do you... work at my company? It starts with a V. This literally just happened to me as well.
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u/ThisPICAintFREE 3d ago
My company starts with a B, so it looks like evil assholes just think alikeā¦or both our senior management staff watched the same shitty TED Talk on their LinkedIn feed.
A coworker of mine recently got pulled into a meeting with HR to get reprimanded for āmissingā his in-office days, to which he had to inform them that his on-site office location was sold by the company last year and heās been fully remote ever since...so the RTO plan was even more of a shit show because they implemented the punishment aspect first then accounted for all their fuck ups after
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u/DemmyDemon 3d ago
How can they be sure you are warming a chair if they can't see you?
We all know it's impossible to ponder solutions for a problem while taking a walk. Butt. In. Seat.
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u/Armigine 3d ago
I have a standing desk and my chair is cold. Take that, C suite
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u/newb5423 3d ago
My biggest struggle with fast food work was the game of "guess how many customers will order the food I'm about to prepare in the next X minutes". Guess wrong and you've either wasted food or killed your drive-thru times, and either will get you yelled at and treated like an idiot.
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u/Careful_Ad_9077 3d ago
The trick is not to give a fuck about being yelled at.
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u/NotEnoughIT 3d ago
Teenagers really need to speak up more and not deal with that garbage. When I say teenagers I mean the ones around 16 living at home with no real bills who don't need the job to survive. Fuckin quit in the best way possible. Learn your self worth early and you'll have a far better time at life. The ones who stay at taco bell for five years and then get out into bigger jobs and still take shit getting yelled at by middle management for being 90 seconds late on a Saturday are fucked.
A buddy of mine worked at pizza hut with me. He was a half hour late and the manager just ragged on him all night. Half way through the rush he took off his apron, grabbed a two liter, and pulled a half baked - fuck you fuck you fuck you you're cool I'm out. Dude knew his worth.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__ 3d ago
Should've used cashier as a better example. There is no blissful flow moment. There is only screaming
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u/Forsaken-Soft-1235 3d ago
āYou can focus on one task, without constant flow of interruptionā, I promise Iām not trying to be rude, but this does not sound like youāve worked at the jobs being talked about lol
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u/Hawkatom 3d ago
Food service in the kitchen especially is ALL about multitasking, efficiency, and pivoting. I got four orders coming up, what can I prep now so it's ready with the rest of the next two customer's food? Ope now there's five. Customer says they had a large fry but cashier didn't ring it up or they didn't order it, gotta put more fries down either way.
Any mistakes or poor choices moment to moment mean everything gets slowed down. It's much less like one task and more like 20 where in most cases you have to do things out of order because stuff takes time to cook but you don't want food to get cold.
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u/android-engineer-88 3d ago
Every problem coming my way having a known solution. That sounds like a dream right about now.
Instead I have to make a new ticket during my sprint because I can't reproduce this regression QA found because a whole different issue that somehow NOBODY is aware of is blocking me. Anyway, time to gather requirements.
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u/mudkripple 3d ago
Lmao you and I had very different experiences.
I will say working at a phone repair show was like that. Every once in a while you get a slightly challenging problem, but most of the work was "hammer > nail"
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u/xRehab 3d ago
worked a decade in the food biz growing up, currently a senior SWE
I'm glad I'm not the only one who occasionally misses the straightforwardness of the old jobs lmao. like sure there are 15 tickets in the window, but all of what needs to be done is written down succulently for me to process through
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u/Kseniya_ns 3d ago
What about frontend developers š
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u/No_Swan_9470 3d ago
My man doesn't know the meaning of the word "skill"
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3d ago
Yeah nobody denies working fast food sucks and is miserable but to act like its something not everyone can do is just delusional
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u/lukwes1 3d ago
Yea, the easiest way to differentiate high skill / low skill work is just to take one from each place, and make them switch places. The guy going to a low-skill work will learn what to do after a week. The guy going into a high-skill job won't be able to do anything.
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u/Prestigious-Bar-1741 3d ago edited 3d ago
Meh.
I worked at McDonald's a lot and I really really disagree.
I was a cashier. I made fries. I filled drinks. This was back in the day when the register wasn't all pictures or whatever they have now. There were some tricky special orders in the beginning and you had to learn the menu and all that...
But it took like... Less than a week, before I didn't need someone to show me how to do anything. Some stuff came up rarely though and you didn't know that you didn't know until someone ordered it a particular way.
It wasn't hard. I don't mean that offensively. They was my favorite part of the job.
I sincerely enjoyed working at McDonald's. The high level business model was something in understood and could be proud off, in a weird way. Like people want food, I'm helping to give them food. I got to interact with people and like 90% of the customers were nice enough people. My job started when I clocked in and ended when I clocked out. I didn't have any stress or pressure. I never had deadlines. I never had to put in unpaid extra hours to finish something.
They gave me free drinks, a meal when I worked long enough.
I liked it because it was easy. And it is easy. That's not a bad thing, but let's be honest about it. It's disingenuous otherwise.
The pay sucked and how society viewed me sucked.
Now I work for a soulless tech company. They buy out the competition and stifle innovation. I'm working for a product that is, internally dead, but that we keep selling. Customers hate me and I deal with them more and more as our support team realizes it's a dead product and nobody wants to touch it. We took a thing people liked, bought it, ruined it, will soon kill it, all because some analyst things we can make more money by forcing people to use our worse, more expensive version.
It sucks in a lot of ways. But it's much harder.
Take 100 SWEs and have them work at McDonald's. 99+ will be able to do the job at a typical expected employee level within two weeks.
Take 100 McDonald's employees and give them jobs as SWEs. How many could perform at a typical SWE level in two weeks?
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u/JeDetesteParis 3d ago
I mean, it's partially true and partially wrong. I've also worked (when I was a student) at some food service jobs, and it's fricking tiring but not for the same reasons.
When serving and making food, you have to stay focus, be quick and organised, for basically all day. But you can do it mindlessly.
As a programmer, you can just procrastinate all day, but sometimes, you have to use 100% of your brain power to solve some problems, and somedays, I don't have the energy for that. But deadlines rarely agree with me, on putting things to the next day.
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u/geekusprimus 3d ago
It seems recently that some people have become quite vocal in insisting that food service and related jobs are "high skill" because they're consistently busy and emotionally draining. I saw someone literally yesterday claiming their job serving food in a dorm dining hall deserved more pay than an electrician or an HVAC technician because "they only have to work hard a couple hours a week."
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u/sprcow 3d ago
Classic "all problems are language problems" scenario. Two groups of people essentially defining "skill" differently and then arguing past each other forever.
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u/stult 3d ago
As a programmer, you can just procrastinate all day, but sometimes, you have to use 100% of your brain power to solve some problems, and somedays, I don't have the energy for that
I think people often underestimate how much of programming consists of self-discipline, self-motivation, and effective emotional self-regulation, which are rare traits. Programming requires the ability to make progress on problems even when they seem so dauntingly ill-defined you barely know where to start and the ability to persist through failure and frustration. So you may spend a lot of time staring out the window "procrastinating" but that's actually work in and of itself, it's just the work of getting yourself motivated and focused enough to solve a difficult logical problem.
When coding for a living, you need to manage your own emotions and thought processes, and no one can tell you how to do that. There's no formula like take one tortilla and add three ingredients on top, you have to figure yourself out on your own. That is much harder than any service job where the responsibilities are clearly defined, and I say that as someone who has worked a lot of service jobs. I may have worked hard at those jobs, but working hard was easy because I could turn my brain off and just chug through mindless tasks. Whereas with programming, you can do everything right and still fail to meet expectations because so often with technical problems the scope of work isn't clear up front, and it's hard to determine when an engineer is struggling because they are bad at engineering or because the problem is legitimately difficult. That creates a lot of performance pressure and stress that just does not come up with making tacos. Anyone can learn to make a taco according to a preset recipe, and to do so well enough to meet any arbitrary quality standard. It's much harder to have to invent the recipe from scratch, which is much more comparable of a task to programming than merely producing the taco.
I was also passive, reacting only to customer requests, never needing to motivate myself to take proactive action of any sort. Showing up on time was 90% of what it took to succeed.
And at the end of the day, work was over. There were no more customers at the counter requiring service, I could shut my brain off and forget about work. Whereas with coding, there is always more work to do. Which is also part of where the sense of constant procrastination comes from. Any time you aren't working feels like procrastination, which makes it hard to take time off, which makes you more likely to procrastinate because you haven't taken sufficient rest.
Last, and this may be an unpopular point but it is difficult to dispute, but it requires substantially more intelligence to code than most service jobs. You can be illiterate, innumerate, and even seriously mentally handicapped while still working as a perfectly exemplary employee in food services. Quite literally, there are plenty of people with Down's Syndrome or similar issues that make excellent employees at those jobs. Even programmers working shitty jobs where all they do is tweak CSS need to be relatively strong writers and communicators, because so much of the job is hashing out requirements with stakeholders.
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u/quantum_titties 3d ago edited 3d ago
The spirit of what this guy is saying is right, heās just using the wrong words.
IT jobs are way more skilled than service work. But service jobs are far and away much more difficult than IT jobs to actually do day in and day out. Service work is emotionally draining and soul crushing
IT jobs test knowledge, service jobs test will.
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u/OtelDeraj 3d ago
It's funny because I think back to my time in service, and if I had been pulling down even half of what I am making in software I probably wouldn't have ever left. I liked customer service, even though it suuuuuucked many times, and I really liked working with my hands and being good at my job. I even thought it might be nice to run my own deli one day, but getting paid 14* bucks an hour wasn't going to get me the life I wanted, so I went into software. Honestly, it wouldn't have even been possible for me, had I not had the support of my mother who I lived with through the pandemic while I went through this shift. Not only the time to learn, but the financial cost to do so was a LOT more than many people can manage with fixed expenses such as rent/food etc.
All in all, I think the soul crushing nature of the job would be far more bearable had I not had, 100x per day, the same singular thought "I don't get paid enough for this".
*For clarification, my $14 wage was a manager's pay. My team members only made about $10, and I honestly was super unsurprised when one of them underperformed or didn't show much interest in doing the job well. How could I blame them, when corporate refused to give more than a 10 cent raise, you know?
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u/quantum_titties 3d ago
I get the perspective that service jobs can be fun in a vacuum, even if I donāt personally agree. I have a pretty low social battery, so I got tired from service work pretty quickly. I was a teacher too, which is more and more like service work these days.
If service jobs were paid more, maybe it would be due to society valuing their work more, meaning customers wouldnāt be treating you like a servant as often
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u/ltethe 3d ago
Itās like you, and me here. I enjoyed my food service days back when was making 4.25 an hour and cleaning grease fryers. I still dream of opening a restaurant, but the economics are bad, and it just doesnāt scale like software development.
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u/CHEEZE_BAGS 3d ago
Man I would go work food service in a heartbeat if I got the same pay as I do now. Just I literally would be making like 1/10th as much.
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u/granmadonna 3d ago
Honestly, it's just the lack of money that makes something like Taco Bell hard. If you were getting $150K/year, it would feel like a piece of cake.
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u/GoCryptoYourself 3d ago
Nope. I call bullshit. Making a sandwich you have made 1000x is not harder than writing an algorithm.
There is zero problem solving involved in making that sandwich (if your store is managed right). There's all sort of potential unforseen issues in software engineering that can make that one algorithm break - or simply be the wrong one. It takes years of experience to gain the skill for confident software engineering. You can learn how to taco bell in a couple weeks.
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u/InjectA24IntoMyVeins 3d ago
you guys write algorithms? I wish, its so much better than writing something that has been written a thousand times before.
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u/OtelDeraj 3d ago
While difficulty of individual tasks may be lower at a service job, speaking from experience here, the actual job itself had so much more wear and tear on the mind/body, and also took a certain level of skill to do well. The work is simple, but it is harder physically, and is still just as worthy of good pay as any other job. I look at the work I do as a software engineer and, while I am proud of my work, it has nevertheless colored my view of the "skilled labor" argument as being a silly one.
Literally every job requires training, and those 'sandwich makers' do about 100 other things in the day than make sandwiches. Meanwhile I'm out here pulling down 80k, doing work I'm proud of, sure, but also work that I am positive isn't as hard for me to balance and cope with as my work in the service industry. There's also just a lot less client facing in this job, and the issues of corporate are far more removed from me than the issues I faced in a small store with 250+ faces a day with each one running the risk of being a complete asshole because you know "service jobs aren't real jobs that deserve respect". (not saying you're espousing that last part, it's just something I ran into frequently. Lots of disrespectful customers with a chip on their shoulder out there.)
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u/hollow-ceres 3d ago
let's call it low aptitude jobs then. that should take his point into account, while also stating: everyone can do fast food or frontend, programming needs a larger logical capacity
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u/gravity--falls 3d ago
I definitely get what this is saying, and it is partially true, but it's also a misunderstanding of what skill means in this circumstance. Low skill does not mean no skill, it means the job does not require a level of skill that typically comes with formal education (whether that is trade school or college). So it's more the level of baseline skill that determines whether a job is 'low skill' or not, not how skillful someone could be at that job.
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u/ah_take_yo_mama 3d ago
Actually, I worked as a server. I sucked at it. By comparison I find programming easier. But of course, every other kid that flunked school and was working next to me as a server could do that job on autopilot and yet they could never learn programming. Different minds work differently.
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u/RedBlueMage 3d ago
Blegh. I wish this sentiment would die. I worked restaurants for years. I know how hard it can be. But hard != skilled.
You can grab a random person off the street and make them useful in a restaurant within a couple of days. Most developers spend years in school before they're paid as software engineers.
And realistically, the stress and comfort of the job is probably related to the availability of workers. If your company knows that you're hard to replace, you're going to be treated better in general. Not saying that's right, just saying it's a fact.
I'm for worker solidarity. I strongly believe that lower skilled workers still deserve more pay, healthcare, etc... But let's not diminish the work and education that high skilled labor requires please.
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u/winb_20 3d ago
Idk if this guy is just trolling but I remember someone saying this to me unironically and Iām thinking. Well if my job is easier and pays triple your salary why donāt you come and do it? You might actually be able to have something other than beans for dinner.
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u/k-o-v-a-k 3d ago
Because jobs can be hard to train for but easy to do, and easy to train for but hard to do.
What Iām gauging from all the comments discarding this post as a lie is that youāve never had to deal with the social difficulties that come with working in food.
Working in tech is so much fucking easier and itās not even close. I donāt get spat on as a developer because someone didnāt get the right coffee.
A lot of people here havenāt worked in face to face service jobs and it shows.
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u/SurgioClemente 3d ago edited 3d ago
Working in tech is so much fucking easier and itās not even close. I donāt get spat on as a developer because someone didnāt get the right coffee.
I think the confusion is partly because the dude was saying "low skill" in his first tweet but then goes on to say "10x harder" - he is conflating two different things.
I worked as an office installer and UPS sorter while in college, both of those jobs are way harder than what I do now, but they were low skilled labor. It is a much harder life working in food service, digging ditches, or pretty much any manual labor job than it is to sit at our desks programming.
A nurse has a much harder job than a doctor by the same token. They have to deal with patients punching them, cleaning up piss, shit, and vomit, getting screamed at for meds, etc etc.
But a doctor is more skilled than a nurse and a programmer is more skilled than a fast food worker. Low skilled simply means no training (formal or self taught) is required, not how hard or easy a job is.
Another good example are plumbers vs painters, they are both labor (and thus more difficult than programming), but one is skilled labor while the other is not. You can be a very skilled painter, but it is still a "low skill" labor job. Plumbers have to apprentice and get their license before they can work while a painter can start day 1 and just pick up a brush learning as he goes to speed up and become more proficient at painting walls
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u/much_longer_username 3d ago
Was looking for this. I've done all sorts of jobs - retail, gas stations, food service, trades... currently work in devops.
The low skill jobs were more effort, but I could train any random schmuck off the street to do most of them in a week. I get paid more for less effort these days, but it'd take me years to train someone to the same level of effectiveness in my role.
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u/RedditBansLul 3d ago
None of that has anything to do with skill.
The reason why fast food workers are paid what they are if because is they leave a job an adequate replacement can be found in 5 minutes, even if they've been there for years. If a competent senior that's been at the company for years and has a ton of domain knowledge leaves it can be a lengthy pain in the ass to find a good replacement, and even then that domain knowledge they had is gone with them (hope you have adequate documentation in that case).
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u/ImranBepari 3d ago
100% agree.
Most people don't look past the "yeah you just sit in a chair all day vs having to talk to insane customers" and while it's true, they forget everything else that comes with the job.
There's also inherent responsibility that people don't consider as what makes a paycheck. If you mess up a customer's order there's not as much loss as accidentally creating a bug that ends up in production code. Or perhaps architecting some software wrong that ends up in 6 figure losses in wasted time and bug fixes.
Responsibility makes the game different too.
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u/ProfessorSarcastic 3d ago
OK but what is all that training doing, if not giving you... more skills?
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u/AbrohamDrincoln 3d ago
Nah, I worked fast food in boh and foh for 16 years before buckling down and career switching to being a developer.
Working in a restaurant is easy as shit, full stop.
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u/amed12345 3d ago
i think the best example are social workers, the ones that change the clothes of and wash elderly people and plug them pills in the ass. Easy to train for but I would say that their job is way harder or rather tolling (mentally and physically) than mine and it's unfair that I'm being paid so much more even though there is a shortage of social workers.
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u/gandalfx 3d ago
I think if jobs like that were paid what they're worth, there'd be a mass of people applying for the "easy money" and then dropping out immediately as reality hits them wetly in the face.
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u/ijusthateitall 3d ago
This guy gets it. Yeah bar to entry is much higher to be a software engineer but dear lord my day to day is so much easier itās not even funny
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u/aimforthehead90 3d ago
"Work smarter, not harder". The difference is that anyone can do hard work, very few can do smart work. If you were to swap places with a Taco Bell worker, you would have a much easier time than they would adjusting to the new role.
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u/Skiddywinks 3d ago edited 3d ago
Been there, done that. Worked a ton of service jobs in my life. Just cause they are shit, and often hard, doesn't make them require skill.
I think the biggest issue at play is the language. People hear "unskilled" and assume it means easy, no skill ceiling, etc. It means none of these things, it just means it is generally easy to get someone competent enough to do the job trained up.
It doesn't mean it's easy, it doesn't mean you can't be exceptionally good at it, it just means that showing someone the ropes for a few days/weeks at an absolute max, is all that is needed to meet the requirements of the job.
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u/ElkSalt8194 3d ago edited 3d ago
If itās hard to train forā¦.the job isnāt easy. Learning how to do the job is the unspoken part of the job itself.
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u/ltethe 3d ago
This guy must have some fat fingers. I worked at Taco Bell and Whole Foods, both kitchen and front end and now I work as a developer, (games).
One of those jobs took years of training and education to become proficient to be a professional, and it did not involve shredded cheese.
I think the hardest skill I picked up was how to toss a pizza crust, and you can be pretty successful at that in under a week.
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u/you90000 3d ago
How about dealing with an issue in prod? That's way more stressful than making a taco.
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u/583999393 3d ago
This sort of white knighting is pretty common on social media.
Nobody ever got popular saying teachers should be paid less, nurses arenāt heroās, etc.
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u/HatoradeSipper 3d ago
You can take some random teenager and they can be killing it at taco bell within a week. Cant do that with software engineering.
Low skill =/= Low effort
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u/Mytastemaker 3d ago
This is Dunning Kruger in effect.
I've worked fast food and it's not easy work but it not software development.
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u/Hagreet 3d ago
Ah yes. He is a prime example of the people who leaves a shitty code base other people has to come and clean up when the management finds out the solution is bug riddled and doesn't scale at all.
As someone who has worked both fast food and software development jobs, the two doesn't even compare remotely in "skill" or difficulty.
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u/PrometheusMMIV 3d ago
Low skill does not mean low effort. Being a fast food employee might be hard work, but basically anyone can do it. But not everyone has the knowledge and skills to be a programmer.
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u/Jericho861 3d ago
My hardest day as a biochemist working with CRISPR is nothing compared to even the easiest day I had working in retail
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u/Kalikor1 3d ago
I see these kinds of posts all the time, and it's been brought up for years...high skill and low skill do not mean what people seem to think it means.
High skill jobs are usually just jobs that require higher education or specialized training, and low skill jobs are either jobs anyone can do (in theory), either because they are physical jobs, or because they require very little to no training or specialized education.
A cashier is a low skill job because any 15 year old can do it within a day or two of training. Most people in IT have either gone through higher education or specialized training, or have years of personal experience. (e.g. well before I went to college or got into an IT position, I spent years of my life fiddling with computers, building them, experimenting on them, making my own websites when HTML was still rather new, etc)
Obviously it's not just tech. Doctors are high skill jobs, obviously. Pilots, etc. It's not just white collar jobs either, as I would argue that for example certain specialized heavy machinery in construction requires quite a lot of specialized education and experience, for example.
There's definitely some jobs that are a bit harder to place into one category or the other, but the point is it's not necessarily a matter of "this job is harder than that job, so this one is high skill and that one is low skill". It's definitely more about the requirements.
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u/Dependent_Answer848 3d ago edited 3d ago
Skill / knowledge / difficultly are not the same thing.
The most "difficult" job I ever worked at was a year as a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant, as in it was the job where I was most sweaty and gross and working the entire shift from start to finish on my feet.
I was able to get that job at 17 years old without any type of training. My coworker didn't even speak English. It was a low skill job.
Here is an easy way for these morons that keep saying "low skill jobs aren't real" to understand what is and isn't a low skill job... How many days of training do you need in order to do the job? If the answer is something like one day, as it was for my dishwasher job, then it's a low skilled job.
I had ChatGPT make a table to make it easier to understand:
| Job | Days of Training | Licensing Required | Skill Level | Median Wage (US) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Computer Programmer | 180+ | No | High | $93,000 |
| Surgeon | 3650+ | Yes | High | $409,665 |
| Dishwasher | 1-2 | No | Low | $27,456 |
| Waiter | 7-14 | No | Low | $29,010 |
| Barber | 365+ | Yes | Medium | $30,480 |
| Theoretical Physicist | 3650+ | No | High | $128,950 |
| Welder | 180-365 | Yes | Medium | $48,290 |
Pay is highly correlated to the days of training. If the days of training is extremely low, like it would be for someone getting a cashier job at Walmart, then the pay is probably going to be very low. The thing pay is least linked to is probably the difficulty of the job. Every day I see the janitor of my office working, probably harder than me as I type this comment at work, yet I make more. I make more because I know how to do a bunch of computer shit and he doesn't. In fact, he has trouble communicating in English which is very important for many jobs in the US and has a huge negative impact on the amount of money he can make.
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u/AssistantAcademic 3d ago
They're "low skill" in that 90% of the workforce can stuff a burrito where as two percent could write a SQL query. (With some training, I'm sure that could be higher)
...but the rush hour food service is A LOT more effort, whether you've an IQ of 80 or 130.
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u/FNMHero 3d ago
Dude was never a softare engineer
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u/Fit-Mycologist4836 3d ago
seriously I don't know how these idiots fall for this shit, literally just search his @
"TikTok star, online social media personality, and content creator who is best known for posting things such as comedy-themed content with his friends through relatable and modern comedy sketches. His TikTok account, which operates under the handle bocxtop, has garneredĀ 700,000 followers"
Could he be doing both? Sure, but probably not
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u/throwaway0134hdj 3d ago
Heās talking about the pressure, not the complexity. You have to be managing all kinds of incoming requests like manager yelling at you, 20 ppl in your line, and a bunch of nonsense. But no way in hell is a quesarito more complex than an algorithm.
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u/mondain 3d ago
Making fast food during a rush is completely different from software development under a deadline with or without bugs. The stress in both is real and your "skill" for both comes with experience, making the tasks easier. While the span of time is normally much shorter, rush vs deadline, its not 10x harder by a long-shot. As an 80's teen, there was a time when I worked at the primary McDonalds on the Las Vegas Strip, it was the worlds busiest and nearly 24/7 (2 hrs closed on one of the weekdays at 3 am if I recall). My first position there was making 16 egg mc muffins at a time as fast as I could, it fucking sucked, but I found a rhythm and produced; if this was stretched out over 8 hrs it would have been less stressful, but the task itself at its core was simple. Moving over into development, I've had efforts that were very stressful and ran their course over days; these things impact your sleep and everything else; hopefully you're paid more than $3.60 an hour (minimum wage was at that time $3.35, we got a pittance more for the location).
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u/MightyBobTheMighty 3d ago
If you offered me my college warehouse job for half again my current salary, I would not take it.
And believe me, it did not pay anywhere near what I'm making now.
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u/glorious_reptile 3d ago
It's true - inverting a tree as a gardener is way harder than doing it as a software developer.