you don’t have to describe them in detail with dates, not trying to get you to doxx yourself
but it’s kind of A Thing with neurodivergent folks to have tried a lot of different jobs, and I’m curious about everybody’s count
I think I’m up to 21 that I’ve filed taxes for, which doesn’t seem that extreme for 42, except when you consider that I’ve been unemployed most of my son’s 17 years of life because I couldn’t handle parenting and that level of outside obligations, so most of those happened before I was 25 – so 20ish jobs between 15-25
how bout you, how many things have you tried?
Just 1 ever, and its the one I am working right now. I struggled a lot in my late teens and early 20’s with school and other things, so work was just not possible for me. When I finally was a bit better I searched for almost 3 years, until I got the job I have now. Was really frustrating searching for so long but at least the work right now has been going smoothly
11, I think, across 4 different sectors: college/work-study jobs, agriculture, food service, small business logistics. Some of those were short-term gigs though. At least 4 gaps of longer than a month where I wasn’t employed or in school.
Been fully unemployed and living off savings for the better part of a year, but looking to boost the number, build savings back, and get some businesses going. With any luck, if the businesses take off enough, I’ll be able to employ others in a cooperative model, and never have to worry about having to work on the extremely unfavorable terms of someone else again.
I thought it was just part of these times for jobs to only last a year or two. The longest that I’ve been on any one company’s payroll is 4 years and some change.
With any luck, if the businesses take off enough, I’ll be able to employ others in a cooperative model, and never have to worry about having to work on the extremely unfavorable terms of someone else again.
🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞
I hope I am able to remember them all, but I think I am at about 16.
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This is all over a span of 25 years and a lot of gaps in between. I’ve worked in 3 different states. So unless I forgot some, 24 jobs in 25 years. I’m very autistic.
- pizza cook
- fragrance blending facility (3 different jobs)
- Modular home industry - Appliances
- Modular home industry - ship lose set up kits
- random job sanding messed up metal doors down to fix
- random job in interior door manufacturing - stacked doors for orders
- random job tearing down these hydrolic things that were made wrong
- Modular home industry - FEMA trailers for Katrina relief
- Modular home industry, cabinet doors and drawers installation
- kitchen cook/barhop
- distribution center - order packing
- cabinet assembly kit routing - ran boards through big routers to make grooves
- gas station cashier
- asst manager at Taco Bell
- Computer repair
- Computer repair - self employed
- Web dev intern
- USDA intern working on a Python based project
- retirement funds claim processing
- diliver driver for Door Dash
- diliver driver for Walmart
- IT tech for a school
- Software developer
- failed freelance web dev - current
this is a really interesting group of industries! dying to know more about the fragrance job, that sounds like it could be heaven or absolute hell
I did 3 different jobs the time I was there. The first was doing picking and packing, then I learned how to make blends. Blending is basically taking all kinds of different smelly oils and powders and mixing like a recipe to make something that smells like apple pie or flowers or musk or whatever. The other thing I did there was “pouring” which involved putting large batches of blends or oils into smaller containers for shipping.
The oils and blends are used for making candles or potpourri, and I even used to make knockoff perfumes and colognes with sum.
that sounds like absolutely fascinating work!! how did you end up doing that?
It was through a friend. He worked there and his mom was management.
2, both retail. Im gonna be getting out of it and if it doesmt work out im going to become a professional hobo
1 and tbh I love it and they give me raises, I kinda lucked out hard. Its not a ton of pay but I’m fine with that. I have a side gig I guess helping at an lgbt center off and on too
Not gonna say what it is its hyper specific
I worked as a dishwasher in high school and college. My first job was as a bus boy, and the restaurant owner said, after the first two days, that these days had been an unpaid training period, something she had not mentioned until then. She stole my pay from those days, and then I quit. This was an excellent introduction to capitalism, although it took me another fifteen years to figure out that this system was actually the problem. I think the difference between me and a lot of westerners is that although I’m a slow learner, I do actually learn. Westerners don’t seem to learn anything at all, except how to wag their tails when their bourgeois masters toss them a bone from the capitalist banquet of stolen labor.
Anyway
I worked overseas in East Asia as an English teacher and university instructor for years. Started a family and we made the huge mistake of moving back to the USA (I was still a lib). My spouse is a nurse and ended up getting a good job after we were both unemployed and living on our savings and family assistance for a year. I was already a Berner by then but it was definitely radicalizing to go from having excellent universal health care in East Asia to having no fucking health care at all in America (with two small kids) while hearing constantly from white liberal boomers on Facebook that universal health care is wrong and terrible and evil and impossible. My whole family had been using it for years by then!
I got involved in local democratic politics, another huge mistake I’ve discussed here multiple times. It only became a problem when I started winning elections. I voted to defund the police and the sheriff himself screamed in my face, three feet away from me. I started thinking that my family was in danger and that no one would stand up for us or protect us here. The police would run me off the road one late night, there would be an article in the paper about it, and that would have been the end of me. What would I have achieved, except making my kids fatherless? So I quit.
I was unemployed and publishing novels that made no money for years, trying to get a teaching job based on my extensive experience even though I don’t have the qualifications the state requires, and anytime an employer googles me they see that I hate the police thanks to a few articles written by a couple of shitheads in our wonderful local family neighborhood newspapers. I worked as a substitute teacher before the pandemic and really enjoyed it. The kids were actually great, only some teachers were weird (the principals are often unbearable in countless ways). Last January I ended up taking an oil burner technician class, among the hardest experiences of my life. It was free and paid for with covid money. I made it through the class and got a job, and have been doing this shit for seven months now. I’m days from getting my journeyman’s license, and have hundreds of pages in a book I’m writing about going from white collar to blue collar work. It’s still a bullshit job, just a different kind of bullshit. All of these fucking oil boilers and furnaces should be dismantled; instead, my job is maintaining them. My coworkers refuse to unionize even though all the oil companies around here are desperate for workers, so that’s cool. Once I have my journeyman’s license, I can do everything except installations (which I don’t want to do anyway since they are so amazingly unethical), but this also makes me nervous because a lot of the work is really advanced for me. My employer has been honest and fair so far (as much as capitalists can be) but my pay is still pathetic (I’m supposed to get a raise to $24/hr in a few days) and I really, really don’t want to do on-call work, so I might end up changing employers soon. I would rather just work for myself, since that’s where the big bucks are, but I still need help from people who know so much more than me, and my license also requires a master to sign off on it. The feudal guilds live on!
I got involved in local democratic politics, another huge mistake I’ve discussed here multiple times. It only became a problem when I started winning elections. I voted to defund the police and the sheriff himself screamed in my face, three feet away from me. I started thinking that my family was in danger and that no one would stand up for us or protect us here. The police would run me off the road one late night, there would be an article in the paper about it, and that would have been the end of me. What would I have achieved, except making my kids fatherless? So I quit.
this is the reason I haven’t personally gotten involved in local politics, even though I live in a deeply blue part of Ohio. that shit is scary, I grew up around those people, they fucking terrify me and I am not popular enough to feel safe in this small town culture
any suggestions for posts of yours to read to learn about how this all went down for you?
and have hundreds of pages in a book I’m writing about going from white collar to blue collar work. It’s still a bullshit job, just a different kind of bullshit.
I think this book would be very popular; I know my spouse would love to read it.
I would rather just work for myself, since that’s where the big bucks are
one of the things I hate most about this alleged individualistic, bootstraps society is how fucking hard they make it for a person to go it alone – the obscure administrative requirements are a huge hurdle for most people.
your journey sounds relatable af, I really hope you write that book. ❤️
- made up bullshit techbro job
- made up bullshit techbro job 2
- made up bullshit techbro job 3
- made up bullshit techbro job 4
10 years and I’ve produced nothing of notable value. Usually i barely scrape past a year at any job but the one i have now is alright cos my team is very ND so I don’t feel like I’m decaying every day. Also technically I’ve moved position inside this company multiple times so dnow if that counts
I’m 36, I’ll try to list them:
- CVS employee
- Circuit city (geek squad equivalent)
- Interior painter
- Data entry
- Autozone, front of house
- Guy who sits in a basement to bill the government hours (temp job)
- Light construction (moving stuff around usually)
- Pizza delivery driver
- Dumpster diver (made good money actually)
- Network installer
- Computer Technician
- Software engineer, Ad tech
- Software engineer, big data databases
- CTO, founder, big data databases
If I had to guess, CVS was your worst job?
You’re a bit older than me but that place went downhill staffing-wise every year
We called it Come Visit Satan by the time I left lol
I went on break and never came back, lamo.
that’s hilarious!!
I remember Circuit City! 🧓😂
what was the most surprising dumpster diving find or sale? like something you were shocked was worth whatever someone was willing to pay for it?
Pulled out a bunch of software from Office Depot and some of it went for full retail price on ebay. The local sports equipment stores would throw out ALL of the ski and snowboard equipment at the end of the season, I also couldn’t sell any of it out of season and couldn’t hold it. There was a satellite mapping company and they would throw out tapes and hard drives full of what I assume were high resolution maps (hard drives were clean and I didn’t have a tape drive). Your local chip distributor will probably have a full dumpster at all times of almost-expired food.
How do you make money dumpster diving? I’ve done it for groceries but can’t imagine another way.
I had a routine that I would do every other day that would hit big box stores and light industrial areas, then ebay it. Not sure it’s really feasible now, stores don’t throw out as much as they did.
Resale and maybe refurbishing. If you know the right places by upscale apartment complexes, you can typically find a lot of good stuff in those.
Residential dumpster diving is very different from commercial dumpster diving.
Technically 5, functionally 4
Pizza chain, customer service rep
Same pizza chain but different location as a driver
Corn breeding lab tech
Neuroscience lab tech
Neuroscience lab tech in the lab next door which was run by my original PI’s wife
Currently unemployed and looking for another lab tech or low level scientist job, ideally at the NIH. Gotta be right in the “turn into a shadow on the pavement” range when DC gets nuked
Oh I also did paid acting gigs for a while, it was never enough to like, pay rent though.
your career path sounds like a Sims career path in the best way – like, you pick a track, and it seems a little unlikely, but it works out and suddenly you’re a neuroscientist 🤯 I love it
also love that you have been a professional actor!! if you got paid for it, it was your profession, even if only part-time. cool as fuck!! neuroscientist-actor-comrade 🤩
holy shit! i didn’t know that this was a thing and it explains so much. thanks for making me aware.
hope the knowledge helps you give yourself a little grace ❤️
Only two, neither of which lasted longer than a week. I am very disabled and very lucky in that I can get away with not working - currently shooting for disability payments.
I’ve had a couple, but unfortunately I never had a real-deal “adult” job.
Employers are just so absurdly picky and what few jobs are out there, I don’t qualify for. Since when did I need to be some superhuman genius that’s a famous world champion in my field just to get any job at all?
I worked like 6 or 7 very different jobs before I got into homeless services. I’ve had tons of different jobs in the field at all levels from temp overnights to running entire shelter programs, but I kinda count them as the same job even if I change positions or agencies every year or so. If I counted all the promotions and agency hops it would be a lot a lot.
I’m mid-30s and started shelter work 7 years ago. I was also an unemployed disaster through most of my early 20s, so those pre-shelter jobs went by pretty fast too I guess.
how did you get into that line of work?
Honestly, I was in a new city and needed a job, and the biggest shelter agency in town was hiring people for night shifts. Turned out I really liked the job, even with all the wild and sometimes traumatic shit that happens periodically. The social benefits are pretty cool ngl - everyone thinks you’re some kinda saint when like 90% of what you do is just clean and give out coffee and stuff. After a few years of that I was like “huh, guess I’m a shelter worker now.”
I also had some lived experience and come from a family of social workers, but I never thought I’d be a shelter person until I started doing it. Didn’t go to school for it.
Forestry (2), car wash, office, education (3), fast food (3), bike taxi, shelter steward, seasonal jobs (4). 16 jobs and I am in my mid-twenties. Plus several periods doing odd jobs off Craigslist and whatnot…
I got my ADHD diagnosis a few years ago but in common ADHD fashion I didn’t do nothing after that.
