[EmX]

[scratchmonkey]

Having a 30K job in San Jose is roughly equivalent to having a 20K job in Cleveland.

[DJ]

[internisus]

Those are actually some amazing perks! I'm really impressed; wish I had spent my food service years with a Starbucks.

[boojiboy7]

[DJ]

[slipstream]

[Hot Stott Bot]

You're just uptight and angry at the world because you can't get drunk.

[EmX]

I care about fair trade.

[DJ]

[Krazii Bakon Lypes]

[IIOIOOIOO]

[alice]

why don't you be a self-employed cynical suspense adventure realist novelist deus?

By the way, fancy seeing you in san jose. Which part are you at?

[GcDiaz]

[Toups]

[DJ]

[boojiboy7]

[Kappuru]

binary code man, what do you do for a living? I'm just curious.
_________________

[Corinth]

[kael]

[Toto]

Americans talking about good coffee itt.

[DJ]

[Mr. Apol]

binary come out of the shadows and tell us how to make mad cash okay
_________________

[Hot Stott Bot]

As I recall from that other thread, he said he was in management at a bottom-rung videogame developer, yes?

[IIOIOOIOO]

I will, a bit later. Kind of hanging out with the wife and kids. Was doing a quick check to see if I'd gotten a response.

[IIOIOOIOO]

OK, so some back story rq:

Graduated HS, Perfect score SAT, full-ride granted at a prestigious (well, beloved by the wealthy) SoCal university. Entered as a sophomore. Partied well beyond advisable levels. Withdrew at the end of my first year after getting my scholarship yanked for an "event" on campus. Tapped some contacts, accepted a slightly less than full scholarship at a small school in the midwest. Got out there, hated the hell out of winter (bronchitis and pneumonia simultaneously!) and went back home... taking a girl I'd met there home with me. I guess I figured... maybe someone else will give me school money? Knocked her up, got married in vegas, got kicked out of mom's house... and rightly so.

I only share this to establish that I was starting out at ground zero. Without involving destructive drug use or criminality/prison, it's hard to remove yourself from the playfield further than I did. All by the age of 19. So, I'm sitting there. Baby on the way, beautiful wife, couple grand in the account. I clearly need to do SOMETHING. I formulated a strategy.

Phase 1 - Finding the Vein
Step 1) Assess my marketable skills... including soft skills.
I'm pretty strong technically, a good software developer, reasonably personable and pretty competent. The technical skills weren't really mated up with any practical job experience and I wasn't energized about sales, which leads me to...

Step 2) Find the right job market.
Southern California at the time (end of the 90s) was one of the most competitive job markets in the country. Especially on the bottom rung. Combined with the elevated cost of living, the odds are stacked against somebody just starting out. So we tapped our network of friends and family, looking for somewhere a bit more open. It so happened that a relation of my wife's noticed that even the fast food joints were completely SOL trying to fill their openings. Hell, BK was offering a SIGNING BONUS for assistant managers. We moved promptly.

The next three steps kind of go together...
Step 3) Don't let today's job prevent me from finding tomorrow's
A lot of the permanent failure guys I knew had taken jobs where they made the tiniest bit more than nothing in exchange for complete lock-in. 50 or 60+ hour work weeks, right in the part of a day when the rest of the planet was making daily steps forward. If you're working 6 to 6 just to pay the bills... you're not working on taking the next step.

Step 4) Shine every day.
Seriously, all it take to diferentiate yourself from 80%+ of the world's population is to treat your job seriously. When you're at work, work. If you're working make a sincere effort to do really do things like they matter. If an opportunity to make someone else's life better through some extra effort arises, pursue it vigorously. But at the same time make sure people know that this is just a step in your life. Like... this is kind of bullshit and I think I can do way more than this, but I told you I'd come do it so I'm going to do the hell out of it. Suddenly you'll find that the people around you are breaking their own backs trying to make things happen for you. Speaking of this just being one step...

Step 5) Find ways to make sure the people around you understand that you have aspirations.
Talk to people about what's important to you (family, music, etc) and how that motivates you to do more and work harder every day. It's important that people understand where you're trying to go, or nobody can help you get there. Note: Don't ever demean someone's job or the job of their co-workers. What you're working towards is qualitatively better for YOU... not just better in general.

This strategy worked pretty well. In a 2.5 year span, I went...
Pizza Delivery -> Electric Utility Tree Trimming -> Culligan Delivery Man -> Working at the regional Culligan offices -> Working in ops in their data center -> Working as a "patchgrammer" in their development group -> Entry Level Developer at the tiny subsidiary of a fast-growing conglomerate. By the year I would've graduated college (21), I had just about caught up with my schoolfaring friends.

Never once did I have to cold-call for a job. Every time it was basically dropped in my lap. Every step forward gave me more pay (at this point still painfully low... 45k was where I ended that chain), more control over my schedule and more access to people who were already winning the game. Some friends who I shared this gameplan with had similar success.

And that was only just the start. That was just how to get INTO the real game. This was a bit long, but if anyone's interested I'll write about phase 2... How to make mega-corporations work for YOU instead of vice-versa.

So yeah, I ended up with this (probably unsightly) reflexive disdain when I see people shufflin laterally from one shit job to another. It usually just means that nobody ever set their expectations about what was REALLY achievable.

[Felix]

[IIOIOOIOO]

Yeah, it wasn't great... but it was getting back to ground-zero. The next 5 or 6 years were where I figured out how to break out of that "class" of pay entirely.

[Broco]

[IIOIOOIOO]

Haha. As you fail to understand.

It's more like... make sure you're doing things WHEN YOU'RE ALREADY AT WORK that keep you moving in the right direction. That entire time I rarely worked beyond a 9-5 and lead a perfectly healthy and rewarding social life. It's not very fun to make a lot of money if you don't have time to put it to good use and people to enjoy it with. A couple of small tweaks to behavior, a couple of nice tricks and all of a sudden you're becoming enriched while others sit around assuming that you have to become money-obsessed to have a lot of it.

[Broco]

Hmm, alright. It's mainly that with your tone and get-rich-book bullet points, you reminded me of a small businessman I once worked for who viewed money as some kind of high score at life. Not that your points are unsound, but you do give the impression of taking it more seriously than is healthy. Is going up in management your idea of success?

[psiga]

[IIOIOOIOO]

Going up in management is a way to have:
1) Generally greater pay opportunities
2) More influence over environmental factors which will affect you
3) More visibility to other opportunities
4) Greater geographic mobility

But it's not an end unto itself. There are all sorts of jobs that look like "steps up" but are really just tiger traps. If a "promotion" fails to have 2 or more of the above qualities, I steer clear.

[IIOIOOIOO]

[GcDiaz]

Well, I guess you're not as much of a troll as

[Dracko]

[Ebrey]

[GcDiaz]

In much the same way that it's not the STR increase that excites you, but the family-size can of Whoop Ass the higher STR lets you open on suckas.
_________________
Steam/PSN/Xbawks: GcDiaz

Let's bring sexy back!

[aderack]

I think I might have a job too, finally.

Man, I hate writing. Maybe I'll hate it less if I don't have to do it.

[slipstream]

[Pijaibros]