Bringing this stuff up is a tell for writers who parents are from higher income backgrounds.
I worked from 12 up, from a farm to a bakery/barista to a salesman. Basically, I was the oldest of 5, there just wasn’t time/$ for the paid activities that a lot of suburban kids do.
Work as a teen is similar to sports in terms of life lessons and leadership development. It’s so lame when people pity people out of ignorance. The dozen people from the barista gig I kept up with mostly did pretty darn well in life this far, 20 years later!
>Bringing this stuff up is a tell for writers who parents are from higher income backgrounds
It sounds soooooo weird to us normal "working class" folk. I assume literally everyone, no matter their current career/job/education level, worked a menial job as a teenager. That's because where I am from ALL teenagers were expected to participate in paid employment (and some were expected to help with the family's bills) and where else are you going to work as a teenager? I wouldn't ever consider bringing it up - I consider it very bizarre to bring it up like that, it would be like bragging about how you graduated college even though you went to public school growing up.
Yeah same. Not on a farm but as a busboy when I was 14. I had to convince the owner to hire me but I knew my parents didn’t have extra cash to give me a guitar so I worked for it. And it was cool being around adults in that environment. Being treated like anyone else and earning the respect from the immigrants who were busting their ass and the other young people from working class backgrounds.
In some ways I regret I wasn’t just taking in my youth at that age (and I recall some customers, in good nature, commenting to me I was too young to be working) but at the same time it helped in giving my the work ethic and drive to make retiring very early an option if I want it.
I guess I just saw the chance to work as an opportunity. An opportunity to build myself.
I've been involved in hiring engineers, and see previous employment 'flipping burgers' as a massive plus. It shows someone is willing to work hard when they need to.
I'm not sure if that says more about the workers or your requirements. By 'work hard' you can only mean 'performing hours of tedious unthinking labour' if you're saying 'flipping burgers' is relevant and necessary to 'working hard'. The qualities just don't seem to match up for a job that requires real, rigorous, logical thinking, except for selecting out anyone incapable of the bare minimum effort to sort of just survive in the workplace. That's fair, but doesn't really map to what I commonly see which is a lot of wasted potential being consumed by menial labour because 'just doing it' is seen as more important than developing genuinely useful new approaches.
This comment reflects a pretentious disdain that is exactly what I dislike. I have worked menial and frustrating jobs, and you learn a lot by working through tough situations. I’ve also absorbed similar lessons from sailing offshore in difficult conditions.
Sailing offshore in difficult conditions sounds much more interesting and skillful than any amount of entry-level hospitality. Anyway, of course I have no 'disdain' for working menial jobs - I have worked in them too, I just don't really view them as anything particularly positive, and certainly for me they were formative only insofar as they provided major motivations for completing my degree so I could escape them.
I think you probably learned a lot more from those menial jobs than you realize. People who never did that kind of job often lack empathy for blue-collar workers; I used to work with one engineer who didn’t care whether production staff got laid off because our project was late (whereas others believed we had a duty to our co-workers). You also either demonstrated or developed an ability to cope with working on tasks that were tough, uninteresting and monotonous; many white-collar workers expect work to always be fun, with constant positive reinforcement, variety, and no failure (like school).
You learn the second lesson from sailing, but not the first.
I worked from 12 up, from a farm to a bakery/barista to a salesman. Basically, I was the oldest of 5, there just wasn’t time/$ for the paid activities that a lot of suburban kids do.
Work as a teen is similar to sports in terms of life lessons and leadership development. It’s so lame when people pity people out of ignorance. The dozen people from the barista gig I kept up with mostly did pretty darn well in life this far, 20 years later!