I’m a dermatological medical assistant. It’s not my dream job- I love English and grammar- but it a)pays the bills and affords me health insurance and a retirement plan and b)is necessary, here in the skin cancer capital of the US, so jobs are plentiful and c)allows me to hang out with doctors all day, and I usually get along very well with them not to mention learn a lot from them. I could do better and LOVE what I do, but I could also do a lot worse.
Corporate Lawyer. Most of my clients belong to the “entertainment industry”: publishing; tv, movies and publicity producers, news agencies, etc.
While I don’t earn the ton of money I deserve I love my job, I love helping the deal get off and I enjoy it much more than litigation (I formerly did this) or tax lawyering as Rand Rover.
Of course Tv, movies, publishing, internet will all be one thing in a near future so, I think, I have a niche with a future.
When I was a teenager, my plan was to become a corporate lawyer, and after a few multi-million dollar deals, retire rich at 28 or so.
I’m an electromechanical designer for an aerospace defense manufacturer. I work on any space/satellite related project that comes through. All things mechanical and electronic fascinate me so there isn’t a more perfect fit to indulge that and get paid for it than my current job. As a bonus, I have access to a fully equipped machine shop, plating shop, paint shop and environmental lab.
Oh, Alice, money would just have spoiled you. 
I’m a Civil Engineer. I’ve been in the business for 21 years, and have owned my own (one-person) company for the last 9 years. I thoroughly enjoy my work, which is concentrated in hydrology and hydraulics (rainfall/runoff), including things like flood studies, bridge hydraulics and dam design. It’s a fascinating field, and I love being my own boss. I like subconsulting with all the other engineers in town 'cause I can work with everyone without actually having to *work *with them, if you know what I mean.
It’s a decent living but I don’t think anyone goes into this kind of engineering to become rich. I’m in it for the satisfaction that comes with improving the quality of life for others, and because I’m entertaining and challenging myself at the same time.
Downsides are expensive health insurance and people who don’t pay their bills on time. Seems like they’ll pay their lawyer and their doctor, but not their engineer. :mad:
Stationary Engineer (right now I work at keeping all the equipment running at a highrise office building)
I like the job because it is never the same from day to day. some days it is same old same old. But I can be doing a lot of electrical work at one time, then keying a building, plumming work, or HVAC. I have rebuilt a lot of equipment over the 40 years. There is nothing like putting in $20,000 worth of parts in a piece of equipment and starting it for the first time. Or seeing a piece of equipment that you have rebuilt run great that you have rebuilt. And oh yes there have been some that I was not pleased with afterwards.
The building I am in now was a pigs sty when I first started. We have cleaned it a lot and the systems now work fairly well. Still some work to go.
And I like trouble shooting. Finding out what went wrong when others could not. Or a better way of doing something.
The best part of my job is I have been at it since 1970 and I am still learning. The only engineer who knows everything is useless, dead, or retired. My job always has some challange.
I’m an academic advisor at a university.
It’s rewarding because I get to work with students to figure out how they can do what they want to do in life and how they can overcome obstacles they encounter. It’s immensely gratifying to hear someone say “You helped me graduate.” I’m paid well enough, although I’ll never be rich, and I could take a class per semesters for free if I wanted to. Students can be frustrating and sometimes they face absolutely heartbreaking situations, but overall the job is great.
I’m news editor at a small daily newspaper, which puts me as a lieutenant to the managing editor. The titles sound good, but our jobs are much more involved than that. In addition to some editing of stories from our two reporters, I build pages every day, write a weekly column, write editorials every other day, take my own photos, cover the city hall beat, the business beat, deal with letters to the editor, work on special sections, do book reviews, and cover for anyone on vacation.
It’s a horrible consumer of time: I’m there some mornings at 5:30 and sometimes have to cover nighttime events as well. Today, a Sunday, I had to work in the morning covering a U.S. senator’s visit to our town for a presentation. But by doing so, I got 15 minutes worth of one-on-one interview, which helps us out tremendously.
Yes, it’s rewarding. I have been able to interview musicians like B.B. King and Leo Kottke, comic book artist Neal Adams, and Tom Doherty, of Tor Books, not to mention four-star generals, governors and senators of this and adjacent states, and hundreds of neighbors with fascinating stories. Some of the very best stories have been from World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War vets.
As an added bonus, I’ve been able to cover science fiction conventions as press — that is, for free. I’ve been able to talk with Larry Niven, Ursula K. LeGuin, Dean Ing, Jack Chalker, Steve Perry, Harry Turtledove, Ken Scholes (watch this guy!) and a host of others.
A couple of weeks ago, I was able to take a spin in a $3 million simulator for the A-10 at a National Guard base that was secret enough that I wasn’t allowed to take photos of it.
I have a huge amount of freedom on feature stories, I get to remain present during executive sessions of government agencies, thanks to Oregon law, and find out about many projects before they happen. As an editorialist, I can sometimes influence public opinion on local issues.
And I’ve been lucky enough to win some statewide awards for my editorials, features and business writing.
Yes, it’s rewarding. The tradeoff is days that sometimes run to 15 hours, and sitting through hours of boring meetings to boil it down into a half-dozen bullet points for a summary story the next day.
I’m a Naval Flight Officer, which is a hard job to describe, so I won’t get into it. I love and hate a few things about it. Love that it’s an extremely hard and challenging program to get into; love the prestige of being a naval officer and aviator; love that I’ve gotten to see the world and do so many different types of jobs; love that, after 15 years, I get paid pretty well to do what I do.
On the other hand, we joke around a lot that NFO means ‘No Future Outside,’ which is to say that pilots traditionally go on to do pilot jobs once they get out, and 'FO’s go on to do… whatever. We have no real applicable, marketable skills in the civilian world, other than a knowledge of the industry, leadership experience, and a nice security clearance. While this isn’t a big deal in the beginning, at my point in the game, it starts looming large. Also hate, in general, the Navy, which is sort of like an abusive father. You frequently get the snot beat out of you, but you can’t quite get up the gumption to hit back or leave. Not until you pass the 20-year mark, anyway.
Most of all, I hate what it puts my family through. My wife has had to put her career on hold, take crappy jobs with hellish commutes, and not know from one month to the next where we’ll be living or what I’ll be doing for the next several years. She probably hates the Navy more than I, and I often wind up in the crosshairs. I can’t wait to retire.
Architect
Yes I find it very rewarding. I love that I can create something where there was nothing, or re-create something out of an existing building. My current project is trying to nestle something into a natural environment and I know we can pull it off and make it seem like it belongs there. I love the process itself, taking a germ of an idea and making it into a reality–but the best part is that I do so little of the actual work. In many ways I see my job as similar to that of a director of a movie. I direct others to create the spaces and the architecture that I have in my head, but I don’t pick up the hammer to do it, or lay the bricks, etc. But I get the credit as it is ‘my idea’ that you see when it is finished. Having the ability to envision something and convince someone else to pay for it is pretty heady stuff.
I also enjoy that I can deal with such a wide range of society everyday. In the morning I might be in the trenches with some rebar guy explaining to me why the column can’t go where I want it to go, or at the job site explaining to the building official why this is the right solution, or at a meeting with the client and the banker trying to get approval of the pay for the contractor. Never a dull moment.
I also enjoy knowing that the final users of my works actually use and enjoy them. I often go to my job sites after they are opened and mingle with the crowds to hear what they have to say. Most of the time I enjoy the comments I hear, and occasionally I hear negative things. Luckily Architects tend to have strong egos and are use to criticism, so generally it doesn’t bug me. I know many Architects though who do NOT enjoy their work, why I don’t know. For me though there is little else I can imagine doing. I figured out I wanted to be an Architect at age 8, playing with Lincoln Blocks. It is who I am and I find it very rewarding.
I’m an actuary. Much of my work is intellectually stimulating. However, as with any other job, some of the work is routine and rather dull.
As a bonus, it is very well paid.
You used to do tax?
I am a stockbroker.
I hate the company I work for and can’t wait to quit.
Ugh, I made a very bad decision.
I’m the VP of a small manufacturing company.
It’s not very rewarding. I guess the pluses are providing some jobs in this dismal county, and I still handle the in-house sales which I usually enjoy.
I spend a lot of my day on the phone. I hate talking on the phone, so it’s weird, but I’m good at it. On Friday, I got a call from a company wanting so much of our product we’d have to expand to 10 times our current output. That was a bit surreal.
Not my dream job. Not my dream life for certain. But I’ve lost the will to change.
I’m the general manager of a small exterior express carwash company based in Cincinnati, with two locations.
I do payroll, bank deposits, manage labor, chemical costs, fix anything that breaks (plumbing, electrical, hydraulic motors/leaks, air lines, pump issues, etc, etc, et al) and just about anything else under the Sun.
My boss is a millionaire many times over, from an extremely wealthy family, and he’s kind of tough to work for. He likes to sit in his chalet office, observing the operation of his businesses via the internet cameras, and makes knee-jerk decisions based on what he thinks is going on at any given time. He rarely visits the locations, and has very little idea of the day-to-day operation of the business.
In short, as a holder of a BA in English, I’m still hoping to write the Great American Novel at some point, and I generally dislike my job, although it is challenging. It just isn’t what I feel like I was meant to do, but I do it for the money. I don’t want to teach.
My salary is allright, just shy of 60k a year (the wife makes about 30k, so we’re not jonesing for food or anything), but I am required to work 50-55 hours a week, pretty much every Saturday (our busiest day), every other Sunday, I have to cold call other local businesses to attempt to drum up volume in this shitty economy that is hurting our volume…and in conjunction with all that, I have a home and a wife and three kids to try to keep up with.
Being beholden to the weather is another big issue. We don’t get a lot of pretty days in the Ohio River Valley.
All in all…it’s a job.
Edit: I also only get 12.5 vacation days a year, and the owner generally frowns on me taking more than a few days off in succession. That part really sucks. Not to toot my own horn, but I have become so indispensible to the operation of the business that I can’t ever get away from it. From constant maintenance issues, hourly updates on my phone, my employees calling me multiple times a day…I just can’t ever feel like I can escape it. It hangs over me always, like a nebulous cloud. That sucks too.
I’m an aircraft pilot working for a private company on contract to Australian Customs. We patrol the ocean on the lookout for illegal fishing, illegal immigrants, first port yachts and various other things.
The big picture stuff can be rewarding but I mainly do it because I like the sensation of flying, and I like that we get to fly at relatively low level (200 feet). I also get a lot of satisfaction from successfully managing the flight from start to finish. Aside from that, it pays well enough that my wife can be a stay at home mum and we can put the kids in daycare a couple of days a week. The roster is a big compromise for us, it has me away for 16 days and then home for 12. The 12 days at home are consecutive days off and that’s nice, but I miss the family while I’m away.
1st job: Security guard supervisor at a mall, because it pays the bills and it is the first job I found out of college.
2nd job: Residential counselor working with medium-risk juvenile offenders in a residential facility, because I like to think I can make a good enough impression to hopefully make them grow up right and get out of a life of crime.
Might you PM me? I’m currently looking for work and this sounds interesting…
PM sent. 
I’m a claims adjuster. Claims adjusting is what you do when you went to college and got an education but didn’t learn a skill.
I started out handling auto accidents and homeowners claims. Now I handle complex construction defect cases like when a developer finds out that a specific type of window installed 800 homes leaks or when some one installs ‘Chinese drywall’ in a 30 story sea front condo.
Lots of complex issues, lots of conflict lots of pressure. Not a lot of intrinsic satisfaction. But the pay is good and benifits are good.