The Best and Worst Jobs in the U.S. (2009)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123119236117055127.html?mod=yhoofront

by ColinWright • 13 years ago

13 41 13 years ago

online.wsj.com

humanfromearth• 13 years ago

Guess the country game:

14th best job: Parole Officer

jandy• 13 years ago

3. Software Engineer

18. Computer Programmer

What's the difference? We can barely decide what to call ourselves. Is there a correlation between job satisfaction and a disposition towards calling yourself an engineer?

sophacles5• 13 years ago

I don't know about title and how it factors in - but It is noteworthy that these two entries - seemingly the same profession, are so disparately placed. This industry has a huge variation in working conditions/environments.

There are the people who work at large corporations - think insurance, banks, major enterprise apps etc. They work on "boring" problems, but they also get paid well, and probably don't have a ton of stress.

There are startup people who get paid OK, plus owernship packages who work long hours, regularly have some heavy stress, but they "live the dream" - many are truly happy with their work situation.

There are folks like game programmers who are always on a death march, have 80hr weeks, but don't get paid very well to chase some dream. By many accounts, the end up burnt out/used up fast.

With such widely varying roles - it makes sense that there are multiple rankings in fairly different places on the list.

RougeFemme• 13 years ago

Job titles are probably based on some governmental labor definitions. . .in the U.S., that would be Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And in the organizations where I've worked - mid- to large-size, programmers are perceived - rightly or wrongly - as folks who just code, while the software engineers are perceived doing more than just coding - although a lot of people with that perception can't really explain what they think the "more" is. Don't shoot the messenger. :-)

skittles2• 13 years ago

What's frustrating is working for a company that calls you a programmer that then expects you to be a business analyst, systems architect, DBA, QA person, and coder all in one. That's how it is where I work. We do have additional titles (I'm a systems analyst now), but the actual work isn't any different between levels. I've learned a lot, but I'll have a hard time convincing a new employer that I should be hired for a senior level position.

unz10• 13 years ago

The sociologist is making way too much money for a government job, our tax dollars at work.

The low-paying dangerous occupations are only that way because there's so many foolish men to take them up.

And you can blame the education system for turning out those foolish men - so a lot of that can be directly blamed on the corrupt teaching unions - whose main interest is in increasing pay and lowering work requirements.

This is where edu startups can come in and help society while earning money.

- Retrain the low pay workers into web designers and app developers. Gamify the education system and make profits by selling high-scoring students to corps that need them.

- Disrupt the teachers union with apps and websites that allow people to form ad-hoc schools outside the system - homeschooling 2.0.

As PG says - kill hollywood and kill government education.

sophacles5• 13 years ago

This rant really confuses me....

* All sociologist jobs are government jobs? Citation needed.

* Dangerous low pay jobs are the result of public education system? This model lacks explanatory power. There have always been low-pay dangerous jobs. These occur in times and places where there is no public education system. They occur in times and places where there is a public education system. They occur in proportions (as related to other available jobs) that seem unrelated to the existence of teacher unions. Rather they seem to be a function of economic development level, with a healthy mix of labor law based restrictions.

Essentially, this rant seems to be off topic soap boxing. Given the "green" username - probably some form of sock-puppetry.

unz10• 13 years ago

Wow, that's pretty rude.

The sociologist in the article - getting paid over 120k. Read the article before jumping with rage.

Basic economics - the low pay is a result of oversupply of people willing to do the work. The oversupply is because many uneducated men being churned out from k12. k12 is run by teachers.

I'm quite sure you're a teacher or your parents were teacher, that explains the rage (By the way, one of my parents was a teacher, but I'm not going to use that to excuse the system).

walshemj3• 13 years ago

Dangerous jobs like Roustabout and Miner are not badly paid but they are "dirty" jobs and attract a premium I was at a training course recently and we had a couple of Pit deputy's (ie mine supervisors) on the course.

They said that the going rate for a single 12 hour weekend overtime shift was $2350 and that some of their "young lads" could clear 125k in a year. This is around 4 times the UK Median wage.

Miners in Australia also could command a very good wage

namdnay3• 13 years ago

It's quite easy to test your hypothesis: Let's see if there are any "low-paying dangerous occupations" in countries without "corrupt teaching unions". Guess what? There are! Time to wipe the chalkboard again I'm afraid...

unz10• 13 years ago

Yes. Scandinavian countries and Australia have a lot less low paying jobs that are dangerous. Guess what - teaching system is also working better there than US/UK.

stephencanon2• 13 years ago

In your utopia, when all the “foolish men” who have been led astray by the evil teachers unions are retrained as web designers, what will you do when your roof needs to be replaced?

unz10• 13 years ago

Pay a more reasonable rate for the dangerous job. I don't only think about my own personal needs, I'm also thinking about the welfare of those low paid men and their families. Roofers deserve more pay than hipster designers.

jonrx• 13 years ago

I would be pleased to see the addition of the « fun » factor.

In the article, they're comparing the job security, high pay, etc. of a mathematician with the « it's not much, but I like it» of the lumberjack. Working as an actuary, I am impressed by how many of my coworkers got there because « hey! It pays » and are in fact (not so) secretly dreaming of changing jobs.

walshemj3• 13 years ago

Well you know the old joke Actuaries are people who would find Accountancy jobs a bit to racy and

"What is the difference between an introverted actuary and an extroverted actuary? An introverted actuary stares at his own feet during a conversation, while an extroverted one stares at the other person's feet."

bornhuetter2• 13 years ago

I am an actuary, and next week is hopefully my last in the industry; I am going off to do an MBA and then hopefully become a semi-technical founder. I got here for exactly the reason you said, I'm good at maths and it pays well. I'm leaving because it's no fun. I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off sticking to my original plan and becoming a software engineer.

beachstartup• 13 years ago

I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off sticking to my original plan and becoming a software engineer.

depends on the job. a software engineer could be stuck writing business forms.

conversely, you could be Nate Silver, the world's most famous and exciting actuary. in this case meaning "well paid guy who does stats and math".

johnobrien1010• 13 years ago

The article is 4 years old... Not that the ranking has changed much in that time, but might be worth it to have a date originally published somewhere in the title, as I read it four years ago, and assumed that this was a different article.

jonnathanson3• 13 years ago

Apropos of nothing: I had no idea "roustabout" was an actual job title. I'd always assumed it was just some sort of archaic insult that you'd occasionally hear from the likes of Monty Burns.

The dictionary has any number of definitions for the term, but the most common seems to be "An unskilled laborer who lives by odd jobs."

If that's indeed the intended description, then we need to take a deeper dive into this issue. I suspect that we have quite a few "roustabouts" getting stuck at the bottom rungs of our labor force, and I'm not talking about illegal immigrants. There are large swaths of the country (particularly in the South and rural Midwest) where people are simply not keeping up with the education or "skills" necessary to remain relevant to the modern workforce.

In large part, this is where I hope services like Khan Academy, Udemy, etc., can start to make a serious impact. It's all well and good for highly educated, well compensated, relatively comfortable folks in the Bay Area to teach themselves a course or two in their spare time. That's awesome. But I'd love to see someone really tackle the training and education of those in our country being left behind.

VLM3• 13 years ago

google for oil field roustabout.

It boils down to being a maintenance man / janitor at an oil drill site. All the weather, some of the danger, cruddy locale, but the pay isn't much better than working plant maint in a factory.

Probably a negative stereotype but roustabouts don't seem to sweat as much as the drill crew. Then again losing life and limb is kind of business as usual for the drill crew (well, its improved over the years...) but its moderately unusual to kill/maim a roustabout.

If you think about it, someone has to be stuck doing minor onsite maintenance. I mean, you're not going to pay the toolpusher $175K/yr to paint over rust, are you?

I had to LOL at the claim you need to live in the Bay Area to learn how to program, or somehow Khan Academy does IP blocking so only bay area folks can watch.

If you need 50K roustabouts to keep the oil flowing, and you teach them to be "CSS developers", then all you're going to do is crash "CSS development" into poverty and not get any oil. I'm not sure there's as much "force" or lack of choice as you think, and selecting a job you don't personally want doesn't make someone less of a person anyway.

jonnathanson3• 13 years ago

"I had to LOL at the claim you need to live in the Bay Area to learn how to program, or somehow Khan Academy does IP blocking so only bay area folks can watch."

I didn't say or imply either of those things, so I apologize if I wasn't clear. Rather, I'm suggesting that such sites have a lot of potential to make a serious impact in areas where people are most in need of skills.

I did come across oil field roustabouts in my Googling, and if that's the primary definition of the term as implied in this article, I stand corrected.

"selecting a job you don't personally want doesn't make someone less of a person anyway."

Again, I'm not sure where you're reading this into what I wrote. In no way whatsoever did I say, or even suggest that.

My personal policy is that, if someone's misinterpreting me, it's probably my bad. I probably wasn't clear enough. But honestly, I think you're reading a lot into my post that simply wasn't intended and/or wasn't there.

VLM3• 13 years ago

I assume the pay figures are based on IRS figures rather than anonymous true responses, because a large number of the "low rated" occupations are cash businesses, notorious for under reporting income. So the IRS could prove on paper that I made $30K, so I guess I "made" $35K and call it good. Which probably doesn't even cover his bar tab, but whatever.

The other problem with the low rated occupations is the author doesn't want to work outdoors, therefore surely no one wants to, but part of the reason pay is so low to work outdoors is because so many people want to work outdoors (despite supposedly no one wants to do it). So that's how you end up with biology grads as foresters at $20K/yr (oh wait the article claims bio is 4th best job, now I'm confused)

The final distortion is several of the high ranking jobs are "winner takes all" much like professional sports. Yes a pro football quarterback is a great job; of course most people who want that job will never be able to get it. Lets see... I know a degreed mathematician working in a call center, an ageism-fired actuary not working at all, a biologist working at a retail food store deli, a sociologist working as a call center supervisor, a PHD philosopher working as an electrician, an astronomy grad working at a bookstore as a clerk. IF you are one of the small fraction of grads who get a job in the field, its great, but you'll probably be working retail. Of course accountants and parole officers DO always seem to be in demand.

This also happens in computers. Yes the top 1% of grads works at GOOG for $150K/yr, but the bottom half is unemployed or at best works a call center resetting passwords.

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

But seriously, being a "Nuclear Decontamination Technician" sounds awesome.

skittles2• 13 years ago

I notice a pattern. "Good" jobs pay well and are not likely to kill or maim. "Bad" jobs aren't necessarily low paying. They are just dangerous. I'm not sure this is a valid way to separate the good from the bad. Some people hate boring office jobs. Take "seaman" for example. My understanding is that some of those jobs are seasonal. The pay is enough to live on for the entire year due to the risk involved. That has to appeal to a certain type of person.

The Best and Worst Jobs in the U.S. (2009)

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