i spent 1978 standing ankle deep in cold, bloody water sixty hours a week operating the tongue saw in a slaughter house and being paid $6.00(US) an hour
I can’t speak from experience, but it looks like it would really suck to work at Electronic Arts.
architects are paid pretty poorly considering the education they have to endure. sure, we’re not starving or anything, but it’s disheartening to be the poorest paid member of your family when you’ve spent so much more time and effort than they have. it suck, because we PAY engineers, they work FOR us, but they make more money than we do. the field of architecture really fucked up somewhere along the way. but i’m not bitter or anything.
actually, i get paid pretty well compared to my friends that graduated with me in 2000. i make about 38 grand a year after a job change and a big raise last year. i’m not licensed yet, but at my firm i doubt that would come with too much of a raise. i have friends that get about 34 thousand a year. when i started working in 2000, my salary was 30,000. i had friends making 24,000. and that’s after 5 years in school, plus two or three summers, taking a 20 hour a semester course load. and our 4 hour studio was more like 6 hours, 7 days a week. i remeber all my non-architect friends having like one class on thrusday and free fridays at school, and i don’t think i had a day with less than 6 hours of scheduled class until my last semester. and studio was mainly on your own time.
just last year i eclipsed my girfriend in pay, and she’s one of those destitute teachers…
you can make a fine living as an architect, but you have to own a firm, or be a higher-up in one. and at that point, you’re kind of a half-architect, half-businessman at best, really.
When at sea…you will be working 120 hour work weeks,for considerably less than minimum wage. In addition, you have a multi-billion $ warship in your hands…if you fuck up, you are in a heap of trouble!
I’d have to say archaeologists. Not only do you have to go through years and years of training (usually you need at least a masters degree to be a credible candidate; however, most companies prefer people with PhDs), you only get a starting salary of $16,000 per year (that’s how much I was offered in Missouri/Illinois), with no benefits, and if it rains and you can’t do fieldwork, you don’t get paid. You have to provide your own transportation and work out in the hot sun during the summer. You have to know soil and subsoil types, geology, statistics, topography mapping, plus you have to be able to classify animal bones, ceramics, etc., and if you’re a paleoethnobotanist or ethnobotanist, you have to know what all the plant types are in your region from thousands of years back.