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What was the best job you ever had?
Earlier today we had a post about dream jobs, and that had me thinking, what was the best job you ever had? Why did you leave that job? Did you know it was the dream job while you were at that job or did you only realize it years later?
I'll start off with my job back in 2009. During the great recession, I was laid off a few times between September, 2007 and February 2009. Not sure what it was like for you all, but it was brutal for me, one company filed for bankruptcy, one was acquired by another company and then they promptly laid off 95% of us, another one had to furlough us for months on end until they couldn't pay us. So I lost, three different job during that recession.
Anyway, in March, 2009, I ended up getting a job at the rental office where I lived. It was a typical suburban apartment complex in the US and I got the job because I was the only one willing to work early morning hours. The rental office had to be open at 6am every day. Apparently not many people wanted to work that early for the kind of pay they were paying.
I got there at 5:45 every morning to unlock the place, make the coffee, and then just sit around for 6 hours drinking coffee, reading books, and occasionally a resident would call or stop by. I got a hefty discount on my rent because I worked there. My girlfriend at the time worked a morning shift at a Panera Bread around the corner and after her shift ended at 9:30am, she'd come by with some free bagels she got at her job and we'd just sit there and talk while eating our bagels until my shift ended at noon.
What a great time that was. I had cheap rent, got paid to read books, got to hang out with my girlfriend while eating bagels for a couple of hours every day, and when my shift ended, we'd walk over to a park nearby for a long walk. Then we'd walk back to our apartment and watch Arrested Development and It's always sunny on Hulu because Hulu was so new and only had 12 second ads! My god! what a life that was!
That sounds awesome, I’d do that in a heartbeat. I’m a big of early rising especially I can work those hours that are not busy or no one bothers you.
Were there days you absolutely did NOT want to be up early? After weddings, birthdays, parties etc
Worked as florist during university. It is the complete opposite of what I was studying and what I eventually got into, but I genuinely loved making the arrangements and setting up venues.
You ended up being present for so many important milestones in other people's lives and it was a genuinely wholesome job that gave me great pleasure.
The logician in me can't help but wonder... What is the opposite of a florist? I'm imagining an anti-florist, burning down floral arches with a flamethrower, but it doesn't seem like a very marketable skill, nor does it seem like something one studies at university.
Please excuse my idle silliness.
I studied geology and my first job out of school was surveying and blasting for a mining explosives company. I thought that seemed fairly opposite the florist trade!
Self employment. I’m still doing it, for almost the past 30 years.
My first job was my childhood dream job though, hardware/software design for a startup in the 90s. It was an amazing opportunity that taught me a lot about business and technology. I left to get more money, which I don’t really regret.
What's the moment you knew you could self sustain?
Things were touch and go for the first decade, and I came perilously close to bankruptcy a couple times but once I flipped my first company I was more or less set for life. Probably halfway through the 12 month earnout was when I knew I was set.
I have a bachelor's in computer science and my career arc was IT, network administration, and database development/management along with coding statistical reports.
The bestest job I had was after I left all that. I did bird abatement. This mostly consisted of climbing a lot of stairs and ladders, sometimes 3 stories' worth, to get to the roof of a building while lugging 1.5 gallons of water and a sack of pigeon food. We had traps up there and the job was to take out any trapped pigeons and refresh the food and water. I'd document any problems and tell my employer about them.
It was entirely physical and I could work pretty much anytime I wanted (after sunset was best for having relatively calm birds, though). A workday ran about 3 hours, driving to 3 different locations and visiting a total of 8 traps, and I'd go about every 5 days. I got in very good shape and mostly got over a fear of heights. It wasn't a lot of money since it wasn't a lot of work, but the hourly rate was not that much less than my previous jobs that required a lot more brain and significantly more stress.
In the 3 or 4 years I did that job, I also got to release 3 Cooper's hawks, 2 merlins, and one very persistent duck multiple times as she discovered pigeon food tasted pretty good. I got to see the full moon on a regular basis, and had one wild night with storms and lightning. Being on top of a building in that is pretty exciting. You try to avoid being the tallest thing around.
I had to leave that job because my mom had a bad fall at home which eventually led to her death several months later. I did try to get the job back but by then my employer's kid was working in the area so he had more reason to be here and covered the sites I had been doing. I wouldn't say it was a dream job but getting paid to do something easy and fun is pretty close.
I worked for a small design agency in a small city as a web developer. We did marketing and web development for a bunch of local businesses, local festivals, etc. I couldn't drive through town without spotting a billboard we'd designed or spotting a company vehicle for a company I built the website for. And it all just made me feel so proud. Like I'd had an impact on my area and what I was doing mattered. Even if it was something as insignificant as "oh I made that plumbing company's website" or "I sat in on a few meetings for such and such company's logo". It was very passively rewarding in a way I didn't really appreciate until after I'd left it. And it was such a small company (4 at its peak, 3 when I left).
The pay was crap and the benefits non-existent, but the reason I left was because I didn't feel like I could grow as a developer at that small company. I felt like I needed the push/pull of other programmers to guide me toward being better at my job. I thought to myself "ah enterprise software development...that's the place for me!" and it's been largely downhill in the "how I feel about my career" department ever since.
I don't regret leaving that job, as I now make well over twice what I made there and have benefits out the wazoo, but I miss the simplicity of it. I miss having literally any sense of pride in the work I do on a day-to-day basis.
Line cook at a medium sized chain. Genuinely enjoyed it, the food, the hard work, the camraderie. I'm a DevOps engineer now, but my retirement plan involves running a cafe / bistro with my SO
Working for a long time in a busy 911 system as a firefighter and paramedic was both the best, and worst, job I ever had. I've been out of it for about 6 years, I still miss it, but I could never go back to it. That career holds some of my best and my worst memories. I could still be doing it today, but the impact it had on who I am was sometimes a heavy price to pay.
I did DoorDash in 2019 and they were paying an average of $20/hr. I wanted some spending money. It was just before I went to university and didn't want to ask my parents for money so I sought a way to earn money myself. DoorDash ended up being the only job I "applied" to that ended up working out. I would do the job in the evenings during the dinner rush, ~3 hours a day. It was cool being my own boss and earning $300 in a week. Though these earnings are not after the cost of actually running my car so who knows what was net income was. I enjoyed the job because it really led me to explore our metro area and learn about restaurants I normally would not have gone to myself. You technically had unlimited PTO since you could just stop delivering at any time. The job also taught me that any customer-facing job is among the hardest jobs in the world because people fucking suck. I can see it being a decent way to earn some extra money post-retirement but you'd still have to deal with people and that would be the one downside.
Research librarian's assistant! I held this job at my university for two years and it was an absolute blast. I primarily helped the head research librarian, but I got to learn a lot along the way and he even let me help some of the other students with their research projects, allowing me to develop a really deep understanding of library material organization and just absorbing a lot of knowledge about a lot of topics to enable me to make good suggestions for books.
There was also ordering papers and books via interlibrary loan, but that was kind of a streamlined process so not much fun to be had there.
I also had access to our archives! It was a small school so it was like, mostly historical documents, past student theses, photographs, etc., but still really cool.
Still not really sure how I wound up in dev ops/cloud engineering but here we are. I honestly didn't think research librarians were still much of a thing but one of my friends is getting her degree in it, so must still be in demand. It's great being able to chat and (healthily) live vicariously through her. Who knows - maybe one day after the great communication collapse of 2067 I'll go back to working in a library.
I had a pretty chill remote job for a while, grandfathered in from COVID policy. Didn’t pay super well for the position but was good enough (depending on company performance and stock fluctuations it would be somewhere between 320k-400k usd/yr). I probably actually worked like 20 hours a week.
Eventually there were more exciting opportunities, but it was a good time.
I was a BA on contract with this big corporation. I wrapped my projects up early but still had a good four months to go. I pretty much shopped myself around to different teams and took on smaller projects and some larger projects. It was fun and I did a whole range of stuff from change management stuff, SharePoint nightmares, streamlining data input, prepping materials for a long overdue government audit, and more.
It wasn’t particularly challenging or anything, but the variety was great.