[lotsofpulp]

Not competitive because you still have to account for quality of life, working on site with no remote option, working evenings, nights, and weekends, general riskiness of being around drunk/high people, etc.

Of course you may not have had to study as hard, so your quality of life as a young person might have been better, but bartending is not secure income for life either.

Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?

[eddtests]

> Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?

That sounds incredibly elitist and cringey. If I had a child earning six figures as a bartender I’d be very impressed, and even if they weren’t earning six figures but were enjoying life I’d be happy… And taking it from another perspective, I know people who’s parents would be disappointed their children are ‘lowly software engineers’ too. With that sort of attitude you can rarely win.

[lotsofpulp]

Using a broad range of parents’ recommendations for what their kids could aim for does not having anything to do with parents being proud or disappointed.

It is a rough rubric to gauge an average quality of life for a person who does a certain thing for a living, not that parents or even entire generations of parents are always right about the continued resilience of a given occupations’ quality of life.

[fragmede]

Okay tiger mom. Bartenders don't get fired because they got a cheaper office in Estonia or India to write code. They don't have 9am meetings. Git is an insult you call somebody; What's a JIRA‽ You don't want to work in the nightlife/entertainment industry, which is fine, but it's a $36 billion dollar industry and some people want to do that instead of sitting in front of a screen all day long.

At the end of the day, take home pay is one metric we can actually compare, because different people want different things.