Anything that involves computers or sitting down all day. No thanks.
Bartender. Drunk people kinda suck when you’re sober.
Cybersecurity. Have been in it since before it was a thing (25+ years!) Infinite respect for the many good people and defenders who keep our world running, but I’m done and getting out.
Astronaut
I’d’ve never thought of this one, but I completely agree. It sounds great in theory and absolutely terrifying in practice.
Along the same lines, I’d also rule out deep ocean explorer or even cave diver. Anything where calling for help is, at best, a question mark.
Programmer. I just fucking hate writing code. Also working with stupid frameworks and having to keep up with whatever new bullshit framework or feature people want implemented would drive me insane. I would crash out if asked to implement MCP into our app.
Web deving sucks ass, i agree
But general programming moves slower
I relate heavily to this. Feels like there’s no time for me to catch up with modern programming
I was a web developer for a few years, WordPress killed the joy I had. Every update could break something because the client wanted a website, but also wanted to use WordPress, so we had to customize the hell out of each install.
I burned out about 5 years ago, and I haven’t even been able to work on my side projects.
I pretty much lived your comment. Working retail now, probably wouldn’t go back…
If you’re good at scripting you might be able to find a spot automating back end stuff for a sysadmin/infrastructure team. Of course, that would be in a sane job market.
I started in IT support with a general tech AA degree (with some extra programming background from a comp sci BS I dropped out of when I realized I could never code 8 hours a day for a living) and started automating the grunt work of tech support and basic access management. Caught the eye of the sysadmin/infra team and they snatched me up. I’ve been learning project management, infra stuff, and deep sysadmin stuff, but I mostly automate everything I possibly can surrounding our duties. Most systems and software have pretty static apis/sdks for automating with them, so I don’t need to stay current with whatever language or fad practice.
Recent projects have been around cleaning up shit in our Active Directory. Easy wins like deleting security groups with no members. Automating checks like once a month checking for any emtpy that haven’t changed in two weeks. Recently got rid of our on-prem exchange email servers, so I whipped up a script to take contact objects from AD, delete any non-functional ones (typo’d domains, domains that were internal to us so there was no need for a contact object), and then to recreate the valid ones in Exchange Online, and finally delete the originals from AD.
It’s not super difficult scripting-wise. And a lot of greybeards could learn scripting, but a lot are content to let new blood do it, which opens opportunities.
Thats kind of what I am doing at the moment and i enjoy writing those scripts but i get so nervous running them. Even though I’m really confident they won’t break something i still feel I’m unlucky enough for the script to accidentally delete our prod dB.
Lol, same. I spend more time writing guard rails, setting up verbose debugging output/logs, figuring out how I can test without blowing up shit, backing up data before, backing up what it’s going to do, and then trying to set up automated confirmation of success or failure than I do coding the purely functional parts.
I’ve run the “person has quit, yeet their access” script I made on people days early more than I should admit. Had to put in a lot of extra checks on that.
If you’re at a place still using VMWare, a tip: if you’re trying to automate shutting down all the VMs for some hardware moves (get list of VMs, send Guest OS shutdown command, wait a certain amount of time, if VM still showing online force shutoff), VSphere will return the VM management devices/servers/whatever they’re called (what vSphere runs on) in the list of VMs, and it will accept Guest OS shutdown commands sent to the thing hosting VM management/vSphere. Halfway through shutting it all down for a move I started getting “cannot reach VSphere” errors. Added an extra hour or two to that weekend project as we had to get into things through some other back end shanigans to finish shutdowns manually.
100% agreed. I don’t a lot of coding as part of my job, and that is enjoyable because I don’t have to worry about whatever latest programming paradigm “everyone” uses.
My code is meant to just deal with minutia in the background and never be interacted with, and it’s rarely even seen by others than myself. Which is probably good, because my language of choice is perl.
YouTuber/tiktoker/etc…
I would love to be a youtuber but i suppose it can all go away just like that. I would struggle to stick to just one area for content, but j suppose the audience chooses thst bit for you based on what’s successful or not
Video editing is surprisingly fun, but i think tiktok ruins the fun - don’t you have to do it in a tiny little phone screen? It’s not right.
Depending on content and delivery, it could be very rewarding, deep and prosocial! I mean, yeah, if you’re flossing on TikTok past the age of 12, you need to reconsider your whole ideology and life choices, but there’s room to do great things as a communicator.
Lawyer
Game dev
Politician, boss or Queen, I am useless in politics. Anything like that where you have to navigate people trying to get your job, backbiting, any sort of office politics I cannot deal with at all, certainly could not handle it AS a job, no way. I just crumble. I need to be able to just do my job and understand everyone wants everyone to succeed where I work.
On the other hand, in jobs that objectively suck but are satisfying to me, I have enjoyed restaurant work and raising children. If I won the lottery and didn’t need to succeed I would open a bar; if my husband died I’d take in foster kids.
That’s awesome. Not everyone can say that they enjoyed raising kids
Sports athlete
Movie, television, or stage actor
News anchor
Anyone famous for sure. Actor, musician, athlete, etc. all sound great until you remember that fame is a guaranteed route to no privacy, ever, for basically any reason.
No thanks, I’ll pass.
It’s not actually that part that I don’t think I would not enjoy.
I don’t think I’d enjoy the actual work for these careers.
Hooker
I think people only regard it as good at the “escort” job title. I’m lead to believe thst the distinguishing trait of an escort is getting to choose whether they, well, escort a client or not.
Politician
This. I think I’d be a great president for example. But I’d never be able to get near it due to the politics needed. Carefully crafting a public image. Tailoring all the minutia down to even specific word choices and how you dress. I’d absolutely tell someone like an anti-vaxxer they’re a fucking idiot.
I would vote for you. The world needs more of this.
