Looking forward to seeing some interesting jobs I haven’t really thought about. Bonus points if it’s an IT job.
I have been working in power plants for over ten years. Entry level plant operators can make six figures with a high school diploma. At a decent plant, you’ll be balls to the wall busy on 5-10% of your shifts, pretty steady with general routine stuff that’s mostly just confirming that shit is normal 80% of the time, and the remaining 10% is in outages which can vary between busting your ass and waiting around but it’s rough either way because you might be working every day for a few weeks. Every plant I’ve been to does 12 hour shifts with pretty frequent changes between days and nights, which is by far the worst part. You’ll have an easier time getting in and moving up if you are pretty good with STEM stuff, but you’re fine if you passed honors physics in high school. V=IR and PV=nRT will get you really far. Spatial reasoning skills are also really helpful.
I’m at a combined cycle natural gas plant where I started as an outside operator almost 3 years ago at $39.80/hour and am now a ZLD water treatment operator in the same plant at $52/hour; control room operators start at about $60/hour here. I had a really shitty 12 hour shift today so I earned every dime of that wage, but sometimes it’s only like 4-6 hours of work in a 12 hour shift and a bunch of reading or YouTube in between while monitoring everything. Even the tough shifts are kinda good sometimes because I get to work the puzzle part of my brain.
What starting jobs does your plant offer right now? Are they hiring? I’m not interested but I am wondering if your experience is colored at all by a different job market.
Did you have any experience prior to 3 years ago?
My plant in particular has a roster of only about 30 people, only about 5 of which are what I would call entry level. Right now we’re fully staffed, but every couple of years we get a few people who leave. We’ll have probably two retirements in the next couple of years, and who knows who will say fuck this place and go elsewhere. But this is all for in-house stuff. I got into the industry as a contractor with a few different companies making less money and running harder for a long while, so that made me a much more attractive candidate. But really I just carry myself well and know how to sell myself and appear respectable even though I feel like a 10 year old trapped in a 35 year old body most of the time. Idk what I’m doing half the time, but neither does anybody else in this stupid world lol.
A super easy way to get your foot in the door for the industry is to look into companies that support outages. It can be irregular work that requires travel, but companies always need bodies just to be a general laborer. You might just be carrying shit for “skilled” workers for a while but you get familiar with processes and can find advancement opportunities from there. I started with radiological decontamination and radiation protection for nuclear plant refuel outages. Most of those guys seem to have like an 8th grade education, so it’s pretty easy to stand out in a positive way and receive recognition.
Probably the best thing for my career to really get where I am was when I somehow talked my way into a job with a major company as a water treatment FSR to handle water treatment for a big nuclear plant. I learned a lot through that, and I’m still very much learning every day.
Not gonna lie: When I started reading your comment, I was fairly sure this was gonna be some kind of Simpsons joke.
The real Simpsons joke is affording a big house with a garage, two cars, three kids, pets, and vacations on a single income from a high school education. My wife and I are a DINK couple each with associates degrees in a two bedroom apartment with no pets.
D’oh indeed, Homer. D’oh indeed…
The year is 2024, and we’re all Frank Grimes now: https://youtu.be/axHoy0hnQy8
It was doable back in the day, especially if nuclear plant workers make as much as the OP says.
My family was exactly like the Simpsons in terms of what we could afford growing up and who was working. Although my dad worked in an auto factory as opposed to a nuclear plant. He was first a line worker but then managed to be trained to repair machinery.
In the year 2024, it’s hard to fathom how that was at all possible to do, but times were different back then. I will say, I’m fairly certain that my parents were also in a ton of debt when I was growing up. It’s just that they used to give loans to everyone (hence the housing market crash in around 2009 or whenever it was).
I don’t know if it was created by the show, but if it is, by mentioning “Dink” you seem to be a fellow Doug enjoyer.
Being a monarch or some kind of royalty seems to be excellent financially and often overlooked.
Economists don’t want me to learn this one crazy trick, but now that I know, I’ll get to work becoming a royal. Thanks to this advice, I’ll be rich by the end of the week.
Trades. Become an electrician or a plumber or any number of other skilled contractor position. Financially you’ll be set for life.
Helped change a water heater at my parents place. Got quoted 1k in labor. Took us a little less than 2 hrs of actual work to do it. Had to buy new flexible connectors and Teflon tape. Possible fire or water damage is no joke so i understand the hesitation to DIY, but the work is pretty straight forward.
Trades are absolutely a viable option. There will always be a need.
The difference between what you did and what a licensed plumber will do is liability insurance. If you somehow accidentally broke a pipe or something, home owner insurance might decide you’re the one to foot the bill for repairs, flood damage included.
It is totally worth it. That being said, I did the same thing a month ago.
Well, idk about set for life. Most trades I know spend all their money on toys, and get too old physically before realizing that maybe they should’ve been saving for retirement all those years.
I had a travel job broadly under the umbrella of trades, we were pulling like 85k+ between overtime and per diem working 6 days a week. Maybe 2 months into this job we were having some meeting about the upcoming 2 week break for Christmas and one of the younger guys makes some comment about missing out on hours and says ‘man we’re broke’.
I’m just sitting there like ??? I thought you guys were exaggerating about the $1k+ nights at strip clubs. I had already maxed my ira contributions and run out of things I could think of to waste money on.
Garbage truck driver
I had a friend that worked garbage trucks. It was an early day but the pay was good and you’d be done with work by noon
It’s not an easy job. You’re constantly moving weights (the truck lifts the garbage bin, but moving a 120 lt bin full of garbage from its spot to the truck and back is not easy either). When your friends are done with their workday, it’s time for you to go to bed. You have to work with bad weather, because trash bins must be emptied no matter what. I work in the IT of the company that does the garbage collection in my area. My colleagues are not very enthusiast of their job, lol. But it’s a stable job, at least. Pay is decent, but I wouldn’t call it good. In other countries though, people doing the same job are getting paid better than in Italy
We have this in my city, so it’s literally just driving the truck https://youtu.be/QxhHkoz99D8?si=QWjJCJAZcqdXIXIo (I haven’t watched the full video, but it appears to just be 18 full minutes of our garbage trucks.)
Learn FORTRAN, and you’ll be set for life.
That sounded like outdated advice 20 years ago, and it still does, but somehow it still isn’t… yet… 😅
Where will I use it?
In the heart of every financial company that has been around for longer than 30 years, lies old code.
The keys to their kingdoms are made from the old code. The old guard has a foot in the grave, and the finance people will pay through the nose to keep everything exactly how it is.
Got it, curious though, don’t they use ( or somehow switched) something like oracle technologies (java, SQL, etc), with all the promises they claim everywhere?
