Well, according to MSNBC, a list of five occupations that are really great paying, low-stress careers includes the following: software engineering and civil engineering.
I am sure Paul North is glad to hear what a low-stress career he sought, just like the hordes of software weenies (that is what EE’s, at least, insist that SW stands for) whose work is so low-stress that one of the most popular books on the topic is entitled Death March.
I need a job with the hours of 12 to 1 with an hour for lunch and seven figure salary. You know sort of like congress and the senate. I would have to say federal workers in most occupations are stress less.
Normally that is a given. However any federal worker anyway involved with the ongoing “BP” disaster may have a very high level of stress wondering if he or she is the next sacrificial lamb. One head of the MMS will not be enough!! Even civil service protected employees need to worry!!
The federal government is a business, just like any other business. If there’s a stressful job in the civilian world, its federal counterpart is probably just as stressful. My experience was on a military installation - but we still had to deal with budgets (and cuts), deadlines, fires, accidents, and violent crimes.
Retirement is a relatively low-stress occupation, and the annual “salary” is usually in the seven figure range, so long as you count both sides of the decimal point.
And, for sure, you can’t beat the hours!
I posted the link as another example of someone writing drivel about things of which they have no knowledge, which is, I fear, not a new phenomenon. I was amused by the inclusion of the two jobs I mentioned, because neither is remotely stress-free. Apparently not having a clue is not a resume killer at a “media” company.
I guess civil engineering can be low stress if you are doing drainage plans for a sub division. But, what about going high in an under construction high rise, or dangling off a high bridge?
What makes my job stressful is the constant drizzle of HR requirements/training. It’s hard to focus when you’re working in a drizzle.
The low stress job is always the job the other guy has…the other day I over heard two people talking about their own very high stress careers…they were librarians I overhead discussing some new means of tracking overdue books and the new training that system would require… should have paid attention in school and they would be fire fighters instead.
I would respectfully say that this is an very unfair statement to be leveling many of our hard working and dedicated federal employees…yes they are out there.
I was not trying to start a fire. Some federal employees work darn hard for a living. I was thinking the administrative jobs are low stress except if there are budgets involved. Then again if you mess up on the fed payroll you get put on paid administrative leave. In the private sector you get fired. Where else can you get caught cheating on your taxes and then become head of the IRS? The state I live in is worse then that. Three speakers of the house indicted on federal corruption charges and prosecuted and two get to keep their pensions! More of our hard earned tax money going to a worthwhile thing.
I applied for a town job as a mechanic a few years ago. I was told at the interview that they get 15 paid days off a year, Plus holidays, 8 am to 4 pm and Friday afternoons are spent playing cards in the lunch room he called it training. I didn’t get the job. A relative of someone in buildings and grounds got it. My private sector job gets 5 major holidays off and 2 weeks vacation that I can only take 1 week at a time. If I got the town job I would have got a pay raise instantly. Its true that the town mechanics make more then the private sector mechanics plus better benefits.
Working for MSNBC is probably the ultimate low-stress job. You don’t have to know anything, and no one will ever fact-check your work.
I have found most of the other ‘list-type’ articles under the MSNBC banner to be equally fact-free. The ‘best’ is usually a place I wouldn’t want to live, or a food I can’t stomach, or a product that I consider a waste of money. Oh, well…
I don’t know who experiences the most stress, and I doubt that MSNBC does either. But as a class, federal public sector employees have suddenly catapulted to an average wage about twice the average wage of the private sector workers. And the average public sector benefit and retirement packages are far more generous than they are in the private sector.
At this time, the only components of the economy that are growing are healthcare, public education, and government. This exploding growth of the public sector drags down the private sector that produces the wealth being used to grow government. So if there is any stress in the public sector, it may be the worry about how to keep expanding their empire once they kill the golden goose. That would stress me out.
A good paying low stress job is Garbage man or Trash Collector. Not the kind of garbage man that hooks up a can/toter to a lifting truck, but the kind of garbage man that actually lifts up the can and physically dumps it in the hopper of the garbage truck. That is a real garbage man and the job is low stress. Just get the trash into the back of the truck.
Driving the garbage truck is the high stress job. We had two “throwers” and one driver for a three-man crew. I started out as a thrower and then after several months my boss asked me to get a CDL and become a driver. I hated driving the garbage truck and after several months I demoted myself and went back to my old job of being a thrower. No stress and great exercise. My buddy and I were in such awesome condition that some of the house wifes would bring out the garbage when we came around just so they could see a great looking, fit, toned twenty-something body. Probably the best job I ever had.
A number of years ago the Saint Louis Police Dept. gave me a parking ticket. I wanted to dispute it, so I went to the downtown traffic court office.
While waiting in line to talk to a clerk about setting a court date, I figured out how their productivity incentive worked. Punch the clock in the morning and your daily wage starts at $240; but, for each member of the public you serve, the boss will deduct $10. Never did I see so many people look so busy while accomplishing next-to-nothing.
Finally when I did talk to a clerk, I told her my story and she referred me to the city attorney’s office. When I got there some “ol’ pol’” heard me out, and in the best tradition of a big-city Democrat he fixed my ticket. It was a golden moment for justice.
Maybe to bring this back “on” topic, I am wondering if in the railroad industry there are any relatively low-stress jobs left. I have a friend who worked in LA for SP in the late sixties as a billing clerk, which was basically a clerical “in basket/out basket” job that she didn’t think was very stressful, which I believed because handling job stress was not one of her long suits. Now, I suspect, most if not all of what was done by the army of clerks in downtown LA is done by computer, so I am sure that job as mostly gone away.
That being said, I am pretty sure that most of the railroad jobs we hear about on the forum here are pretty stressful, if for no other reasons than the schedule pressure and safety issues that are part and parcel of same. But I still wonder if somewhere in the railroad industry there are still relatively low-stress jobs.