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Not all jobs that pay well are worth it, and sometimes jobs that pay little are terrible, too.
If you can find the absolute sweet spot of a great job that’s also awesome, that’s the best.
If you can’t, though, a low paying job you love might be the next best thing – as long as you can afford it.
14. Not bad if you can get it.
Immediately after getting out of the Army, I took a job as a security guard at a large factory as a “filler” until I could find something better. I was there about six months.
My job was to patrol the parking lots during the night shift, making sure no cars were being broken into, etc. Which is just another way of saying “ride around in a golf cart smoking weed all night.” The pay was shit, but I loved that job.
13. A good manager is everything.
I’ve waitressed in way too many restaurants and I hated all of them, except for one sushi spot. It was in a hipster part of town so my co-workers and the customer base were cool as hell. It truly never felt like “work” because I was essentially just socializing my entire shift.
Enough time has passed where we all moved on or literally moved out of the city but they felt like family and I really miss it.
Oddly relevant, my old manager texted me yesterday (haven’t talked to him since I left in 2016) just to say he was thinking about me and wished me well.
12. Not bad pay for the work.
As a student in university, one of the departments hired me to copy VHS tapes for some training course.
The idea was, I got paid only like $5 a tape and each tape took like 40minutes, but all I had to do was rewind the two tapes, swap out the one I just copied for a fresh one, put a label on and put it in a box. Then put an empty tape in and press play on one and record on the other.
They paid me peanuts cause I was supposed to just do it in the background as I worked on my studies or whatever. No problem.
Thing was, it was end of live for VHS, everyone had the machines but no one ever fucking used them, so everyone and their brother lent me their machines, and I just managed to split the f*ck out of that cord and I wanna say, rig it up to go 20:1?
In the end, I had a job where I just sat surrounded by machines, did whatever I would normally do and once an hour pressed some buttons and pulled down something like 100$ an hour for my work.
I just sat on the tapes till the semester was over and then delivered them all at once.
11. There’s always something to see.
Runner at an architecture firm.
$7hr (in the 90s), but basically a delivery driver who got to hang out in a plush office around cool people and cool projects when I wasn’t driving around a few hours a day.
10. And now she’s a vegetarian.
Working on my Aunty and Uncles farm when I was in high school. Pay was shit to say the least, but I got to look after all of these beautiful animals that all acted like pets because they were treated as such.
It was so awesome seeing how all these farms animals would come up to cuddle and just hang out whenever I would be working around them. I also got to drive their truck around the farm which was unreal to someone barely a teenager!
9. Good coworkers go a long way.
I got paid like $10.50 an hour so it wasn’t super low income
But I worked at a vitamin warehouse with a bunch of other dudes. We basically talked shit and laughed a lot while packing boxes together in a room all day. I think about that job A LOT. I was at a shitty place in my life and going to work wasn’t all that bad for once.
8. Everybody wins!
I worked at Legoland when it first opened here in the UK. I started off on rides, but soon moved to a restaurant as the lunch breaks there were better.
The restaurants back then were really decent – we used to make everything from scratch. I worked in an Italian place, we used to make pasta, pizza dough, all the sauces, chop up whole legs of ham and every single vegetable by hand.
Started when I was 15, learnt all I could from the professional chefs who ran the kitchens and by the time I left at 18 I got a job while I was at Uni in a kitchen of a family-owned Italian place who couldn’t believe I’d learnt all I knew from working at Legoland.
Also, when I left, I hadn’t realized over the near 4 years I worked there – weekends and holidays – I had been accruing holiday pay, and never taken a day’s paid holiday. When I left they gave me a sizable cheque which became the basis of a savings account that eventually became a decent house deposit.
7. Low stress is worth something.
I worked in France as a Saunier. I harvested salt from salt marshes on an Island in the Atlantic ocean. Worked hours under the blistering sun, with my bare feet in contact with the hot cracked earth underneath, and the salt burning my skin.
I was paid very little but I loved every moment of it. Oh the view, such a wonderful view. The peace, the lack of stress… it was wonderful 9/10 would do it again
6. Love it or hate it.
My current job is the best I’ve ever had. The pay is only ~31k and not something I can do forever as I get older but all I do is sit at a desk and do maybe 2 hours of work a day.
As someone who used to work 10-12 hour days doing manual labor and also call center work where I had to work weekends taking a significant pay cut so I can play RuneScape and work on some college classes was absolutely worth it.
5. One person’s dream is another person’s nightmare (it’s me).
I ran a Lego summer camp for kids. I basically got payed to build Lego and come up with ideas for kids to build.
4. Pizza makes everyone happy.
I worked for a mom and pop pizza place. I only got paid $5.75 (1997 or so) but if I had made a living wage I would’ve stayed there. I just liked making good food and making people happy.
The owner was a fun Vietnamese guy that was cool to talk to and we used to watch UFC and boxing video tapes on the security system. It was a good time.
3. I would love a kid like this.
When I was 12 I worked in a babysitter-type-role for $2/hr. I absolutely loved it. The mom was always in the house (just working from home) and I got to play board games and read books aloud.
I’m not entirely sure how I got that job. I just remember my mom asking if I’d be interested and my glowing ecstatic response. But I’d put $5 down that they were a lower-income family than I guessed at the time and that my ultra preceptive mother had coaxed her into accepting some cheap childcare.
2. Free movies!
Scooped popcorn at a movie theater.
4 free movie passes per week for the most entry level position, leads and managers got more. You could trade them for free food around the whole shopping center.
So as an 18 year old, I got all the free movies, popcorn and food from restaurants in the area I wanted.
1. That does sound nice.
I worked at a dog daycare in the play yard.
One of the perks was that employee dogs could come in for free.
(With proof of vaccinations.)
So I got to watch my 4 dogs play 8 hours a day.
Oh, to go back to the days when money didn’t have to be a huge consideration!
Have you ever had a job you loved, despite the low pay? Tell us about it in the comments.
