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[Jopax]

Currently studying Electrical Engineering, with a focus on electronics and stuff (tho I'm fairly attracted to communications and antennae stuff recently). It's something of a dumb choice because I had no idea what exactly I wanted to do once I finished highschool (which was also EE focused) and my parents insisted that I had to get a degree to be anything in life, so I picked what a bunch of friends did, I picked something that would get me out of my home town and I picked really badly.
Wanted to drop out after two really shitty years but that didn't go over too well with the parents so I'm plugging along for another year now just to get them off my back.

What I really want do is concept art/illustration work. A really competitive business that requires tons of work to get into properly, so it's not been the easiest having to split time between that and studying and gaming (which, for all the timewasting it feels like still keeps me sane to an extent). Still, I think I'm on a good road now, have done some freelance stuff over the past few months, the money wasn't big or anything but I think the expirience is valuable, plus it was fun to do so I'm not really complaining.

[Truean]

I intend to become a criminal defense lawyer.

[insert lawyer joke]

Anything specific inspire you to want to do that? I know hearing stories in the sad thread sure don't make it seem like a good field.

It pays well, seems interesting enough, and the Juris Doctor that I'll get from the education required would help me get more earnings anyway.

I am well aware that most of the job is not yelling at people in courtrooms.

....

Everybody who saw me quoting that and replying knows what I'm going to say beforehand....

Respectfully, if you are in the United States, then you need to seriously research the field, which is frankly dying. New grads are screwed. There is a glut of unemployed lawyers who were frankly lied to and told all of the things you stated. Until and unless your parent has a law firm ready for you to take over, I cannot stress strongly enough that you should reconsider, please, for your own sake. I sincerely regret pursuing a career in law, and am trying rather desperately to get the heck  out of it myself. Feel free to make my mistake if you are dead set on the idea.... Google phrases like "law school scam...."

I am an attorney. I did a lot of criminal defense, and family law, and business law, and all sorts of things really. It was horrid, as an understatement.

I have been oddly harassed and ignored at the same time by clients who frankly want 2+2 to equal 5. It doesn't; they repeatedly threatened to kill me and my entire family for it (and some took steps to sincerely try, forcing me to move). They want to buy results, which would be abhorrent blood money paid to some lawyer rather than the victim or their family, and impossible.  Also you will be universally viewed as a crook no matter how moral and ethical you are. No one will want to pay you, even if they can. Every second of your time will be scrutinized, not because you didn't spend it working, you did, but because nobody wants to pay for anything, ever. If you "lose" then it will be "your fault" (expect death threats from the prison, and I'm not joking). If you "win" then it should've been "obvious" and not taken you anywhere near that long.... Good luck being paid or being safe from the inmates or even the people who get acquittals sometimes. Don't even get me started on the debt, which you will be paying for the rest of your life if you go to law school. I am not joking.

Then of course there's the fact that you'll have to constantly fish for clients in criminal defense (without running afoul of the rules arguably against that, depending upon what you do). Don't let the suits fool you, because that's just a uniform. You'll have to take orders from terrible criminals who will all view you as another jerk trying to screw them over (when in fact they are the jerks much of the time). You'll be placed in literally and morally unwinnable situations. You'll have to confront victims of a horrid crime which ... all the evidence will show your client committed ... but you still have to cross examine that poor 7 year old girl who did absolutely nothing wrong... but has had a terrible amount of wrong done to her.... If you try to use kid gloves (which you should) when cross examining her, your client will accuse you of "selling [him] down the river," because you didn't get 3 inches from her face like he wants you to.... Then of course there's the toll this will take upon your mental health and any romantic relationship you may have. Lawyers often get divorced and have alcohol and substance abuse problems. Do not believe what you see on TV. I wish somebody could have told me this....

Don't. I don't recommend a legal career to anyone these days. It has never been this bad.

I would like to be in finance again, or management, perhaps quality management. Accountants always seem to get paid one way or the other, and if people want to argue, you can hand them a K-Mart calculator to do it themselves. Accounting is what Law USED TO be, and should be but isn't. Accounting has an exclusive skill set (people hate math and taxes etc), as well as the potential for side work or firm work. Finally, there's the tangible product of a report that you can produce. Being a CPA is NEVER a bad thing.

[Magistrum]

I notice that many of the bay12ers here work with programming...
I work on a small company developing stock control software for stores and lately a few local industries too. This is only the fourth month I am here and this is my first job experience. I mostly do debugging since the core team just churns out malfunctioning stuff and go drink a coffee or something. I'm not sure they actually work at anything since I am yet to get a glimpse of more than two of them on the micros at once. I and two other peers make things work while they take the credit apparently. After reading QC comics I kind of related to marten(God Damn, I'm sure Marcos would put that in my job description if he could.)
I want to work making physics research, discover stuff and what not, but I make no idea of how that works, or even what would be the "job market" for that. Is there any of us here that works with that?

[mete]

I'm 28, I work with Drupal, have worked on some big sites that I believe I can't cite.
I would love to work with something like a "cowboy", or something like that.

[Tawa]

-snip-

Well then, that's one career I'm not touching with a 10-foot-pole.

[Telgin]

I'm 28 and currently work both as a research assistant / grad student and as a web developer / programmer at a local ISP and customer support company.

Thankfully I don't go anywhere near the customer support side of that, but as a programmer it's a very nice company to work for.  I've been here for about 6 years now, ever since my last semester of undergrad, and I'm really happy to be here overall.  It's interesting work that isn't usually stressful.  I get to play with the newest web technologies and I've learned a ton here.  The benefits are great too.  Really no complaints.

The grad student work is pretty nice too.  Very hands off and research by its nature is bleeding edge stuff, which is cool.  It's pretty discouraging as a grad student at times, but I've been making significant progress lately so it's not bad really.  I also really like my advisor and get along very well with him.

Dream job?  Now that's hard.

After I finish my Ph.D the normal course of action would be to try to get into teaching, which I really don't want to do.  The alternative is industrial research, which is much more up my alley, but sounds pretty stressful.  I guess ideally I'd have a research job for a company doing some kind of hardware / software bridgework, but one that wasn't as stressful as somewhere like a national lab or a company as big as Intel.

[Truean]

For anybody looking for a job these days or rather a career to pursue, consider the following:

Plumber, or Electrician. Can't outsource, requires skill, Transferable many places. Possibility to work for a firm or self employment.

Accountant. See above (with some exceptions).

Certified ASC Automotive Mechanic. You can work for a dealership and possibly do things on the side. Everybody will need you at some point and it has major bartering potential. Moreover, it is a service that you, yourself will need. Being able to do it yourself will save you the labor costs as well as possibly knowing how to get parts for cheaper than usual.

What you're really going to want to learn to do is build skillsets and flexibility along with incredibly social skills to find a way to politely tell your boss he's crazy when he wants the moon moved when doing so would be illegal for lack of permits. You need to find a way to tell this motivational speaker reject that he needs to spend some money to do it right so you don't end up in jail without offending his rich people delicate sensibilities and getting fired.

[Magistrum]

I can confirm on the electrician part, as I made many gigs with that in the area where I live, and it was one of the skills that helped me keep family stable until getting a job.

[Strife26]

-snip-

Well then, that's one career I'm not touching with a 10-foot-pole.

And there's a career I can safely cross of my list as well.


At the moment I am mostly happily unemployed but looking to take advantage of some government provided college money in the middle future.


If I could have a dream job, it'd be doing some ridiculously high speed tank shit. There's no such thing (to my knowledge) as a special forces tanker, but I would totally have stayed in for that.

[acetech09]

Me? 19, working at a consumer robotics/software services company as a tech/engineer/designer. Kinda meh. Good pay, business trips to China are great, lots of budget for design and prototyping work, but there's very little of that. Mostly, it's just writing reports on production quality, refurbishing things, and doing revision analysis. Waaayy too much desk work. If I wanted desk work, I wouldn't have quit programming.

I really want to get back into position as a small-volume machinist/designer tech in the robotics or automotive industries. Building custom mechatronics, cars, etc. Anything where I can design parts, then make them myself. I'm currently trying to slide out of my current job and into something like that.

[TempAcc]

While I never had the type of terrible experiences Truean had as a lawyer (altough some clients do give me a hard time, once in a while), I can confirm that the carreer is actualy slowly dying, even outside of the US. I dont get as much money as I'd like, altough I have no financial problems either, but I'm working on moving on to other things right now and it seems to be working sort of ok, hopefuly. Anyway, being a lawyer is a lot of responsibility and not for the faint of heart, but right now things just aren't very favourable and there's simply too many professionals in the area, as well.

Accountant is also a carreer that will start to tank in a certain time, too. There are many digital tools that already supplant accountants in regards to most day to day stuff, and these will only get easier to use and more sophisticated from now on.

If you haven't decided what you'll do for a living yet, try to aim for carreers that involve technical skills that can't easily be outsourced or supplanted by software/machines, and that are applicable in pretty much any country. People will always need doctors, electricians, engineers, plumbers, etc. Forget about anything that can be supplanted with careful planning or technology. Lawyers will always exist, me thinks, but its not for everyone and risky in many ways, as Truean mentioned, specialy if you're working with corrupt people.

[Truean]

Everything is becoming automated. Nothing is safe. Be as self sufficient as you can. Get into no debt. Learn to salvage (the cute names to help us live with ourselves is "upcycle," "recycle," etc). Learn to grow some type of food. They're complaining that people working in fast food places shouldn't get $15 / hour and they should automate burgers etc. The question will become what on earth we will have to get people to do if they can't even manage to get a job working in fast food. It's quite depressing.

Meh.

Hopefully the government will forcibly regulate large corporations to require them to hire an army of accountants to regulate their ill gotten gains before another Enron or "Credit Default Swap" happens. Until and unless the government starts making it harder for them to ruin people, here are the things you're looking for in a career:

a.) Freedom from horrid corporate crap like "non compete agreements," or "intellectual property protection."
b.) High wages with good benefits
c.) Transferability in case your corporate overlords screw up.
d.) Ability to barter with people for goods and services you can't or would rather not produce.
e.) As much privacy as you can manage, because everything sucks and will haunt you forever in electronic blackmail device the internet.

Maintain family relationships, because odds are you will have to move back in with your parents or your parents will have to move in with you. The cost savings may well be the only way you can deal with the impossible financial craziness. Learn some domestic matters that can help in the interfamily barter system, be it cooking, lawn mowing, cleaning, etc.