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Originally Posted by Larry Legend
That "Not sure why people put that kind of faith into their employer" is straight crazy talk.
There's no way in hell you can convince me that at my worst sales job with 60 day hard quotas or termination I was anywhere near as risky weighted as working phone customer service and eating fire.
Having 2 low paying jobs isn't a hedge against having 1 decent one.
I'm not sure what the inflection point is, but I'd do the same thing if I was earning $100 / hour. The higher number is a massive opportunity to really make a go of something major and it seems foolish to me to not take advantage of that.
Recently, I was running 3 contracts all paying $50+ / hour. One ended, one is delayed over circumstance, and I changed my mind on another. The lower-paying work is part needed, part not needed.
For example, I was paid $200 for one day this past weekend. I met the person who advised me about being burned out along with some fascinating girl. The changes and the opportunity to explore and see new situations, companies, and people, is interesting to me, and sometimes I'm willing to take a hit in pay to experience and learn more.
Of course, locality helps a lot. Being LA has opened up many more opportunities to find new and interesting contracts, especially relating to programming, music, and other creative things I would never have thought of. LA is also very much a gig-based economy, more so than any other place I've been. I would like to work 7 days a week if I can, and I don't have to earn $400 every day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by candybar
One thought I had is that you may have spent too much time in low-trust environments. We've been doing some home renovation and been hiring a bunch of contractors, handy-men and what not for all kinds of stuff and it was interesting to see how people behave in a low-trust environment - most business in that world seems to be one-off without that much in the way of previous relationships - how many times are you going to install central AC or renovate your kitchen - so everyone's somewhat defensive and paranoid, at least compared to the corporate world. It seems to me that spending too much time in that kind of environment will damage your ability to work in a high-trust environment because you come across as excessively cynical and paranoid, not to mention spending a lot of energy guarding yourself against phantom threats is suboptimal in a competitive environment.
Does this make sense at all? It seems to me that a lot of people with no concrete skills (not even great social skills) often get paid 6-figures mostly for their ability to act normally in and thereby sustain a high-trust environment. You seem like the opposite case.
It makes sense. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with various construction workers, but that's unfortunately the status quo. I don't have a lot of room to talk **** here, but that field is sort of the "out" for your average HS drop out, ex-con, and other types, though to be sure, there are quite a few people who are well-equipped to take on a Blue Chip job earning much more.
What I've found is that older people and non-union workers tend to give the best bang for the buck. A young lifer in the business generally won't work out. A union-person won't work because because they were trained do industrial construction and union workers are trained to not do anything but their little job (which means they won't pick up their own water bottle), plus they are trained to build, not fix or work around mistakes. I never heard of a residential union worker, but the skill-sets for each are very different. The tools, approaches, supplies, and thinking (or lack of) are worlds apart.
Regarding backgrounds, the person who taught me the most had a degree in mechanical engineering and used to work at JPL, but he just decided he'd rather do construction. It's not easy to find these types, but there are quite a few of them out there. They tend to work on higher end housing and charge what appears to be an arm and a leg, but like a good programmer or lawyer, they end up being much higher quality work and materials, yet end up costing about the same as average Joe Plumber at the end of the job.
There is a lot of defensiveness in some situations. I can be difficult to work in a situation where the home owner is staring you down all day because they think you are going to steal from them or break their toilet. Interior designers are the worst people on the planet.
One thing you quickly learn in contracting, no matter the field, is that you have to deal with people who inherently don't trust you. I get this a lot in programming (much more than I experienced in construction, actually), and that's okay since I'm often dealing with people who got harmed by a prior programmer or I'm number 15 in a line of failures. My only approach is saying very upfront what I can do, what I can't do, and showing them that I'm able to do part 1, and that generally diffuses the doubt.
I think that people find clear and straight-forward language refreshing; I don't think this is true in an interview setting. Also interviewing for a contract is talking about the problem at hand and solutions to the problem. This is much easier for me and aligns with my general attitude toward work.