As the title says. My family raised my siblings and I in poverty and every generation of my family prior has lived in relative poverty. No one in my family has ever gotten any degrees, or finished any form of higher education.
I grew up watching my parents struggle, got divorced when I was about 5 years old. Both my mother and father never made very much, though they constantly worked 50+ hours a week trying to keep a roof over our heads.
I ended up homeless at 16, and moved in with a friend near my highschool so I'd be able to finish and graduate. I graduated from high school in 2012, and had no money or savings for college or education. I didn't perform well enough in school for scholarships or grants or anything, so the only option I really had was maybe public school with a Pell grant or FAFSA loan if I was lucky. I was not interested in immediately going to school, so I made the mistake of jumping into the work force instead.
I worked for a few years in factories, doing 12 hour shifts 3/4 days a week making minimum wage and then up to $10/hr at most.
Then I did some random work doing seasonal retail stuff for a few months here and there. After that, I worked as an assistant manager for a diner on one of the bigger US college campuses.
Through all of these jobs, over the course of 8 years, I never made more than $10/hr.
I moved to a different state when I hit 23, worked on a dead end call center job doing 80+ calls per day for $11.75/hr. I was miserable, the job was awful, albeit a bit easier than most sales/call center jobs. But I absolutely hated having to get up and go into the office to drain/exhaust myself talking nonstop on the phones all day.
I ended up losing that job after I got sick with Covid at the beginning of the pandemic. I was in and out of the hospital for a few months and took a long time to recover. I ended up running out of time for my FMLA paperwork to get filed appropriately due to a Derecho hitting our town and knocking out power to the whole town for like 3 weeks. I had to stay in a hotel for about 3 weeks using all of my savings to keep my bearded dragons alive/healthy.
Once I finally recovered from Covid side effects, I got a remote job as a loan documentation processor for a major bank. Contract for 8 months at $16/hr.
I was laid off from that job and then found a job in IT as a data center operator. Jumped up to $20/hr. Worked there for about one month before leaving due to the manager being a sexist/racist scum bag and all of the team being on the verge of retirement. They all treated me like shit and made things up to get me in trouble because they were afraid the company was going to lay them off to prevent giving them their retirement or whatever. Idk.
After that, I landed a corporate IT job for a major gas station chain in the US for $20/hr. Worked with them for 6 months contract and got laid off again.
I was struggling to find a new job from about October to Jan of this year, applying to over 400 jobs and not landing a single interview, automatically getting declined for every single job I applied for.
That was, until I had a random email land in my inbox from some obscure talent acquisition company. They were offering me a remote job with a Fortune 100 company that was Contract to Hire. I thought that it was a scam at first because it was an unsolicited generic email that seemed to have been sent out to a bunch of other people. But I was desperate and really needed to find a job, so I pursued it against my gut instinct.
All the people were clearly Indian, barely spoke English, everything was really difficult to handle due to the language barrier there, but I sent them all the appropriate documents to set me up with an interview.
Within a week, they told me they had an interview set up for me, and the interview was very basic, remote through teams, no crazy questions or anything. 3 days later I was told they liked me a lot and wanted to give me the job, and then asked what I wanted for salary.
The position itself was listed as a Tier III or Tier IIII (which I've never heard of before, never seen that high of a tier, I honestly didn't think I was qualified for it.) But for shits and giggles I asked if they would do $55/hr.
Without a moment of hesitation, they wrote me up an employment agreement/contract with salary listed as $55/hr, with good benefits, health, dental, vision, HSA, life, 401k/IRA, etc etc. I was stunned, because this took me from making roughly $40k/yr to over $100k/yr.
I figured that I was no where near qualified for this position, and would likely only be able to pull off working there til my inexperience started to show, but that's not the case at all and I've now been working for them for a few months.
Nearly 90% of my job is automated and requires me to just press a couple buttons in a few control panels through my web browser, however my typical work load is like 3 to 6 things per week. Each issue takes me maybe 5 – 10 minutes to resolve.
My manager is extremely nice and accommodating, my team is about 3/4 other people and they're all really kind/helpful.
I've never experienced anything like this before, and I'm currently dumbfounded because the amount of work that I'm currently expected to do for $55/hr is quite literally a joke in comparison to the back breaking shit I was forced to do working at factory jobs or all the other jobs I had to do in the past.
It makes me wonder how many other corporate level jobs are out there like mine, where you literally just sit around all day either at home or in an office, and have hardly anything to get done each day. Because if it's normal for jobs like these to exist in corporate environments, it's absolutely ridiculous to me that people working all of these more laborious or customer facing jobs or whatever they would refer to it as, aren't getting paid more.