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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
There were definitely a few days I didn't want to wake up early. It helped that I lived in the apartment complex and it was a 90 second walk from my apartment to the rental office where I worked. The fact that virtually no one called or walked in for the first two hours helped. Shifts were relatively short (6 hours and 15 minutes).
And I couldn't screw anything up, it was virtually impossible to fuck up, people's lives weren't in my hands, or things like that. Most of my interactions with the residents were along the lines of "my AC isn't cooling enough," "alright, we're on it," and then I'd fill out the intake form to get our AC contractor to come by, or "hey, I've got a package from fedex coming later today and it needs to be signed, will you sign it and hold it until I get off work?"
How long did you have that job and how did it end?
The economy eventually recovered and I was able to find a higher paying job in 2011. I ended up working this early morning shift job at the rental office for just about two years.
This is I would call my dream job, except that I am a night owl.
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!
Rocks vs plants
Blasting vs arranging
Keeping people away vs working large gatherings
Yup, that all checks out! Satisfyingly opposite indeed.
I would love to do something like this part time or when I'm retired, seems so peaceful and chill
You just have to watch out for the Bridezillas ;)
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.
The other birds, did you just release them right away on site? What would happen to the trapped pigeons?
I let the Cooper's hawks and the first merlin go. I kept the second merlin and flew her a few months for fun before letting her go (I had always flown hawks, not falcons. It's a different style, so it was a learning experience for me). The pigeons mostly went to my employer to feed his own falcons. I didn't have a pigeon loft to do a proper quarantine to make them safe as raptor food (my employer did). I released a few, but you know they'll just find their way back to the trap aka the great source of food.
The duck had a husband who was either too smart or too big to get into the trap, and would dutifully stand nearby while I released the wife.
Wait, how tall were these buildings? I'm assuming you mean three stories of ladders, not three stories of stairs+ladders because going up the stairs at home and at work definitely hasn't done much of anything to affect my fitness.
This was a manufacturing facility (2 sites) and their corporate office. Factory floors have very high ceilings so a building might have 2 levels but it's more like 3 - 4 normal stories. So it's a little hard for me to estimate height. The traps at the main factory were accessed by a combination of stairs and ladders, and we had 3 or 4 separate locations for traps there, so 3 or 4 sets of stairs/ladders. I do remember the highest spot there was up 6 flights of stairs of 11 steps each plus one more flight of ~10.
The other factory had just one trap accessed by a ladder that was definitely the height of a 3 story building -- it was so long, it was split with a little platform halfway up so you could take a breather lol.
The corporate office was 4 stories and was all stairs and just one short ladder (ceiling height there was also high, but not like the factory -- maybe 10-12'). We were not allowed to use any elevators. Also keep in mind I was lugging about 20 pounds of stuff going up, and could be laden with up to 25 pigeons going down.
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.
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.
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've had some pretty good jobs over the years but the best, by some distance, was working for a circus. We did workshops, teaching people to juggle/diablo/tightrope/etc, which was great fun. But my favourite bit was doing walk-round clowning/magic, where either on my own or with someone else, we'd wander around a festival/street/event/whatever just.. being entertaining. Doing a little juggling routine, breathing fire (rather carefully because public liability insurance only goes so far), engaging people with magic tricks and so on. We got to mess about all day doing fun stuff and then get paid for it!
The hours could be pretty brutal, it wasn't uncommon to be up at 4am to drive a few hours and put up the Little Big Top, which was HARD work, then have to be Fun all day before taking the tent down, packing it up and driving home again. 16-18 hour days on occasion, but my boss was pretty good about scheduling so we weren't doing them back to back. Lots of fresh air, sunshine, free food and drink and it was a surprisingly good way to meet girls too. Could a nineteen year old ask for a better job?
Oh, and I had an office job which I ran away from to join the circus. I didn't tell them I was leaving, I just didn't turn up one day. I did unicycle past the office on my last day, heading circuswards, but I have no idea if anyone saw me. I like to think someone did.
I'm imagining that some people saw you riding off, and you became a small office legend for a while. In your ex-coworkers minds, synonymous with following your dreams, brought up around the water cooler when the work was just a little too dull.
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
I worked a couple of different regional restaurant jobs and they were both a blast. Even some fast food restaurants (Arby's or Taco Bell) were a fun time.
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), that I wore a lot of different hats and was at least aware of every single client and project we had.
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.
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.
320-400k/yr isn't paying very well...? Maybe I'm crazy but that seems like a high salary for almost any job...?
You're not crazy, that IS a high salary, even for staff engineers that aren't living in a HCOL area. The fact that it was entirely remote might not matter if you live in such an area and have no intention of leaving said area.
By then I had reached staff engineer, and for that kind of company you'd expect more in the 500-600k range, and there wasn't much growth potential realistically in the equity, so I just autosold. A lot of peers I knew were making significantly more, especially with illiquid stock growth considered. Of course they also did a lot more work, so you win some, you lose some.
Construction site and production manager in the cultural industry. So much is like normal construction, until it's really not. Working with creative people doing cool things and sitting between them and contractors from the wider industry that have to somehow be shoehorned into this scene where nothing quite works as they think. And vice versa.
I could have doubled my money by going and working in the mainstream industry but I don't think I was ever really tempted, it was a lot of work but also a lot of fun, and culturally it was and is home. I don't do it anymore and miss it but 60 to 80 hour weeks aren't compatible with school drop offs, or sanity in the end.
Honourable mention goes to delivering pizza for pizza hut. Fanging it around suburban streets before I was old enough to know how dangerous it was to do 90kmh through the bends past my high school, coupled with eating pizza and hanging around talking with some really cool people when not fanging it. I had a lot of fun doing that job, and not a worry to take home. Or really any money, as the down side.
I'll try to take a slightly different tack than others with this one. I'm an introvert who didn't grow up with very good social skills. Although it was difficult for me, the best job for me and my long-term success in life was working as a leasing agent at a large group of apartment complexes during a break from college. I'm not sure how someone like me got a job like this, but I had to talk to people all day every day. If I wasn't handling walk-ins or leading model home tours, I was making calls to follow up on leads or schedule more tours. It's surprising how many issues one can overcome when their income and survival depends on it.
I was only at that job for about half a year, and most of the confidence at that job hasn't translated to other situations in life. Some of it did, though. I still have some anxiety when it comes to phone calls or talking to groups of people, but I still sometimes think back to that time in my life, which gives me a bit of confidence.
As a job it was kind of boring, but all in all the best job I ever had was working in technical services in an academic library, because I wholeheartedly believed in the mission of the organization I was working for.
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.
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.
In high school I had what I would consider the best job I could've possibly had at that time. I worked for a budget second-run movie theater with that was still using film when most of the theaters were converting to digital.
I started as a concession stand worker/usher and eventually became one of the projectionists. We only had eight screens, and because we were only open from 5 until the end of the last movie, there were usually only two screenings a night. Which meant my job would be lacing up the movies, hitting start on the projector at the scheduled time, and then hanging out until the first movie ended and I could lace it up again. Sometimes when we had new films come in, I'd need to splice them together and add our trailer reel, but that was only once a week at most.
Compounding this, the oldest person who worked there was our general manager who was 23 and freshly out of college. Literally every single employee was between the ages of 16 and 23. One of the managers brought their GameCube in and after the last run of movies kicked off, we'd hang out in the manager's office and play Super Smash Bros until it was time to go home. We were also a very poor performing theater so a busy day would be like 100 people in total showing up across all 8 of our movies. Weekends were obviously busier, but it was never crowded. Our primary clientele was older folks, and I swear to god The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and We Bought a Zoo played there for 3 months straight.
Sometimes I still miss that job. The pay was minimum wage but it was extremely fun, low-key. I got to do my homework in the projectionist booth while being paid. The managers could not give a single fuck about anything, so it was all the popcorn and soda we wanted, our friends could come while we were on the clock and watch a movie for free, we could come on our off day and watch a movie for free, on more than one occasion we stayed after our shift was over to watch a movie at 2am.
Sadly, there were rumors the whole time I worked there that the chain who owned the theatre was going to shut it down and sell off the land and they finally did while I was in college.
I worked at a university helpdesk and during my first summer there, it was generally super quiet. If someone couldn't immediately fix their issue everyone would go over and work through it with them and then go back to what they were doing. I did almost all the homework for the classes I was taking that summer during those shifts. It was nice being able to go home and hang out and do stuff instead of doing homework, and I was getting paid while I did it!
Sadly the next summer they realized they were paying all those student techs to do practically nothing so they had bigger projects scheduled during the summer months. Refresh of computers in labs, deep inventory audits, updating documentation, etc. We would have 1-2 people taking calls/covering things and the rest of the team was doing project work.
I ended up hating every single one of the jobs I’ve had. I dont think I’m cut out to be someone’s employee. I find it humiliating and exploitative. I’m much happier working for myself. What I lost in stability I’ve gained in dignity.
May I ask what, at a high level, you do for self-employment? I used to work freelance (editor) so get the feeling, although I personally also don't mind working for an employer.
As you’d expect on this website: I’m a software developer.
My favorite would have to be phone repair. It was very nice to tinker around with lots of tech (and even fix it sometimes!) My shop would also do any tech repair so it was fun to work on PCs and be somewhat jealous over someones parts. It's also very relaxing to me to repair devices, fixing phones was always the best because you would noticeably improve someones day when you hand their device back to them. Unfortunately towards the end the company got bought out and then they wanted us to do sales + tech repair. They had a protection plan that covered all tech you owned except phones (which we saw the most of) - seemed kinda silly but they would breathe down our necks until we sold 10+ plans a month. Additionally, I had to run the entire store by myself (I was the sole employee) after we got bought out and they would not promote me, telling me I "lacked initiative" so that really accelerated my departure.
Other than that, shockingly enough doing backroom at Walmart. I loved throwing the truck (except in the heat) and we would listen to music and generally have a bit of a blast. They did try to cut out the music but we prevailed. Not sure if you can do that anymore though.
I worked at this grocery store for 2 summers: https://share.google/qNKYe5iVe8pekbJRD
Go look at the streetview to see why.
That's a gorgeous view! I imagine you did a lot of hiking/outdoor activities in your spare time?
I'd have to say freelance editing, because I worked when and where I wanted, my specialty was in topics that interested me and felt societally valuable, and it was decent pay + lots of work available (at the time - sadly neither the case anymore).
The only real downsides were inconsistent pay, and I got paid exclusively for the exact time worked/output, no paid breaks or benefits (both big positive changes for me when I went corporate). Also, frankly I'm not the best at self-promotion, which did limit my opportunities to continue that life.
I do miss the feeling of being able to take an afternoon off just because I had no deadlines and I felt like it (well, I can but I'd burn through vacation time). Or, flip side, having the flexibility to travel and bring work with me; although at the time I felt like I didn't take very much advantage of that, it still afforded me multiple weeks/months of visiting family far from home or impromptu road trips.
There are great things about my current job (assoc prof a an academic medical center), but it doesn't come close to my pizza delivery experience around 2004-2005.
We were in the college-plus bar district, open for new orders until 3:00a, and had base pay of $6/hr plus 100% tips and delivery fees. Drunk people tip a LOT late at night. Throw in the odd free pizza made wrong and the free fountain drinks, and it's heaven. I spent the summers memorizing so many discographies.
During COVID, I was tech support for a medical records facility with part time hours and full time benefits from my previous position because of Cobra.
This job is probably one I'm going to look back on fondly too, considering it pays about as well as any I've had, is remote with flexible hours, and as long as I get work done, they don't ask questions. My biggest concern is that this probably isn't a forever position, could be ripped away at any time, and my hangup on what hours at a time card mean when you're working at home.
My current job, though there is some turmoil that is coming up (boss is retiring, his replacement isn't my preference, company was bought out and is being assimilated by Big Corporation). I work at a power plant, and while I definitely sit too much, what I do whilst sitting is usually pretty entertaining aside from the health/safety stuff (have to put on safety meetings, training, etc). But I always love getting out into the plant and doing, though it is a union site and I don't actually do much. But it's awesome to learn, to apply my education and knowledge, and overall, help the plant run.