Whats the worst job you've ever had?

Corporate software dev gig in the Bay Area. Was like a 10 minute commute by bike from my house. All but 2-3 of us on a team of 30 or so were H1B, all from the same village in India. Many of them appeared to have little more than some passing familiarity with software. Instead of working at their desks, they would all crowd into a conference room for a day long quasi-meeting all day, every day. A spot at the actual table was primo, most had their laptop in their lap all day 'coding'. This team barely produced anything, and when they did it wasn't even close to what was asked for. Decisions were debated in this room for hours that should have been made in minutes. First, the director of this group was fired, then they went through 2 CTO's in 2 years, each re-organizing everything. Bar none the least productive shop I've ever seen. All management knew how to do was insist on more hours in hopes of getting something useful. Working conditions were so bad the girl who sat next to me jumped to her death in front on the San Leandro Bart train one morning after getting yelled at again for yet another failed deliverable.

I took the job because they wanted help migrating some apps from an old proprietary stack to Java and I'd done this many times before. However, if you weren't from that village, you were not to be trusted. Finally, they moved the whole team to another office 20 minutes away but I stayed at the office close to my house. I just gave up and enjoyed a few months of doing nothing, going for long bike rides in the hills in Oakland during the work day before moving on.

I think I stumbled into some kind of fraud where they were just giving jobs to people they knew without any qualifications without any intention of building software. It was truly bizarre.

I worked in a hat factory as a summer HS/college break job. I stood at the end of a table and inspected the initial wool cut outs that would eventually be formed into the hats. The hats would go through a machine that sprayed them with god knows what chemicals, someone would capture them out of the machine and place them on the table, while the rest of us at the station would turn them inside out and hold them up to the light to look for flaws (thin spots).

I would look at the clock every 45 minutes to see that only 10 minutes had passed.

I was one of the lucky ones though because every hour or so, I got to move to another station to hang newly-formed hats from another station on a drying rack that would take them to the next floor.

I was a bag boy for six months or so in high school for . I wanted some extra side money and a friend of mine worked there and offered to put in a good word for me.

Simultaneously, I had been a high performing student, taking all advanced classes, doing after school sports, etc.

The job itself was not intense or anything. But it was miserable. You could tell that nobody working in that store wanted to be there. Some seemed positively stuck too, like they couldn’t move on and improve their lives even if they really wanted (I don’t actually believe this).

Anyways it induced something of a small existential crisis in me seeing all these sad people who had been what I thought at the time was wasting sometimes decades away working these pointless jobs. I became depressed a bit and my studies fell. I also kind of sucked at the job after a while because it was mind numbing.

Anyways it’s put a lot of my career as a software engineer into perspective and I’m very thankful to be in the position I am. I am also much more thoughtful about bigger picture goals and things I want out of life because of it. Perhaps most importantly though I never look down on anyone based on their job or career.

After moving abroad with my girlfriend, I didn't initially speak the language. I needed a job so I applied for a job in my mother tongue. The job was calling construction site workers and conducting interviews with them about the drilling machines they use. Some of the questions I remember: "How many holes do you drill a day?", "how happy are you with your drill?", "what would you rather have: a drill that's lighter, or more reliable, or ...?". I needed to complete a full interview to get paid for it, which took a good 15 minutes at least. The people I called were on-site and busy with their things, and didn't really have the time to spare. Worst thing: the calls were made automatically, within 30 seconds of the last call, so you were constantly on the phone. I quit on the second day.

I was a substitute teacher for two school years. Remember how mean we all were to subs in school?

The really horrible thing wasn't the kids though, but that I was essentially a gig worker (this was before Uber was widespread so the term hadn't really taken off). I had no guaranteed hours. Instead, schools in the area would post to a website when they needed a sub. Those jobs would be put on the site and the first person to pick them up would get them. This meant usually a couple hours a night refreshing that page, waiting for jobs to trickle in, and pouncing on them. My only computer at the time was a crappy little 7-inch EeePC with the tiny tiny keys. I did end up automating some of the tedium but I still had to actually decide if the job was worth it -- some of the schools were so far away that it was barely worth it after figuring in gas money, and some classrooms were such disciplinary nightmares that it wasn't worth my sanity.

If I didn't get a gig the night before, I would need to wake up at 4:30am to do the same: shower, eat, get dressed, wait for the last minute jobs to show up, hope to snag one, then jump in the car and drive hopefully in time for first bell at about 7:15-7:45am (differed by school). Sometimes I would do all that, driving 45m to some rural school, only to find later on payday that they had cheaped out and not paid me for a prep hour, saving themselves pocket change in order to screw me out of 50 minutes of pay. With hustle, I could usually get work on school days, though probably every other week I'd have a day where there was no work (and therefore no pay). I had to wear a suit and tie every day as well (or else schools would complain to my company that I was unprofessional) even when I knew for a fact that the school had a more casual dress code, or did "jeans Friday", etc. When I was really desperate (if I'd had a few no-work days that pay period, for example), I would sit at the computer until lunch time hoping to pick up half-day gigs. Again, none of this time looking for jobs is compensated in any way.

It was a truly dystopian experience and is the reason I have never ordered DoorDash, Shipt, TaskRabbit, etc. and have only used Uber in dire situations where I can't take public transit and I don't have access to any vehicle or the ability to bum a ride from a friend. Treating employees this way (no guaranteed hours, unpaid scrambling for individual gigs, etc.) is simply evil.

My first software job was by far the worst. I worked directly under the CTO, who was a huge micromanager. The code I was working on was akin to what we'd call now micro services. Except each "service" was a single, 5,000+ line functional PHP script. There were no common libraries, but plenty of duplicated code. It was myself, another person who wasn't a developer but was working as one, and the CTO who knew just enough to be dangerous.

I would be called into the CTOs office (next door to the shared office 3 of us were in) multiple times a day by him just yelling our names. We were expected to drop whatever we were working on and go in to answer whatever question happened to pop into his head at that second.

Often applications would break and the CTO would want to know why, only to find that the local copies of the code on my and my co-workers machines didn't match what was on the server. Which means the CTO changed it, but refused to admit they changed anything, claiming it must have changed itself. When me and my co-worker suggested adding version control to the code, the CTO immediately shut it down.

These things would happen routinely for the 2 years I worked there. And for an extra kick in the pants, the dress code was shirt and tie and we would be pulled aside and talked at if a shirt came untucked.

When I was a teenager, I had a summer job at a galvanizing plant. Sometimes birds would fly in one end and drop dead before exiting the other. At the end of the day, clearing your sinuses would expel dark/black mucus. It was also very hot, from all the molten zinc. One time a cold lampost was lowered in, and some zinc flew out the non-lowered in end, hitting me in the stomach while I was completely outside, burned right through my shirt and left a scar for years.

The worst was chain-link fence. You stood on a grate right over the zinc tanks with a file/hook and cutters. Anytime the fence got caught up, you tried to untangle it without stopping the line. The best time was loading the fence on trailers sitting outside in the fresh air, shooting shit, waiting for the next batch to load.

How about the worst job I didn’t get?

Went to an interview with some random company in Sacramento I didn’t even come close to qualifying for (database designer or something) with me doing horribly but for some reason they kept up the interview. Then it came up that the real job was being the person to take the calls for people who’s water bill went up after a property reappraisal and I was like “yeah, this isn’t going to work out” and just walked out.

Worked for a great boss on a great team building some really cool stuff. We had some organizational problems and the boss wouldn't stop people from doing stuff that was actively harmful, but I dealt with it best I could. Then a new boss came in and made all new work be about "getting wins", and trying hail-mary stuff that, if it worked, would make him look like a genius so he could get a promotion, but would leave us holding the bag trying to deal with the tech debt and not actually improving the project. If we disagreed, new boss would yell at team to get his way, force us to do whatever he wanted rather than letting us have a discussion, weigh pros/cons, generally have agency and some input. I created a presentation detailing all of the problems and solutions for all of them, and presented them to the new boss and boss's boss. Both of them chewed me out for not doing more myself to solve the problems and only complaining. Soon after my contract was not renewed. That's when I found out that if you make your boss(es) look bad, it's in their interest to get rid of you.

HVAC. There's nothing like jumping into a damp crawl space in the winter or playing in fiberglass insulation in the summer.

Being a cook at a diner in my twenties, in a horribly mismanaged kitchen.

I started just as the cook for colder items. Making salads and simple appetizers. It was perfectly fine.

However it quickly became like Darth Vader's super-star destroyer with people being fired or quitting. So I moved up to expiditing (calling out, tracking, and gathering all the dishes in an order). Then finally to grill cooking hamburgers to order, etc. All in a very short amount of time (within a month)

The amount of multitasking needed to work in a chaotic kitchen is insane. Lots of shouting and angry wait staff and customers. Needing to actually cover multiple stations (grill, fryer, etc). Difficulty tracking the status of everything. Eventually I also walked out.

My first job at Jarvik Heart. I worked directly for the infamous Dr. Jarvik "inventor of the artificial heart (not really)".

He is famously awful to work for, and with. We made LVADs, including the CNC machining in Hells Kitchen in Manhattan.

He would steal people's unpaid PTO when they left, and even would sue former employees regarding their non-compete agreements, even when they weren't enforceable. He had friends in high places in the NYC court system so was able to get cases to go further than they should, using it as an intimidation tactic. He cost many former employees their new jobs, and careers.

His legacy- terrible to work with, for, and a real awful person.

Worked for a large corporation in a non-tech space.

It wasn’t the worst job as far as pay/benefits goes, but holy shit I wasn’t able to do anything in that job.

The project I was specifically hired for basically never got off the ground. It got stuck in some weird void where bureaucrats and managers constantly argued about X or Y to the point nothing got done. And my job became a mix of “sit around” or “support any rando who needed a little relief, leading me to get stuck supporting COTS shitware. After two years of basically nothing happening (despite them hiring more people for the project) I left for the job that would then lay me off last year.

Call center in a cubicle farm to cold call people and ask their opinions on popular songs being played on the radio.

You'd play them samples of songs and ask them to rate them. Their responses were gathered for marketing research.

Some people really don't like getting cold calls (myself included) especially when you're male and asking to speak "Julie" who happens to be their wife.

Our time was so regulated if you were one minute late to work, returning from break, etc, mgmt would send you a message telling you to get your act together.

Red flag one was having to pass a spelling test as part of the job interview.

Worst job was working as telemarketer selling tickets to a charity event, 3-4 hours a night. It was cold-calling, reading off a script, and absolutely nobody wanted to talk to you. If you could make it through the script before they hung up, it was a victory. I sold a few tickets, but hands down the worst job.

Worked as a janitor at a large department store- buffed floors, cleaned windows, and a stint of cleaning the bathrooms. Occasionally gross, but nobody watched you while you worked, so would just daydream while I was doing it.

I worked for a linen rental company when I was in HS. We would rent tablecloths, napkins, aprons, etc to restaurants. When they were dirty the restaurants would put them in garbage bags and leave them outside until we picked them up. During the summer these bags would fill up with maggots, and the smell would be atrocious.

My job was to take the bags that we picked up and sort the linen by color, type, etc.

I worked for a tent company (like where you rent big tents from). They had contracts all over central fl, mostly at Kennedy space center for events and what not. My job was to load and unload trucks full of 5 gallon buckets filled with concrete. That’s about all there was to it and it was awful.

My current one.

It's my highest paying, but also filled with the most lies or double standards, frustrating, and stressful.

I've also worked in retail, in a warehouse, and as a janitor. The pay sucked, but at least the impact was tangible and the expectations were straightforward.

I've had some crappy jobs, but the worst job was one I actually really enjoyed, it was the horrible manager that ruined it for me. People join companies, people leave managers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detasseling -- Thanks Nebraska

working shutdowns in the south-east texas petroleum processing chemical plants. Time and a half after 40 hours and double time pay after 60. They paid per diem based on how many miles we came to work and gave us a hotel then we would work 16 hour days for a couple months or until the project was done. This was my dads life for a long time and I tried it a couple times at 18yo, realized this isn't for me, then went to art college.

i've had a few, but the worst? prob the one that was just bad enough but not so bad that i should have quit a lot earlier but didn't. :-/

i packed wiper blades for a half day on a college break.

i listened to a mcdonald's orientation in high school, i think.

i had a tech support job in foster city at a high tech sweat shop for a half day.

yeah, when i think back, there were actually a lot of them.

I worked in a warehouse for around 3 months over a decade ago. They stored data in paper form from various companies. I was hired to place stickers sequentially on all the incoming boxes.

One of the worst aspects of that job was I wasn't trusted with anything. I think this is because I got the job through a staffing agency, and this warehouse probably assumed that anyone they were going to hire would either be sketchy or missing a bulb in the pack, but would at least be competent enough to place stickers. I couldn't even operate the sticker printer or fix issues without annoying this one other guy who I was never sure was my actual boss. Every day, I had to put these stickers on pallets of boxes, standing the whole 8 hours, and perform janitorial duties if I happened to get through that day's worth of palettes.

It was a very lonely job, which was both a plus and a negative. I could put on my headphones and space out, and after a while I figured out areas that were out of sight of security cameras, so I'd sneak under them and play games or read comics. No, I wasn't lazy, but if I got through all my boxes and already swept the entire warehouse, there really wasn't anything else to do, but I had to look like I was working if anyone spotted me. I never got caught in one of my hiding spots.

What made the job more lonely, ironically, was the fact that sometimes I'd be working with someone. I was never fast enough for these people, so there was a handful of times where they brought in someone else from staffing to help out with the stickers. These people never lasted more than a week, if they even lasted a few days. It sucked because they were personable and I was hoping I'd make a friend or two. One of them was a Black lady, real nice person. I didn't expect to hit it off that easily with someone from a different background from mine; we were joking and laughing the whole time, and I even showed her where those hiding spots were once I knew she was cool. The following week rolls by and she's not there. I was disappointed because she made the job a lot more tolerable.

The one cool thing about the job is boxes frequently came in with missing covers or they'd fall apart, which let me peek and see what's inside. A lot of the incoming boxes were from big film studios, and I found some scripts for old films and TV shows. In retrospect, I could have rifled through that stuff more and gotten away with it, but I was mostly a good boy back then. lol I like to believe there were some lost episodes somewhere in those boxes.

I stayed for 3 months because I badly needed the money. This was a few years after the Great Recession and I still found it difficult to find work as someone with no experience in animation (which was my first career). I did make some money doing web development, but at that time I didn't have any projects to work on. The staffing company, for good and bad, gave me a job pretty easily.

In the end, I just had something snap in my mind. I suddenly realized "I can't come back to this anymore." I collected my check from the staffing company, told them I'm not showing up again, and that was that.

There are worse jobs from a physical standpoint, but being almost alone in a gigantic warehouse of identical looking boxes and having the sole task of placing stickers was the most soul-crushing experience I've ever had.

Cleaning the change rooms, showers, washrooms and common areas at the local YMCA. Overnight job.

What do I win? ;-)

Detasseling corn.

The worst was at a company in Berkeley. I was the person who kept the "mini computer" up and running - backups, coding the billing system - pretty much everything.

I had a manager. Oh my fucking god. This nasty fucker, I don't think he ever showered, always had those huge perspiration wet spots under his underarms. He stunk like shit. I'm sure he never showered. And also, his mouth - fucking green teeth, I'm sure he never brushed his teeth and his breath stank.

The guy was a super loudmouth bully, and always expounding on philosophers, rather than working. And it really was his social manner that was way worse than his hygene, if you can believe that.

I remember one time we went to a cheap diner, and he was being his loudmouth self, and as this woman was sitting at another table for a while, she finished her lunch and got up and as she passed, she said words to the effect of: "I don't know how you can stand this guy, he is so obnoxious and gross. I'd quit if I worked with him." That's how bad he was - some random woman, who didn't even have a dog in the fight, said how nasty he was after listening to him for about 10 minutes.

The guy actually gave me an actual breakdown. Panic attacks, which are NOT fun if you don't know what they are and what is going on. They are not how they sound. Instead of panic attacks, it should be named "I'm going to fucking die in the next 10 minute attacks." I eventually quit. I should have listened to that woman and quit a lot sooner, but at that time, it was quite a bit more difficult to get a job in the tech field.

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The jobs I actually liked the best were in retail, waiting on customers. I know people abhor those jobs, but I like them. I like waiting on people, and making them happy and interacting with people. My favorite job of all time was McDonalds restaurant, if you can believe that. I think I should have stayed with them and tried to move up the ladder.

I also worked a manufacturing job for a summer job after high school and before going to college. That was great. All I did was these plastic butter tubs shot down this V-shaped chute. I would wait until about 50 of them had come down the shoot, and there was a mark on the chute that indicated that there were 50 of them there and stacked. I would then take 50 and put them in a box. When the box was full, I'd tape up the box and put it on a pallet, got another box from the stack of folded cardboard boxes, open it up and tape it up, then start the process of putting a stack 50 tubs at a time into that box. 12 hours per day for 3 days, 2 days of, 12 hours per day for 2 days, 3 days off kind of gig. You would think that job was horrible, and mind-numbing. But to me, it was zen. I would just zen out for 12 hours and I liked it. It wasn't boring, to me anyways. My boss was the guy on the printing machine. He was really weird, could barely talk in complete sentences but was cool. He sat next to the machine doing nothing, until the machine broke down, which was at least twice a day. He would then fix it, and I'd wait, and then back to the boxing. But nobody fucked with you. You were just there by yourself all day, which for a mild introvert, is pure heaven.

Part I:

Working at a company with 6 million+ lines of C++ COM code with an old UI (still in use) that was written in Delphi but was migrating to a new system (written using MFC....) with zero documentation other than a Wiki nobody updated, and 2 senior developers who weren't overly communicative and would be lumbered with fixing others' code because they didn't tell them how anything worked. Then the "junior" developers would leave because they kept getting berated for doing stuff wrong, and the cycle would start again with another developer who got the job. An eternal cycle of stressed, frustrated, bored (because they wouldn't be given interesting code to work on because they weren't trusted/"good" enough) developers, but 2 very busy senior developers.

The newer C++ code had a good idea in a function-based system for the UI but the functions were too generic and would accept parameters of any type, so a lot of the runtime code was working out if the object you were passed was of the right type. It was too flexible, and also meant the implementation team who would design the software for the users hadn't a clue what the parameters were meant to be.

The schema for the database was generated from their own textual file format that let you specify soft relationships instead of hard FK relationships. XML was nowhere to be seen. The parser for this format was convoluted and also very picky about the format of the schema file.

The schema would be translated into header files so that you could refer to fields in the database by an enum value, and then pass off reading/writing that field to the underlying database code so that developers (ideally) didn't have to write SQL. It was their own ORM system but it was quite simplistic and to do anything worthwhile you had to write your own SQL. The schema for the database was not published, nor did it use sensible names, so you'd have to learn this baffling schema and hope for the best. All transactions pending for the database were put into an object that transacted them in one, and they were under the illusion that this was their sole invention in the entire universe. Whilst a good idea, the singular nature of these transaction objects and self-contained business logic meant that when object A hit the database, it might load object B, C, D and E. Each of these might load F, G, H, I and J and so on, so you ended up with a colossal tree of SQL hitting the database. It was incredibly slow.

The database also used magic numbers to change the behaviour of the software. Even in the user interface that the customers used, they taught on training courses that to make it do X Y or Z, simply open the config editor (an Excel-like grid) and the number 5 into grid B25...! As if this was perfectly understandable or usable? It never ever struck them that it might be a good idea to put English words next to settings.

At runtime, the software loaded its schema in a C++ object that it had serialized to the database when the database was upgraded. Since the pointers inside this object had now changed, at runtime on loading it would hook up the pointers to point to the correct parts of this object. If the schema upgrade failed when running its SQL, the schema object might still get saved I think so you could end up with the physical database schema being X whilst the serialized object was Z, so at runtime it was haywire.