It's kind of awkward for me making this post given where I am now, but I feel like I should share my perspective. My workforce journey started with me dropping out of college and working at a pipeyard through a temp agency at 19. It was dangerous, back-breaking labor in the sun from 5am-5pm 5 days a week. I got paid $10/hr. From there I got into food service, delivery driving, and finally got my first office job as a debt collector all while teaching myself to code. After some career pivoting, failing upwards, and stretching of my resume I eventually wound up in tech support which led me to landing my first dev job.
All that to say that I feel like I've taken a whirlwind tour of our shitty labor economy to wind up here and I've never been so conflicted. I've done manual labor, emotional labor, tedious menial labor, and technical labor. Usually several at once. I've experienced the shift in how people are paid and treated based on how they survive, sometimes within the same company.
I know that if had followed conventional wisdom and got a degree, Worked Hard™, and stayed loyal to a single employer, I'd be so much worse off. Very rarely did my experience carry over between jobs. Yet it only ever got easier. Every single subsequent job led to better wages, better working conditions, and above all less scrutiny. The level of micromanagement and the wide array of super specific KPIs and metrics that must be met just disappear. And suddenly I'm just allowed to work and live? I benefited from it but it still pisses me the fuck off.
Not everyone has the opportunity to do what I did. But it shouldn't matter. There's no reason a pipeyard worker can't be or doesn't deserve to be paid enough to thrive. No reason we can't all be treated like a human and an asset. The entire mentality of how people are compensated in the US is completely upside down, and it's just that much more real to me now.
- Edited for typos