I’ve seen it several times with startups. Some go in hock and live off savings for years hoping their idea will come to fruition. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, and these people end up bankrupt. Employees and suppliers were paid, but he/she didn’t draw any salary.
Its because your primary goal is to do a job, not be a profit machine for the owner of a company or providing shareholder value.
If someone chimes in saying they make alot more over in the private sector then they either own the company or the company is making alot more money off of their labor than they are making.
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Some utility companies here pay their mechanics quite well . . .
But those jobs are extremely difficult to get
Sorry old days but you speak garbage.
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I would love a cushy government job, in a shop or especially doing office work.
I tried applying for municipal and govt jobs but the process is prolonged and too political, and it helps to know someone nowadays to land such a role.
My Dad got into the Post Office as a carrier back in 1969, after his decent-paying factory employer for over ten years moved out of CT, and little me was on the way.
He retired from the P.O. by 2000, with a decent pension on top of Social Security, but I’m sure the application process 50 some-odd years ago was much simpler and straight-fwd.
There’s nothing political about applying for a public sector job
If the job’s accepting applications and you’re qualified, you apply
Then you wait for a test slot
There are plenty of study guides available for almost any conceivable position, fwiw. It’s money well spent
If you pass, you wait for an interview. The eligibility list often has an expiration date, so if you don’t score partulicularly well, or if there’s hundreds of guys applying for a handful of positions, you might “die on the list” . . . it happened to me once
Needless to say, guys with high scores get interviewed before low scorers
And there may be months . . . or YEARS . . . between test slots
If there’s no money made available to fill positions, then there’s no testing, which means there are unfilled positions and yours truly picks up the pace until more bodies are in place
If you’re not getting in, you need to literally hit the books, so that you score well enough to snag an interview . . . Often a panel interview, btw
They DO ask if you know someone already working for them . . . but I’ll give you my take. It’s better to say no, get in entirely on your own and nobody will ever be able to question if you deserve to be there, imo
If you’re serious about getting a public sector job . . . And I think you’re ABSOLUTELY NOT . . . you need to get serious and stop being a whiner
Whiners don’t get hired
When you get interviewed, they’re also taking notes about your PERSONALITY . . . Supervisors from specific departments are there looking for prospective employees. And they are NOT hiring anyone that will obviously rub everyone the wrong way 
An office job would be a bad fit for you
You’d be better off taking a job where you only interact with machines, not people
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My expectation is that everyone shares my interest in continually growing and improving…themselves. And by bettering yourself you will be a better and more valuable employee, I will rely on you more, and your wage will rise. You may grow beyond what I can offer you and you will leave for bigger and better things. Or you will reach the natural end of your progress and will stagnate. You might be content with your place, or you might move on. None of this is personal. It’s your job to make me want to keep you. It’s my job to make you keep wanting to come back week after week. If you’re no better at your work, haven’t learned anything new, or done anything different in the last 5 years, you’re going to be left behind. If you think you can find a wage that pays the rent, punch a clock for 30 years and then retire, you’re expendable. You don’t have a career, you have a job.
In all industries there are always new models or systems to learn about, new ways of doing things, updated technology, etc. It’s incumbent upon everyone in an industry to keep up with these things.
They should set their sights a little higher then. Now I’m not talking about support staff. In the auto shop example I’m referring to the mechanics and maybe the service advisor. I don’t expect the kid who sweeps the floors and parks cars to win any awards for his work. I don’t want the part-time gas station cashier to be stressed out about a performance review. Those aren’t careers, those are filler jobs you do on your way up or down the ladder.
Should it? I’ve known that since the beginning of my working life. This isn’t the 1950’s anymore.
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+1
I worked at a couple of federal government sites and playing politics was the fastest way to get fired. There’s always someone that disagrees enough with what you say or do politically that they will be happy to get you in trouble. This isn’t hypothetical, I’ve seen it happen. Public conversations, even at the coffee machine or lunch, can get you in big trouble.
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Move to NH. NH is in extreme short supply for Postal workers. But be prepared to work LONG hours with sometimes unrealistic deadlines. Usually, 2-3 times a year the Post Office takes out a full-page ad in the local newspaper.
Additionally, anyone who thinks that all “government” jobs are “cushy” has clearly never held one of those jobs. Post-retirement from the field of education, I got my third academic degree in order to be certified as a Legal Assistant. I could have worked in the private sector, but I chose to work in the public sector in order to help people.
My job–working under two Deputy AGs–paid $17 per hour (I didn’t really need the money, but many of the people holding that type of job DO need it), and there were no fringe benefits–at all. The workload was such that my “lunch hour” was usually no more than 15 minutes, and although I wasn’t paid past 5PM, I frequently worked–unpaid–until 6 or 6:30PM, just in order to keep-up with the workload.
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That depends on the career isn’t it. For the engineering field - the private sector jobs pay significantly more than public sector. I’ve been recruited for public sector engineering jobs and I laughed at their pay. It was significantly less (40%-050% less). It’s one reason there aren’t a lot of those jobs. They’d rather pay a private contractor to come in and do the job (for significant more money) then to pay an engineer 2-3 times what the office manager of that particular department is making.
It’s very common in the engineering fields. As a retired director of software engineering and chief architect - I’d paid out incentives to good employees with stock-options. And more than once we shared the profit with employees on some of the big contracts we did. Profit sharing is a lot more common in smaller companies and startups.
Again that depends on the field. Engineers are still at a high demand, and they can pick and choose what job they want. I’d NEVER work for a company that didn’t have all 3. Please explain to me HOW they DON’T get Social Security?
And rightfully so. The AVERAGE job length for a software engineer is 1-2 years. A lot has to do with finding more pay. Another major factor is companies have a project do so they ramp up talent and when the project is over, they let most (if not all) of the talent go.
There are a lot of people in the engineering fields that just float. But in engineering- if you float for too long you will eventually sink because your skill sets are now obsolete. You have to keep your skill-sets up or you sink. My 45+ career changed significantly from when I graduated college with a BS in computer science when I retired. Almost NOTHING from what I did in my early years would be transferable to todays market. I’ve seen brilliant engineers with impeccable career who got on certain engineering projects and didn’t have the opportunity to grow their skills. They pigeonholed themselves out of a job.
It’s not just jobs in the engineering field.
https://www.epi.org/publication/widening-public-sector-pay-gap/
The fact of the matter is even if paid very well, you are still enriching someone that owns the company or providing shareholder value.
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Reading too much from 1870? Why would anyone hire anyone that didn’t contribute to profitability? And who do you think does the hiring? Ya think poor people hire? Your warm glow of collectivity is showing.
So what? Engineers are the largest group of millionaires in this country. They are paid well and the smart ones have maxed out their 401k’s and saved even more. By the time they retire the average engineer is worth anywhere from 3-10 million dollars. The person who owns the company should get a bigger reward because they are taking all the risk. It’s a gamble and 70% of businesses fail in their first 10 years.
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As well you should. That’s why they hired you. They put in the capital. I put in the labor and/or brains. That’s how it works.
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I’ll bet if the post office increased the starting pay by 20% or so they wouldn’t have such a labor shortage.
You can say that for ALL businesses. My last company we had very few non-engineers. But we did have a few people in shipping. Very important job that needed to be done right. We paid them very well and had little turnover. Same benefits as everyone else. When we had a big contract, we would hire 2-3 temps.
Similarly, there is a national nursing shortage. In NYC, one of the nurses’ unions is currently on strike, with the key issues being the need for more staff, plus the need for better security within the hospital.
Rather than meeting those demands, the CEOs have flown-in a few thousand “travel nurses” from all over The US. These travel nurses are paid many thousands of $$ more than regular staff nurses, plus they receive tax-free transportation, housing, and meals.
The huge expenditure for those travel nurses would pay most of the cost of the demands of the staff nurses.
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