The Job You Want v. The Job That Pays

Leaning heavily toward the job you want, but I would take this off the con list:

Unless you’re talking about professional training, I know too many people that are in a line of work that has nothing to do with their college major.

You wnet through four years of college that pays $7.50 an hour? I’m really sorry to hear that. Good luck with the job search.

That is what I am curious about. How is a job that pays so poorly earn an “exclusive” standing? How is a job that requires specific training pay so little?

Off the top of my head example: someone could get a degree in recording engineering - which believe-you-me requires some pretty arcane knowledge - but the way the industry works is that you almost always start out emptying trash cans and filling the coffee maker.

Art therapy would be another.

Basically, any job that requires training yet sits on the crappy part of the supply-demand curve, or any job that requires a lot of experience in addition to training. “Exclusive” likely describes the position within the field, not necessarily according to public demand.

I’d venture a guess that it’s a newspaper reporter at a small daily. If it’s a weekly, it’d be even less.

I noticed that your location says Nashville, if this is still accurate, then I suspect that the company you are talking about is located by the airport and sells computers over the phone. And rhymes with ‘hell’.

Well, I worked there for 6 months out of college, while looking for my current position as a database developer. “Hell” would be a more accurate spelling of this place. No words exist for how much I hated working there. Not to say that some people didn’t end up liking it, but most people don’t. I say this based on the probably 90 + % turnover rate.

If you do decide to get a job that pays instead of the job you want, I would not pick a job there.

Unless I am wrong about which company.

Let me know if you want more details about my experience at Hell

This is a no-brainer: take the job you want. 30K isn’t enough to sacrifice your happiness.

sigh I wasn’t in your exact situation but I turned down many opportunities to travel in order to “save” money for graduate school or not rack up any credit card debt.

Here’s what I learned:

when you have the time, energy, youth and lack of significant responsibility to do cool stuff, you lack the means

when you make all the money you need, you’re tied down, go to bed by 9 and have no freaking time (okay, I go to bed by 9 because I wake up at 5 a.m. to do my hamster ellipticalling) :).

I now have a high-paying job, in no small part to the choices I made, but I wish I’d just put a grand on my credit card and gone to visit my friend in Japan when she lived out there and I could have just seen Tokyo with free housing. When my sister was in the same boat, I told her to just go-you can make the money up down the line.

I’ve decided sometimes it’s worth it to take the risk when you are young. First, you can try it for a year and see how it’s going. You may realise it’s not your dream situation to live on 15K and it takes the fun out of the job. But at least you’ll know. Second, if this chick you want to marry is the type of chick that will stick with you in the long run, she’ll downsize her jewellry demands altogether or assume you’ll make it up in the long-run when you’re more stable. I mean, I don’t want to marry some shmuck that’s just going to mooch off of me either but I would never throw a fit about a ring with a poor Ph.d student that’s going to have a good job and be a stable partner in the long run. Also, I’m not too attached to diamonds but that’s just my personal quirk (I am however, a gold whore but a lot of Indian women are).

I didn’t go to college until I was 26 (still in right now) because I jumped right into the 30k a year job. Seemed a lot of money at the time, but quickly realized it wasn’t much at all. Working a job you don’t like wears down your soul, it sucks the life and adventure right out of you. After realizing that such jobs tend to hire anybody, don’t require much “skill” and the like, I decided that there is not much security in those kinds of jobs, and definately not much satisfaction.

My co-workers were mind-numb from tedium, angry and disillusioned with their lives so far, and many of them felt they had wasted 20 years at a place they hated with ever fiber of their being. There were benifits, but not much in the way of security. Getting a job that you only slightly like, but has some sort of required skills give you more security, but not a whole lot. Though I realize that even guys with fancy degrees and years of experience lose their job due to lay-offs and downsizing, it is much easier for them to find a job (Assuming they are young and aren’t tied down with family- always jobs somewhere else in the country).

Now, there are many things I WANT to do, but I met my desires halfway. Find a job I can enjoy but also that makes a decent amount of money. I tried the money route, went to school to be a Pharmacist, but after working in a pharmacy for a year, I switched majors. Too stressful, no amount of money was worth it. I switched my major so that I could start an online business and have the skills to build my own website and design my own databases. I also might jump into the work-force, because I find database administrating to be pretty interesting and challenging.

Still in school, but thats the reasoning behind my choices. Spending 8+ years outside of school doing the 30k grind was not fun, and I would much rather do something I enjoy and have less money.

I had the experience of taking a promotion to an area in my department that I knew absolutely nothing about and cared about even less. Going to work every day not caring about what you do is a bummer. Finally I took a lateral to my present job and I cannot imagine myself doing anything else. My advice is to if you think you will detest a job, don’t take it. But another thing to consider is that your job is only part of the day. What really matters is your family life, so if the job you hate would jeopardize that then by all means pass on it.

No question at all: go for the job you want. You can always get some crap job that pays $30k/year down the road if things don’t work out, but if you never even take a shot at doing something you love, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

You only get one life to live, and you don’t want to spend it bored and bitter and full of regret.

Another vote for the job you want.

This is something you are young enough to chase, and even if a year from now you realize that this isn’t your dream, or the financial struggle isn’t worth it, at least you will have tried.

For one $30,000 isn’t that much money, even for a sales job.

And as Manda Jo said : Once you get used to a 30k/year, it’s damn near impossible to live on 15K.

Can you guarantee that you’ll have another chance to try at your dream job? Can you guarantee that once you’ve settled into that life that you’d even have the guts to try again.

So many people regret not taking chances - is it worth it for you to go for a better paying job now to spend the rest of your life in a career path which you don’t really like wondering “what if?”.

As for the girl, if she really loves you she can handle not getting her a rock. You could get her the $60 special from Zales with the tiniest speck of diamond dust and to a woman who loves you it would mean as much as a rock the size of the Hope Diamond.

If the diamond is more important than the sentiment behind it, then you need to question her feelings for you.

I thought of that, too, because my first job after college was as a reporter at a weekly. Pay was crap but it was a great experience. The unhappiest I’ve ever been at a job was in the soulsucking corporate position where I made the most.

In other words, take the job you want.

Sounds like you’re young. If it’s really meant to be with this girl, she’ll pack up her bags, move with you and get a job where you’re going.

If you’re sticking around just because you think you have to to make it work with her, it won’t, and you’ll regret not taking the JYW.

I’ve had to decided twice to turn down jobs. Once I was being offered $40,000 right out of grad school for the chance at more grad school.

Once, I turned down two jobs while unemployed, with a mortgage and wife, just because we wanted to stay in Baltimore.

Both time I just did what I wanted to do, and didn’t take the safer route.

$30,000 isn’t much money, and that doesn’t sound like a job you’re really going to go somewhere with.

Chase after the job you want. Even if the odds are that you may crash and burn financially from it, you can go to your grace knowing you gave it a shot.
You don’t want to end up being married with kids at a job you don’t like, have a bad day, and start resenting your family for an opportunity you passed up on once upon a time. Bad for you, bad for them.

When I first met my future wife she was fresh out of college with a degree in “costume design”. Something she loved doing. She took a job that paid “0$” at a diner theatre as an apprentice. Her boss quit soon afterwards (cause she couldn’t handle the stress) and my wife accepted the job as the head of the costume department. Sounds great huh? Well, for a salary of $20K they worked her 6 days a week, 13+ hours a day. She loved it at first but it just drove her into the ground after a few months. She would come home at night and just cry.
I told her to quit and we’d be happier moving north and getting new jobs.
She started doing temp work for a big fortune 500 company 5 years ago at $13 an hour. They hired her on and she worked her way up the corporate ladder and now makes $60K/year working 40 hours a week with vacation, insurance, and an annual bonus around $6,000 as a corporate process developer.
This fall she’s going to make halloween costumes for our son and a neigbor girl across the street.
She’ll admit she’s happier now but never regrets giving the “dream costume job” a shot. How else would she know that it sucked.

$30,000 a year isn’t enough to choose a job that bores you unless you don’t have other options.

I wouldn’t be able to make it on that salary, but in my single life I would have gone for it.

I meant the salary of the JYW, since I was unclear.

Since it seems that no one agrees with my position, let me provide an example. I have a garden. I have lots of stuff starting to grow. I have peas so sweet they taste like candy. I could grab a handful now and have a great snack. Or if I wait until everything is ripe I can have bushels of delicious veggies, eat those peas until I’m sick and still have enough to share with my friends and family.

You could take the job you want now that pays like ass but you enjoy, much like I could go and eat that handful of peas, but by putting in your time at the good paying, boring job (or by waiting until everything is ready to be harvested) you can still have your dream job (and your delicious peas). Patience is a virtue.

In short; think about the grasshopper & the ant parable.

Bunch of damned hippies. Get a real job! Cut your hair! And keep of my lawn! (And I’m only 28!)

Garden Analogies … hmmm…

I see this more like :

“Job that pays” = buying a potted plant that may not be for the correct climate you are living in to place in the garden

“Dream Job” = a bag seed for the soil of your climate

By the time the potted plant withers and has sucked as much as it can from the soil, it is far too late to plant any seeds, so you’ll never know if they could grow.

Except that’s not actually true. Assuming that the dream job is not a dream job in and of itself (who dreams of poverty?), but an entry level position in his dream field, then he should take it and get started on that dream career now.

It will never again be as easy for him to live on $15K as it is right now. And it’s not as though $30K is such a kingly salary that he can switch careers at 35 (with a family to take care of, most likely) with sufficient savings to start over.