My first job was working in the Pear Sheds... growing up in an agricultural area, the factories that would sort the pears coming off of the orchards would often hire HS students during peak season. Thankfully since I was underage I only had to work 60 hours/week (10 hours/day, 6 days/week), standing since we couldn't sit down, staring at a convener belt of pears going by and throwing the blemished/bad ones onto two other convener belts. F'ing monotonous, 7am to 6pm.
I grew up on a farm to a lot chores that I were things that other would consider jobs.
But I would consider hard wood flooring my first job. Hard as f--- work, and the employer I worked for was known for being one of the hardest working men in his profession around, him being my dad.
When I was 18, I got a summer job in road construction. My job was to walk up and down a hot highway for 16 hours a day, picking large rocks out of gravel.
My mental model is "this beats the almighty fuck out of road construction." :)
It's several generations since my ancestors had to work a manual job, but my grandfather sent my dad to work on a mushroom farm for a summer, and in turn my dad told me I needed to find manual work for the summer when I was 18 if I expected any financial help from them during university.
I worked in a series of factories, mostly cleaning machines. None of the work was physically tiring — I think I was too useful to be given that work — but I at least met other people who'd probably be doing similar work for the rest of their career.
When I was in high school, my summer jobs included: lawnmowing, building construction, dishwashing, and being a gas-station attendant. It worked out just fine.
The end of retirement article made me wonder about this. What was your first job, how old were you, and how much were you paid?
My first job was stacking bricks from an old building they tore down behind my house. I was about 10 years old and got paid a dollar or two, can't remember exactly, for a stack of 1,000 bricks, 10 by 10 by 10.
Scraping and painting a greenhouse at a farm for $3.50 an hour when I was 16. It was actually a great job, except when we were painting the inside. Once my back was hurting from painting some trim and I stood up too quickly and put by head right through one of the panes of glass. Fortunately not even a scratch, but it scared the heck out of me.
That was my first "real" job if you don't include all the standard stuff like paper routes, shoveling driveways and mowing lawns.
Construction crew on a group building a golf course. One day my job was - literally - to walk around and pick up rocks and sticks and what-not. In the 98 degree heat and sweltering humidity of NC in the summertime... with no shade to be found. For not much more than minimum wage.
Outside of that, my dad was in the logging business when I was a kid, so I worked summers during high-school helping him cut down trees and load them onto a truck to haul to the paper mill. That was more being outside, doing hard physical labor, in NC, in the summertime. And I'm not even sure I got paid, now that I think about it... :-)
As a teenager during the summers working for my father driving frontend loader. I sat in a AC cab and screened top soil all day. I went to work at 7am and left around 4pm. I didn't have a care in the world after 4pm.
It wasn't just because I had no bills to pay, I just didn't worry about work. I knew the pile of dirt wasn't going anywhere and the area we were digging out was going to be the same when I got back to work.
I never brought work home. It took me a good 14 years to re-learn that in tech.
I had a similar experience with a summer job clearing brush, painting stuff and stacking 50 gal drums at a fuel tank farm. Didn't have to think while I'm there, could tell when I was done (are there still trees on the fence line? not done). Never once thought about work when I wasn't at work. I actually developed pecs and a 2-pack from all the brush trimming. Miss that, for sure
From 14 on, I worked tons of minimum wage and odd jobs after school, every summer and spring break. Fast food, painting housing, construction, whatever. I remember painting housing, standing on aluminum ladders in the sun in July the NC heat as being particularly punishing work. That's just how things were.
I used to dream about how awesome it would be to have an office job, get paid a nice salary to work on problems inside w/ AC. It's still not easy work and sometimes I might complain, but compared to the shit I used to do when I was a kid, it's a vacation.
Factory work as a teenager. Actually the job was boring, but compared to the usual dev jobs, it is the only job I have done not involving sitting at a screen (although there was occasional sitting at a screen entering points for a milling machine - best part of the day!). Doesn't seem too relevant now.
Imagine then the following (stretchy) scenario: an isolated village on an island.
Now the villagers start digging the hole in the ground. Mind you, digging holes is tough business: they have to eat and someone must pay for the food. If all of them work on the hole, who makes the food? But they are smart and the project manager arranges for some of them to cook the food while the rest of the village digs.
After a week the hole is done and after another few days the hole is filled back.
Now they sit at the campfire and think by themselves what great two weeks those were: they were employed.
It's non-stop work. Eventually, it folded and became ... A development.
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