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Forbes' Five Worst Tech Jobs
santan writes: "We've all read countless stories describing the revolutionary and high tech jobs available at Internet startups nowadays but here's an article at Forbes listing the worst tech jobs out there. Some of them include packing dog excrements, chatroom monitoring and searching for the most disturbing porn on the net. So go to work next week with a smile."
Congratulations, your mind has been completely destroyed, you actually ENJOY telephone technical support now.
Some day you'll be the manager, and make a whole $40,000 a year until they fire you or you die.
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You don't know what hard work is until you have worked on a dairy farm, milking cows without one of them fancy milking parlours with their automatic take-offs. No, you get to either kneel down on one knee or squat or bend at the back several hundred frickin times, alternating depending on what body part hurts the most. Oh, and cows are the stupidist frickin animals alive, skitish as sheep and weighing 1000-1800 frickin pounds. Oh, and they can KICK. Damn can they kick. Just ask my boss, his testicles must have reached some kinda world record size. Oh, and they SHIT. God do they shit. 30-60 frickin pounds a day a cow. Oh, and you haven't lived until you have artificially inseminated a cow (you have to insert your arm past the elbow into the cows rectum, to press down on the uterus so that the semen, at 20 bucks a pop, flows down into it), or cleaned out a cows infected uterus (PU!!!!), or had a slimy, slippery newborn calf flop into your arms.
Please, dairy farmers are some of the hardest working people in this country, in one of the hardest businesses around: the family farm. My boss, who is also my second cousin, puts in an average of 15 hours a day, EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
-- Igor Pavlov
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Well, other than those virtual pieces of chalk they throw at you and ...
... oh, ok, so most of them would be pretty bad). Or which company you work for.
oh, you mean the real job.
In that case, a friend of mine does that for Adobe, and he seems to like his job, so maybe it depends on which chat room it is (e.g. the Jon Katz chatroom would be my personal idea of hell, while the Britney Spears chatroom would be
Will in Seattle
Since Microsoft Exchange Server.
Because by the time they call you (1) they already tried to self diagnose and fix some problem and ended up screwing it up more, (2) are by now totally frantic, (3) don't have time to explain the problem to you, and (4) want it fixed now. On Sunday at 22:30, Christmas Sunday, while you're naked in bed with your SO. and (5) customers with direct programmer access will ask "when will you fix it?" I dunno. That's an issue for management to sort out. I'm working on other stuff and the customer suddenly thinks he's my Boss and can immediately reassign my duties? Fuck that.
IMO, customers should never have direct access to the programmers. A buffer layer is needed. Programmers make for poor customer service reps, anyway. We know the software sucks, due to insane and lame requirements from the PHB, and aren't afraid to reveal truths that the sales guys would never dare reveal.
They said cell phone support by the programmers would be temporary until another tech is hired. It's been 3 years now and no tech. I hate my job.
When you've roofed houses in Houston, Texas for fourteen hours a day in August (105 in the shade and 99% humidity) to make $2.00 an hour, ANY job with a ceiling sounds pretty damn appealing, much less a job with air conditioning or one that allows you to sit down.
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
I saw that comment and almost barfed.
I started thinking - surfing for porn, and getting paid - must be for blocking software. But doesn't it seem a little disturbing that there are people who say "Yeah! I could get a job surfing for porn, so that it will be blocked by Company X's software - Gawd, I hate looking at porn, but THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!" - I mean, doesn't this sound a little "Jeckle and Hydish"? How can you be repulsed by something, but still take a job doing it...unless you really aren't repulsed by it, right? But then, the dilemma is that you are working to subvert your own interests... Or is that the reason - you like it (porn), but you feel you must do this to "cleanse yourself of evil" - to be forgiven.
There is a name for that kind of behavior, and it isn't sanity...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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-Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Browsing through (albeit possibly 'disturbing') porn a tech job? The only skill there is doing it with one hand.
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"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
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"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
-Me
I was in the security department of a certain company which runs free porn newsletters. We had a sponsorship program and my job was to browse the sponsor sites to ensure that they met our terms and conditions. This meant that I saw some pretty disturbing stuff... rape, incest, child porn, scat, etc. I saw things that could truly give someone nightmares. It was up to me to terminate the offensive accounts and catch them if they tried to sign up again. I liked my job. Saw some disturbing stuff, but also knew I was doing a service to others by catching it. A lot of it was sites outside the US because they don't have the same laws regarding it like we do.
The popup windows were a pain as well. I got very good at hitting Alt+F4 really quick.
--
Shadowcat
ealasaid@cybergoddess.net
kageneko@kageneko.net
"I can roleplay. I can frag. I can PK while you lag."
Until further notice, all employees are required to be at their desk from 8am until 7pm, with 30 minutes for lunch. There are no exceptions.
What wanker wrote this. I mean, sure, I can sit at my desk for 12 hours per day if that's what you want. Just don't expect much respect for the company, productivity and all that. Hell, 12 hours isn't too bad - there's lots of web surfing and emails to be done in 12 hours....
If your start up company has lots of work to be done and is not doing well, it is entirely likely that not having people at their desks for 12 hours per day is just a symptom, not a cause. Shit like this is really good for giving start-up employees the motivation they need to build greatness (NOT!)
Writing emails like this is indicative of someone who is deluding themselves as to the real reason their company is going under....
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
In deciding what job I've had that I've hated most, I had a limited selection to choose from, all my work experiences have been summertime-only positions. I think the worst had to have been a data processing company I worked for. For 8 hours a day, I would sift through forms, extracting all binding items (staples, paperclips, etc), placing batches of these forms through a large industrial size scanner, and then, from those scans, entering all the pertinent data from the forms into a computer. It doesn't sound bad, but it gets pretty damn monotonous after a few hours (which pass slower than any day in school you could ever imagine). Not only that, but my boss wasn't cool at all, and even when there was no work to be done, we would have to count, and recount, and recount again, stacks and stacks of these forms, no matter how many times they had been counted, just to have work to do. The only thing that made the time bearable was that 3 of my friends from school were working with me, eventhough most of the time they split us up. The only plusses I saw in the job was that it allowed me to skip eating dinner with my parents (always a plus), and it increased my typing speed by at least 10-15 WPM. I suppose you have to find the good in everything.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
They closed down this past October, even before this Forbes article which was dated November 27, 2000.
I guess this is another example of how good the Internet research is at Forbes.
Porn viewing in and out of itself is a blessing to LOTS of people, and as for gross stuff, cops, doctors and undertakers probably see a LOT worse every day of their lives.
I'm not so sure. There's some pretty intense stufff out there - things like goatse.cx, people tearing their gentitalia apart with hook [thanks to the person on IRC who posted that URL, people being raped or semi-snuff movies, and violence [cadavers after violent encounters] which is marketed and used by some peoplee as porn, Unlike a cop working a local beat and ancountering drunk teenagers and wife beaters, you can pretty much see the world elements of humanity.
Just a thought. I still have a thousand times more respect for the cop, who actually puts himself in danger in dealing with these people. I just think the internet guy has [if he was *really* looking for it] seen worse. It being on screen [and possibly faked] does take some of the shock away though...
"searching for the most disturbing porn on the net"
Wouldn't that be the job of a Slashdot troll?
ftp://poopoo.ca.ca
:)
In the meantime, go watch the video here. It's NOT what you think.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
This is a job? At my last job, the guys did this every day. The challenge: find the most disturbing video clip of the day / week / fortnight / whatever. It was a hobby for them. So, every so often, you'd hear laughter or groans from the back room, venture in, and find a bunch of people crowded around a screen watching someone doing unnatural things to a horse... or a chicken.
And just think... this could have been their actual job...
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
In my short 7 year work life, I've worked at McDonald's, and I've worked two different tech support jobs -- one at a rural ISP, another at a premium software company (among other factory/programming jobs), so I think I'm in a position to testify on the subject.
Tech support jobs were the only jobs I was ever AFRAID to go to. To this day, I can't answer MY OWN PHONE half the time, because I'm sitting there wondering who is at the other end of the line, what they want, and how I'm going to fix it. If you have a lot of nontechnical friends, you know what I'm talking about.
In front line tech support, most people learn out or burn out. The people who leave usually aren't cut out for it mentally, the rest of them turn into emotional wrecks like myself. Take a guess why there are so many damn stupid MCSE's?
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
There was a drain which ran from the part of the building where animals were killed through under the yard and out to the sewer. This drain was known as 'the blood drain' because what it carried was mostly blood... and anonymous bits of animal which got cut out immediately in the killing room because they might taint the carcase. One very hot day in July, the blood drain blocked up... and in the end I had to clear it by lying on my stomach in the yard, reaching up the drain at full length of my arm, to pull nameless bits of semi-putrescent substance out of the pipe with my hand.
Nothing you ever do at a desk will be remotely as bad as that.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Forbes is just looking for ink and page views. Maybe the decline in dumb money will lead to fewer dumb articles like this ... well, maybe not.
sulli
RTFJ.
..and Jobs can test the patience of tech support too.
I did after you provided the link. I'd like to know how they consider the output of their 110 pound dog Buster worthy of the term PooPoo Grande. It's obvious that they've never had to deal with a well-fed Mastiff. There's a breeder in CA that has a 270 lb dog that could probably supply them with more crap than they could ever need.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
no offense, but if the shit hits the fan on this economy, the average person will jump at the chance to hold an open zip loc below some pooches ass for $14 an hour.
didnja ever read the grapes of wrath?
since most readers are american, and living in the "american century", you really have no idea what it's like to watch people you love get turned into REAL WHORES or watch members of your family starve, die of diseases or get shot and robbed for what little they have.
don't get me wrong, i certainly don't hope these things come to pass (again), but historically it's a fairly strong possibility.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
No, previously the degree of voluntarily has always been such that is a choice between degradation and starvation or violence. He should save his shock and pity for the child who made his sneakers, not the voluntary whores of capitalism.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Its a similar thing with me from when i worked in a grocery store. I dread going into any of themanymore and i'm so paraniod about some things. I ALWAYS check the dates on the stuff now, as when you work in a grocery store you get so sick of rotating the stock around(so that new stuff goes at the back) if you are at a near empty shelf with only stuff at the back or only a few stuff moved up, there is a chance it's been there for YEARS (trust me on this...at the store i worked in we had this 4 year old cream cheese and we placed bets on how long before we were caught leaving an old tub of it there, but some jerk ruined our fun by buying it).
I never get deli meat anymore except from dedicated meat stores because they usually have clean hands all day. In grocery stores they just pretent to or only rinse because your hands feellike shit after washing them 30 times a day.
at the place i worked at i had to go to the deli to slice meat every time the bell rang. To this day (a year later) i still instinctivly drop whatever I'm fucking doing and start walking someplace whenever i hear a similar bell, then it hits me....yuk.
Umm... I followed the link to the article, and there was no text. There was a header and all, and the page title was "Crappiest Jobs" or something to that effect. But the article was missing! I decided to view the source, and they seem to have forgot to put the article into their source code...Can somebody help me? Am I having a problem, or are they?
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suwain_2
You need some methodical troubleshooting skills. There is a learning curve, but once you understand the hardware, software and connectivity and how they interoperate you can handle ANYTHING. Start by narrowing the problem down to a few possible causes and eliminate each by testing. Don't worry if it takes a while - a good troubleshooter will be patient enough to work through the problem until it is finished. If your customer (or worse, your boss) doesn't understand this, don't get flustered. If you have to, you can always explain your methodology. If you have one, your boss will support you -- or if s/he doesn't, update your resume.
In that case, you're business is fscked. When I call tech support, I expect to be talking to a person in an office chair, who's got time to deal with my problem. Not intruding onto a programmer's private life. That's a pain in the ass for both of us. I expect to talk to someone who's prepared for their job, not just the guy who drew the short straw. I can understand why your customers are so annoying, they think "I'm calling a big business which has a bad manual" not "I'm in someone's bedroom". Damn, that must scuk.
"Yes, here at cringingfacelesstoadey.com, we offer you temps that will not only run errands for you, but also cringe when you hurls insults and large pieces of cookware at their head! Our faceless toadies go through an extensive 12-week course, where they learn to say things like "Yes, Your Magnificence!" and "I am unworthy of picking the scum between your most gangrenous toenails, Your Worship!" Think of the immense satisfaction you'll feel as your very own faceless toady scurries off to fulfill your every whim! And nothing beats the rush of screaming "Think! I don't PAY you to think!" at your very own temporary minion before emptying an entire pastry tray on their head! Our facless toadies have been employeed by some of the most dynamic chief executives in the U.S., including The Joker, The Penguin, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs!"
"So don't delay! Expand your ego by abusing those contractually powerless to strike back! Go to www.cringingfacelesstoady.com today to find the whining, cringing, sniveling faceless toady of your dreams!"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Wow, what an ass. I know at least in BC, Canada, requiring people to work 11 hours a day with only a half-hour lunch break would violate the law, regardless if those people are salaried or not.
Better take a second look at those laws. There's a special bit of legislation dealing with "high-technology professionals", that exempts them from many of the provisions of the Employment Standards Act. Take a look here for the details.
I'm not sure if this particular example would be legal or not, but just about all of the other "overtime"-type regulations don't apply to "high-tech" workers. The idea is that your stock options are supposed to make up for all the unpaid overtime you put in, while your semi-literate CEO pulls in 6 figures for sitting behind a nice desk and watching his screensaver (and/or browsing porn) all day.
You *have* to wonder what sort of resume you need to present in order to get a job as a porn scanner...
"Have personally sampled over 10,000 porn websites in my 'research'"
"I can instantly tell by a domain name if it will have porn on it or not."
"I don't puke when I see that goatse.cx link that keeps turning up on Slashdot..."
Even more interesting is this version in the Seattle Times. It looks like someone decided to change "5:45" to "6:45" and "6pm" to "7pm". Given that change, it makes me wonder how much else of the letter was changed (as Barnicle claims).
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Quote:
Until further notice, all employees are required to be at their desk from 8am until 7pm, with 30 minutes for lunch. There are no exceptions.
Hands in my pocket
Interviewer: "What's it like searching for porn?"
Worker: "It's hard."
Interviewer: "Your job is hard?"
Worker: "No"
Interviewer: "What's hard then? Oh...never mind."
zx75
This is not a sig.
If you really read the article, it says the reason that it was one of the worst jobs was because they had to look at the nasty images like the ones on goatse.cx and comp-u-geek.net. And sites that combine those with loops of moving javascript popup windows.
Note that this article is from November 2000. Since that time, of the two big dotcoms mentioned in the article, MyLackey has gone (as the Register so nicely puts it) "titsup.com," while Kozmo has pulled out of some cities and reduced its presence in others.
Now these facts may just indicate poor execution, but perhaps, just perhaps, a company that routinely subjects its employees to the humiliation and lack of respect described in the article will eventually find that its primary asset - its people - have grown to hate and resent it?
ObDogPoop: my parents own a veterinary clinic, so I received a comprehensive education during my childhood summer vacations in the gentle art of retreiving and disposing of canine feces. Yes, it's every bit as bad as the article suggests. It's a shame that I couldn't find a place for that on my CV...
.. I thought I should share my worst job experience. Before I went to work for GameSpy, I worked for Famous Players' Silver City Polo Park in Winnipeg, MB, and it was the worst job ever. Let me tell you why.
Let's start with the physical stuff, and work from there. While I was working at Silver City, I was a member of the 'floor staff.' It's not as glamourous as it sounds -- we were responsible for cleaning up theatres and bathrooms. 'Pfft, that's alright' you think. 'Popcorn, drinks.. easy' Oh, yeah right. Over the 9 months that I have worked there, I've had to clean up many a puddle of vomit, blood, alcohol, and a used condom. And all that for minumum wage. ($6 per hour.)
Don't get me started on the management. Favouritism ran rampant -- some people would get tons of shifts, while others would get one per week. In fact, that happened to me (one shift a week) -- I even wrote a nice long letter expressing my discontent, but it didn't help.
So, that's MY sob story...
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CitizenC
I used to work doing programming for dog tracks. There's a guy who gets to follow the dogs with a little cup on a stick for the drug test. THAT's gotta be a suck job...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
For the second year in a row: crack whore trainee.
Good thing Jon Katz didn't write this article. Otherwise one of the selections would be "High School Student"...
Why was tech support left off of the list? Some of you probably work in this field and understand where I am coming from.
For those of you who don't know, you usually get to deal with many raving lunatics/knowitalls who do not take the two minutes to look the possible issue in their owners manuals. And yes, this is a daily occurence.
Life is wonderful, I wonder if I too can aspire to become a lackey......
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
...running a cool technology-focused website with an interactive discussion system that is abused by hundreds of adolescent trolls that insult you, fill up interesting threads with garbage, exploit every possible hole in your system, put your e-mail address on spamlists, make bogus submissions, continually accuse you of conspiring with your employer and lots more?
But seriously, searching for porn is listed as one of the worst. I've been doing it for free for years. I had no idea I could be getting paid for it.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
They forgot the all horrible Slashdot Moderator job ^_^.
Seeing is that when I was a teenager working at the teenage hell boot camp that is McDonalds, and then later doing tech support(in '95 and we DIDN'T have internet access),I'd say a bad tech job PERIOD is better than flipping burgers. Okay, except picking up dog shit. That's just inexcusable, and I'd hardly call that a tech job.
Only in america can we have jobs involving "tech" and still complain about it. Beats working in a sweatshop for Nike, or picking rice somewhere in Vietnam.
"Brian Milburn, president of Cybersitter, says that one of the worst things about this job is stumbling upon sites featuring photos of severed body parts. Gross. "The Internet is a big toilet," Milburn says. "If we had kids at home, I wouldn't let them use it." " ------- Now you don't have to wonder why blocking software product are so screwed up.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
... that journalist who has to write cute little Internet stories for online magazines. When interviewing folks from around the web, you can look no further then Joe Queenan, writer for Forbes. In an email interview, he had this to say:
It isn't all that hard. Thank godd above that I can yuse Microsofft Werd to do my spell checkin. Oh, this intervew is for a Pro-Linux website? Well, I meant Star Office, er' KOffice, er, VI. LINUX ROCKS! If anything was difficultt, it was finding the picture of the dog taking the ****."
How about the grueling demand of the all important deadline? When Queenan was asked this, he responded:
What deadlyn? I have hat that stori bruwing for weaks.
So, there you have it, the confessions from someone who works the sixth worst job in the Internet.
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Thies jobs share a commen thread.. they are hummiliating..
Let me give you an example of a low tech job that sucks.. mine... I'm a night watchmen at a recycling center (I'm available for employment BTW).
Basicly people get angry at me for doing exactly what my boss tells me to do. I get insulted, threatoned and lied to.
But it dosn't happen that often. Usually people just don't show up... It's pritty rare that I have any problems.
When there are problems my boss backs me up 100%..
Thats my job...
Now... tech support... Now maybe nobody is threatoning the tech with phisical violence but they do scream yell and whine a lot. And while I deal with a person maybe once a month.. if I'm unlucky.. a phone tech gets a whinny person once a day if he is lucky...
My job I do nothing for days.. pritty much.. So I get a jerk every now and then.. I can deal...
BTW: My boss is basicly making my job difficult lately and won't even admit it. Small issues.. but enough for me to quit...
I don't actually exist.
Personally, having a bad tech job currently (tech support) and a decent job immediatley before this (flipping burgers), I think I'm qualified to say I felt better flipping burgers for $6.50/hour USD than I do doing tech support for $10.30/hour USD.
of this summer camp I went to way back when. On this one island they had this campground of sorts with a primative outhouse, basically comprising a few sheets of plywood, built into a primitive toilet over a dirt ditch no more than 6 feet deep. One year a girl fell in when the plywood broke on her. Apparently she was stuck in there for 30 minutes or so before anyone discovered her. When she got out, she was absolutely non-linear....
I can't even imagine. *Barf* Especially in the heat...ugg
I did.
*Backs away in shame*
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Porn viewing in and out of itself is a blessing to LOTS of people, and as for gross stuff, cops, doctors and undertakers probably see a LOT worse every day of their lives.
PR flacks existed long before the 'net and probably were universaly hated by any techies.
Chat room monitors is pretty new, but i'm not sure it's much worse than being a councelor in a teenage summer camp. Now, running Slashdot, that is likely a job from hell *snicker*
And lackeys existed long before technology, never mind computers, even in US of A.
Now, if you ask me, the worst possible job is a low level tech support for some financial company. Why? You get all the "benefits" of a tech support position, combined with being the bottom of the food chain for people who posess no technical knowledge (true for all lusers), proud of it (true for all lusers) and can fire you if they don't like the tone of your voice with one phone call (not likely in your average tech support position).
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein