I work in public interest, so I’m already close enough to doing my dream job for pennies that I know I’d stick with it. 
Id subcontract the janitorial job and do the dream career pro bono.
I did some drudgey jobs right after college (security guard, groundskeeper, painter) when I had no idea what I wanted to do with my degree. If I’d been making $750K/year, I could have done them for a lot longer than I did.
Then retire after 4-5 years, and do whatever the hell I pleased for the rest of my life. 
“Yo, kayaker, I’ve never seen anyone so happy to swing a mop!”
“Well, I’m making $750,000 per annum.”
“Ummmm what’s a peranum?”
Can’t think of a job I’d want to do long-term for min wage. Many people will want to retire someday, and some people will have to retire someday for health reasons, whether it’s mobility problems or cognitive decline. That takes a pile of cash, with the amount depending on whether “retirement” means a decade or two of globetrotting, or a couple of years of skilled nursing. Minimum wage ain’t gonna get a person there.
In addition to retiring comfortably someday, I’d like to live comfortably along the way. Minimum wage ain’t gonna cut it there, either.
On top of all that, I can’t think of a “Dream Job” I’d truly enjoy working at for several decades, regardless of pay. So janitor it is. $750K a year, after taxes, means about $412K per year in take-home. I could do a janitor’s job for 5-10 years, accumulating a nest egg and living well along the way. In ten years, living well on $62K per year and investing $350K, I’d have a nest egg with a basis of $3.5M which, properly invested, would probably have grown to $5M, at which point it’s large enough to safely live off of until the end of my life.
2 years as a janitor at $750k and then I would retire based on my existing assets and age. I would need a good tax lawyer to protect as much of that windfall as possible. But I could do it. Maybe try to do a third year, that would clearly be enough in my situation.
One thing about the Army the recruiters don’t tell you is how much of your time is spent cleaning. I’ve already done the job for much lower pay and I’m a master with a floor buffer. I’ll be the janitor.
I’d do the janitor job for $750k a year, then hire someone at minimum wage to do it, call myself a manager (or small business owner), demand a raise, collect my government SBO grants, then retire after a year or two.
Nothing wrong with being a janitor. Someone has to clean. For $750,000 I’d work two jobs as a janitor and retire early and ludicrously rich.
I would work no job for minimum wage, I couldn’t afford it.
One of my brother’s best friends is a janitor. He’s got a bachelor’s degree and everything (I think something in the arts). He had worked summers with the school district maintenance crew while in high school, went to college and kept doing maintenance, and when he graduated he found the janitor job to be suitable for him so he stuck with it. He’s a well-spoken, well-read and ridiculously smart guy who happens to have to clean bathrooms for a living. Of course by now after 20+ years he is Building Manager or something and quite high up the food chain. He’ll be retiring in a few years in his early 50s with a full pension behind him. Not too shabby.
Anyway - janitor can be quite a nice gig. I think you picked the wrong profession for your poll. You should have made something up like Puke Catcher or Full-Time Catheter Inserter.
Where do you keep the mops?
For $750K, those rest rooms are going to be sparkling.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t think the best paying jobs feel good to go to, though. Of course, I’ll hasten to add the disclaimer that I don’t have one of the “best paying” jobs, but to use your example of neurosurgeon, that field is notorious for being on your feet for hours or even days without sufficient sleep. When I think of a really well-paying job (and I mean well-paying for the average person who has that career, not the outlier celebrity who gets paid way more than the average actor), I think of high stress and long hours.
Inequality is not just a result of supply and demand. I bet if businesses actually wanted to, they could find qualified board members and managers willing to take less. But the people deciding the remuneration of board members and managers are themselves board members and managers, so they’re happy to continue overpaying managers for both success and failure.
“Janitor” is not typically a soul-sucking joy-killing death march job like many are. Typically, hourly and restricted to a sane number of hours per week. So I’d have a lot (more) free time in which to self-actualize, and plenty of financial resources to support that.
Starving my family for my “dream job” is simply selfish. And frankly, taking the phrase “dream job” seriously means you take your job too seriously. “Live to work” is a mental illness.
I’ve done janitorial work, It isn’t bad really. Low stress. Autonomous. Most people you meet are fairly respectful. No work from home.
I’d take the janitor job, subcontract it out for $20/hr with benefits and then work my dream job.
If the unskilled jobs paid more, the skilled people would do them instead. This has happened due economic crisis periods or when governments collapse. Physicians and engineers working as cab drivers, etc.
What could a tax lawyer do to protect your windfall from income tax?
By my math, three years as the World’s Highest Paid Janitor nets you about $1.2M after taxes, minus whatever your living expenses were for those three years. Let’s imagine your nest egg ends up as $1.1M. The common rule for retirees in their 60s (who generally need their nest egg to last no more than 30 years or so) is to draw down their nest egg at 4% per year (and many advisors, with an eye on market prospects, are now calling that advice into question). If you need your nest egg to last for 60 or 70 years with a low risk of bankruptcy, you’ll probably only want to spend 2% per year, or $22K. If your nest egg is mostly in bonds (as it should be, if you’re exclusively reliant on it), then you ought to be able to sustain this indefinitely.
But $22K per year ain’t much to live on; just ask a real janitor. You won’t be living in a nice house, or driving late-model cars, or traveling much, and good luck paying for your own health insurance. And when you start to get really old and need to move to an independent-living or assisted-living facility, you definitely won’t have enough.
TL,DR: you’re probably going to want to put in more than three years as a janitor, even at $750K per year.
OP, I think you would have had more evenly balanced poll results if you’d given something like, $75,000 for the janitor and $30,000 for the dream job, annually.
My Dream Job comes with perks money can’t really buy, so I’m going that way.
(In “The Real World”, there are plenty of people who *pay *to do my Dream Job!)
I’m not a careerist in any sense. My parents raised me up to think of jobs as things that paid the bills so I could enjoy my off hours and that is pretty much still where I settle out. I’ve never had the concept of a dream career and regard working as an irritant and unfortunate necessity of live.
So, yeah - wealthy janitor, all the way :).
And you are assuming I have no other assets, which as Felix once said makes an ass out of you and me. 3 years will do fine for me, I’m only expecting to work another 10-12 years anyway. Lets leave it at that.