What about spelling errors? :::d&r:::
as a possilbly future…Architect should be up there. Minimum 5 years higher ed, usually more. Years of internship, plus a series of exams for licensure.
In my experience, pharmacists are vastly overpaid due to a shortage of supply.
Count me as one of those wonderers.
The previous two falls, I worked 100 hour weeks for 9 out of the 10 weeks of the quarter. I make 21K a year.
Jeez–now that I look at those numbers, I wonder what the hell I ever got a Ph.D. for.
How about president of the United States?
I think relatively it’s pretty high up there for complexity & difficulty/pay ratio.
Yeah, but the President also gets free room, board, and travel. And a crapload of vacation time!
I think I’d probably say teacher. Either that or nurse’s aid/orderly (though I’m not sure how much an RN would make). Also I have this cousin who works as a personal assistant for old people, and I think she only makes 20k or so a year, not much for that type of work.
Heck, you forgot: cooking nearly all meals, and cleaning the house. And, everyone else’s “holidays” (like Thanksgiving and Christmas) are “Extra Work Days” for us because the meals are bigger and more complex, there are more people to clean up after, etc. etc.
Another drawback: putting up with jerkwads who look down on you because you don’t have a “real job”.
Well I’m in Illinois. I don’t know how different the areas are. I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard that pharmacy degrees are among the highest paying with the average atarting salary around $60,00-$70,000.
I’m not sure of the validity of it, but I heard a recent anecdote that commercial airline pilots make almost comically low salaries - something like a starting salary of $19,000. The anecdote then posited that the “average” 20-year veteran pilot w/ a family still qualifies for welfare/food stamps. Then, remember that these guys continually agree to salary freezes, slashes in benefits, and other cuts because of their ailing, mismanaged industry.
That’s Michael Moore, in Stupid White Men. And before the inevitable criticism, he relates it anecdotally. But it may not be far off the mark - the US DoT gives 1994 figures for starting salaries as low as $13k. (The food stamps comment is an exaggeration - he relates one single case where a pilot with four kids qualified for them, and there’s no suggestion he was a senior employee.)
I heard that the grad students at my school went on strike a few years back because the school was tryign to explain to them that they could live on 73 dollars a month of discretionary income. Right.
Pharmisists have it easy. Granted I equate what most people consider to be “terrible hours” with ideal working conditions. Wait, you want to pay me more to work from midnight to eight am, where do I sign up?
Also, I’ve grown up around engineers and scienists. They work two to three hours a day more in the office than teachers do, and then bring home hours of work to do at night. Not to say that being a teacher isn’t hard, but they aren’t exactly putting in more hours than the rest of us. Now the teachers at my parochial school, they were getting screwed. They made 13K a year in the mid to late 1990s.
IMHO, some of the people who have the most dangerous work for the least respect are photographers that work as correspondents out in the field. The ones in Iraq and Sudan and lots of other places like that were life is none to stable. I saw a thing about them on TV last year. They get paid poorly and shot at on a regular basis for little respect and an unstable supply of work.
Politician.
Typically decent pay and very good pension/retirement benefits.
On the down side:
Extremely long hours, I’ve seen weekly diaries that had politicians on the go for 80 hours or more. When parliament is in session, debate can run to 3 or 4 in the morning (in some jurisdictions, others restrict hours). When parliament is not sitting, you have to tend to your electorate, coupled with ministerial or portfolio demands.
Lack of privacy. Your every foible and private vice becomes a public matter. Your off-the-cuff comments are taken out of context; your personal opinions on non-political topics are disseminated and criticised.
Heavy travel schedule, taking you away from home and family for most of the year.
Stress. Imagine working every day in a heavily antagonistic environment, characterised by partisan battles, jostling for power amid lies, spin and distortions (okay, much like any office environment then. ;))
The pay is quite good, but for many politicians it’s far less than what they might to earn in the private sector. Experienced white collar professionals who go into politics usually take a pay cut.
Lack of job security. Every day there’s a chance of losing your position for a matter which wouldn’t affect many occupations (e.g. an extra-marital affair or a driving offence). Every 4-5 years you are put to the public vote where you’ll have to sell yourself to an electorate–and the best man or woman does not always win.
Personally, I wouldn’t do it for the world. (Which is why I have healthy respect for politicians, the majority of whom I believe are trying to do something good for their community (but yes, a lot of them are rubbish)).
On the plus side, there’s a power thing.
I came in here to say that, so I’ll toss some statistics into the mix. This site gives a lot of information about average household income for farmers in the United States. Having read it, it does support that most farmers go to outside sources for income, so that they can support their “lifestyle decision” of farming.
The second graph on the page shows that rural residential and intermediate farms both bring in less than $20,000 worth of farm-derived income per year, with rural residential farms having negative income. The only types of farm households bringing in more than $20,000 per year are commercial farm households, who in 2004, earned an average of $160,000/year, with just over $120,000 of that from farming. (I think it says somewhere that commercial farms make 72% of total agricultural income.)
Dairy farmers, on average, make less than any other type of farmer listed on the USDA’s page. 59% of $52,582 is $31,023.38. I think farming, with its lifetime commitment and requirement for extremely varied experiences, should definitely be on the list.
Lifestyle-farming is kind of like being a stay-at-home, except your babies are hairier and you get paid more. Also, no diapers, but pitchforks. :eek: 
What you have to do to maintain medical licensure varies by state, but usually involves some degree of continuing medical education. You do, however, have to take occasional exams to maintain board certification in your specialty.
Residents make about $40,000/year in the US. (That’s true no matter where you are; a resident in Manhattan or the Bay Area might make $1000 more than one at East Buttcrack Regional Hospital.) They work about 80 very stressful hours a week a lot of months, but not every month. (Many used to work more than that, but 80 is now a fairly strictly enforced upper limit.) I’d say we’re up there on the demanding/complex/underpaid hierarchy, but not at the top.
One way to turn this into numbers might be expected cost of education vs. expected salery once you are established (i.e., not grad students or residents–in fact, both are still be putting money into the “cost of education” pile if they are accumulating debt just to eat–which many grad students are)
One canidate I would mention would be veternarians. If you don’t have a wealthy sponsor, you will easily graduate with a six-figure debt load, and it’s another year/20K worthof debt to specialize at all. Vets start between 40-50K a year, and from what I can see they more or less stay within 10K of that range forever unless they own their own practice–and then if their income goes up, it’s from their second job as a small business owner! 40K isn’t bad, of course, but subtract 10K a year for loan repayment for the first 20 years, and it’s not a luxurious lifestyle.
This is clear from your coding, which you’ve forgotten post-partum as well as your typing skills which would pick up some if you stopped hunting and pecking with your boobs and used your hands like the rest of us.
I swear, I love ya. 
( and, vigorously agree with everything you posted. )
I think that trying to compare “teachers” to “scientists” is pointless: there is way too much variation within both fields. I know teachers who show up 30 seconds before the start of first period and pull out 30 seconds after the last bell has rung: but I also know “scientists” who are firmly entrenched in a university who have balenced things so that they are all but carried about the building on a litter born by a half-deozen sweaty grad students. And I know both teachers and scientists who work 80 weeks year in and year out.
As an English teacher, it pains me to admit this, but another underappriciated positon is that of coach. Yeah, coaches often blow off the classes they teach–which sucks, and is wrong, and shows a systemic problem–but they blow off their classes becuase they are on campus at 7 in the morning and leave between 7 and ten each night, not to go home but to drive half a dozen altheletes who have no car home first. Then they are up at the school for practice each saturday, and they come early and stay late to view the tapes of games and practices. THEN they have to stay up for games, which can be hours away and last until 11 and aren’t really finished until midnight. And THEN there is the time spent smoozing local businesses and organizations in order to raise funds. It’s a hard life.
And my father-in-law wonders why I’m not jumping to take a weekend shift. It’s because I’d probably spend more in gas than I’d make at the job. Not worth it.
Robin
This site, while self-interested quotes a news piece indentifying the “most underpaid workers” as:
Preschool teachers ($21,907): Day-care workers ($19,900) are notoriously underpaid, but the real dishonor is paid to the preschool teachers who lead our 3- and 4-year-olds in ABCs and 1-2-3s in our vast dual-income absence. Birth to age 5 are critical years in the development of a child’s personality and intelligence, yet we pay these people little more than we fork out for a babysitter on a Saturday night.
Junior Naval Nuclear Propulsion operators. They drive and operate nuclear reactors whilst getting paid appriximately US$34,000.00 at the most junior level. After some years, their pay becomes somewhat better, but it’s never all that much.
Flight Instructor? No one’s mentioned this one yet. After paying for Private, Instrument, Commercial, Multi-Engine, Flight Instructor, Flight-Instructor-Instrument, Multi-Engine Instructor and all the Ground Schools, Examinations, and equipment; Most have invested something on a par with a college degree. All to work for a whopping $14K per year (worse in a bad year). I realize it’s a stepping-stone for most, but it seems underpaid considering its importance.