me at 50 after the latest round of cutbacks and layoffs, “are there still jobs that will allow me to pay my bills?”
Me after surviving the layoffs, great all my bosses are gone it’s going to be months if not an entire year before they notice me again. Time to do the bare minimum!
Yeah, feel the same since the great slopification of the internet and also my job…
During my first “job,” I was too young to be legally employed, so I volunteered at a library with my mom. Initially I worked in one of the back rooms, hidden from the public, helping to scan and sort books put in the return bins. (I discovered several great books by seeing them come back; among them were Dogsbody, Lovely Bones, and Me Talk Pretty One Day. Those are listed alphabetically by title and that wasn’t even by design!)
After I volunteered long enough, I was deemed sufficiently experienced to put books on the shelves in the stacks. I was titled a “page” and proudly announced that while attending a LAN party. One of the other attendees of said party said “and if you do that long enough maybe you’ll become a full book!” I laughed quite heartily.
If you’ve never read anything else I wrote here, the post above will probably tell you everything you could possibly want to know about me.
IT security is like that. It’s really boring until it isn’t.
Make note of the Crowdstrike update schedule, and book holidays immediately afterwards
If you do your job right, nobody will know you did anything at all.
And management will subsequently ask you why your position shouldn’t be terminated, as you’re clearly not contributing anything.
Luckily I report directly to the CISO.
“Why is your finger in that dam? You’re clearly just standing there doing nothing.”
The good(ish) news is that black hats are very skilled at their jobs. IT Security more often needs to justify their fuck-ups than their excessive competency.
Me at 34 I wanna go back in time and do nothing
Buddy of mine was a night janitor during college. I had to help him a few times, and it wasn’t a bad gig, run around and vacuum, mop some stuff, take out the trash. Dude listened to music the whole time and basically never saw anyone. Sometimes I kinda want to quit doing software just to do night janitoring.
And you can! Chase the dream!
While it was kinda fun “mindless” work, I just bought a house and need my software developer pay to keep the house.
at least once a month i’ll text my friend: i’m so tired of working, let’s just live in the woods! as i begrudgingly get ready for my shift.
I took it as a sign of pride that my junior engineers never wanted to be project managers while it is common for the industry because My staff understood the bullshit that comes with project management.
Me at 41: can I just move to a cave and live off berries?
berries
only during salmon berry and blackberry seasons.
Librarians require a master’s and make like $34k a year.
does it have to be a masters in librarian? ive got this engineering degree i wouldnt mind using for something a little less corporate.
Yup. MLS or MLIS.
The fuck you need a master’s for? The dewy decimal system ain’t that hard. 🤨
Because it’s meant to be the case that a librarian can help me if I need to join a correlation between etchings of revolutionary France and the poetry of William Blake
Because most people who work at the library aren’t librarians. Librarians maintain and manage a collection, set up the database, etc etc.
You certainly don’t need a masters just to do that.
I’ve been lobbying my office for a person with a Library Sciences degree to help manage our massive archive of Sharepoint files.
“Haha, how hard could it be?” is the sort of thing that gets you stuck with a multi-year long stint in Library Hell. I can say this from personal experience.
Managing a collection is not a data-entry job, it requires you to know about stuff. Which book on, say, the middle-saharan 17th century tribes do you get, and which ones don’t you get? Is the new one better than the old one? Which old works are to be digitized and which ones aren’t?
Also included is actually running the library itself, helping people use it (from little bobby who wants that book about a mole who wants to know who pooped on its head, to a PhD student researching said 17th century tribes and what art they produced). It includes copyright law, information ethics, conservation, etc etc etc.
It’s really much more broad than “Someone who works at the local library”
Source: me, someone who once worked at the local library, and seriously considered doing it for a living… untill I saw the effort required and the pay.
How would you choose which book to get on middle-saharan 17th century tribes anyway? You can’t know about everything. You’d just have to ask a bunch of experts in the field, right?
Research skills that you acquire during your master’s (incl. but not limited to, talking to other experts)
You can talk with other experts without having master’s
Sure, you can ask 10 experts, and get 11 opinions.
Researching books, authors, subjects, and determining which ones are appropriate and which ones aren’t is complex stuff.
You would, for example, research the authors prior publishing history of books and journal articles, read peer reviews of their articles, check their references, research the history of the authors of their references ECT to build an idea of what sort of author you’re dealing with. Do they know their stuff, or are they just a book mill? Is any of the subject matter contradictory, controversial, out of date, or incomplete. Repeat for 30 books on the same subject to find the most comprehensive work for your collection.
I had the job shelving books. I’d show up in a button-up shirt and slacks and I could shove all day with no problem at all. No one would bother me. I’d show up in ripped jeans, a Metallica t-shirt, and 4 years since my last haircut and people would ask me for help every moment of the day. Libraries are weird.
Good example of outfits sending signals.
Slacks and a button-up probably made you look like management just out picking up slack, and people subconsciously left you alone - “oh, they’re probably really busy with management stuff and also had to go shelve books… I’ll leave them alone”
Casual clothes in contrast would have signalled “worker” - “I’ll just go ask that person, it’s not like they’re doing anything important, they’re just shelving books!”
It probably didn’t help that I was a 17-year-old that looked like I was in my late twenties.
I’ve climbed the corporate ladder and traveled all over the world until I got near the top where the nepotism is thick. Said ‘fuck that’ and bailed out early.
New plan: “Work for myself.” Took me a decade to get here because of little things like health care and capital.
Been on my own for almost 2 years now and it is glorious.
Or: is there a job… where I can just live my life? Like, spend time with friends and doing hobbies and still getting paid?
You mean… you want to live your life and not add value to someone else’s wallet?
I for one love to work for soulless schmucks who profit from my labor and make the tough decisions like not giving raises this year.
“3/5 - Meets Expectations”
Wealthy investor.
That’s just called “being rich.” Work duties do include disenfranchizing the poor, with quarterly reviews by peers in the Illuminati though.
So not quite as chill as you might hope from “having no logical fears or needs”.
Do what you love except hold a camera in your offhand and shout “bro bro honestly like actually what just happened!? Like and subscribe!” Every 30 seconds.
Get independently wealthy. Can you marry someone rich?
Hey wait a minute! I did not said i wanted to meet a woman
So you want to become a librarian?
I want to be a bookstore employee
SSSHHHH not so loud or i’m gonna have to ask you to leave
^Great job. I’ll keep it down.^
You can do both. Climb the
corporatebook ladder!
