I’m a Thai actor. I can’t speak for all actors, but I get paid ~250k baht per episode for a lakorn (TV drama). A typical lakorn has ~15 episodes. I usually do 1 per year. Add to that the salary I get from the TV network to stay with them.
I push buttons in my basement in my underwear.
Pay is pretty good because I know what buttons to push in what order.
Could be a DJ, gamer, streamer or only fans…
Computer programmer
Close. I talk to the customers so the engineers don’t have to.
Excellent people skills
OSU!
I am a stay at home Dad. The pay is terrible and my boss is extremely immature. Best job I’ve ever had.
Depending on your boss, you get all the plastic food you could need though!
Air trafic controller (Europe, not FAA…)
It’s honestly a kind of dream job as I work around 2 weeks a month, have 7 weeks of paid vacation + I can call in “unfit to work” anytime with no question asked. We often work 2 to 4 hours less than the official time we are paid for. We get paid health cure and the job is not that hard or stressful when you are good at it (I’ve done it for 15 years, it’s like a second nature now).
The pay is very good, around 100k (€/$/chf, it’s basically the same) at entry level and around 220k after 20 years of experience. I’m at 150k for a 80% part time contract.
The only downsides are the working hours, 24h a day 7 days a week which gets tiring as you age. And that much money for not much work makes me lazy, not being at risk means I’m not making efforts to gets better. I dream of being an independent worker, working from home or anywhere in the world on my framework 13 by making creative work, but I’m not pushing hard for that dream as everything is ok with my life and job.
I know, that’s totally a “1st world problem” and I’m not complaining at all. It’s just that being too comfortable in something does not push you forward.
Wait, you’re expected to be working for 168 hours straight?
I wanted to get into the Tower so bad when I was younger. I perform great under stress and I love that kind of job. But FAA regulations ban me outright because of a heart problem I have and now I’m too old. Haha.
Glad you enjoy it! It sounds like a really cool job
Yeah, work-life balance is very important. I love that in acting we shoot for a few months then have the rest of the year off during which you do various gigs and ventures and relax.
what’s your porn name?
Disabled, unable to work. I get paid around 8k (USD equivalent) a year to survive. I’m barely alive and in poverty.
Nice try IRS, but you already know what I do: Unemployed, I only deliver newspapers to keep a day rhythm.
Per month 450€ for paper delivery, 600€ from the state (mostly rent assistance).
Lived half a year from my savings without any assistance and learned to cut back at everything unnecessary. Now I get more money and don’t need to pay into healthcare. Feels weird to be able to splurge again. Nothing contributes to my pension fund at the moment, but nobody believes in pensions here anyway.
Network engineer working the night shift. I’m at around $165k. Would do the job for 95k if I could do it from home.
Unionized IT for the primary job. Contract for the second.
My primary spot alone is about 10% high for this region, job, and experience level. And it’s union. And 100%wfh is in the contract. And my boss is awesome. Sometimes the work is dumb, but that’s fine. People retire on half pay.
That’s, what, $107k/y? That’s a good, solid middle-class income in the US, unless you live in an expensive area. E.g., it’s a great salary if you live in Manhattan, Kansas; it’s not a lot if you live in Manhattan, New York. What’s the cost of living where you live?
I’d go by the price of eggs, but they’re outrageously expensive under our current regime.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Bangkok Here’s a general overview.
43% less expensive than where I live yet milk costs the same as here 🤔
Milk isn’t a big thing in Asia on account of 99% of them being dairy intolerant.
Milk prices vary widely. The Midwest has a lot of cows. Milk is pretty cheap in most places, although Big Dairy flattens that out a lot. I’d expect milk to be very expensive in Japan, which isn’t conducive to dairy farming.
I only just now realized that, when doing cost of living comparisons, you really have to consider lifestyle. For example, my wife has a dairy allergy, so I’m the only person in the house who consumes any dairy. If you don’t eat gluten, bread prices are irrelevant, and you really should factor those out in the cost of living index.
Maybe it all averages out, in the end. “Housing”, “food”, “gas” - whatever indexes they use, they’re just aggregates.
Could be subsidies in your country. Could be geography of Thailand. When I was there it didn’t strike as the kind of land with expansive dairy ranches. As an example, New Zealand produces almost 20x as much dairy as Thailand.
regime
It’s still a government, give it a couple of years.
Good point.
I’d definitely have to make a burner account before answering this honestly.
Used to make $80k a year (before taxes) as Co-Lead of a Data Analytics department.
Managed databases, did analytics (regular, structured and custom one off SQL queries), reporting, general software development (basically my team and IT, 2 or 3 people, were the only people in the whole org more computer literate than ‘can respond to an email, maybe’), API construction/management, process documentation, coordinated with every other team.
I enjoyed the work, loved my team, though the technical and general incompetence of many other employees was challenging to deal with.
As an example:
In doing process documentation with one team, I interviewed 5 different people on that other team, including their lead, and all of them described completely different processes with maybe 20% agreement…
But, then I got assaulted, crippled, lost my job, got evicted, car got stolen, eventually got SSDI payments to kick in after spending a year homeless (my family are abusive and dysfunctional, my ‘friends’ didn’t care) and now live off of about $22k a year, still recovering, still doing PT.
If Elon and Trump gut Social Security, I’ll die homeless and starving.
The place I used to work at was a non profit housing and aiding the homeless, by the way.
Go Team America.
That first half sounded cool. Then I reached the latter half… Really hope you the best in your recovery.
Software dev for a shipping logistics company. I make $80k with 100% paid decent enough health insurance for me and my family.
I could get paid a lot more, but this week I took a 4 hour lunch to go to the park and play soccer with my kid. I let my boss and coworker know and they both just said to have fun and say hi to the family for them. I do something like that at least 2 times and week and it’s not a problem.
Last week I went to the aquarium on a whim and my coworker decided that sounded fun and brought his kid too. You would have to pay me a lot more money than I’m worth to give up this kind of freedom.
Yup, this is so good to find. The company I work for is so flexible with time. First job I’ve ever had where I’m not micro managed to death on projects and time.
To contrast my last company, they gave me a laptop that was absolute shit and would give me the blue screen on death a few times a day. I asked for a better one and they said no so I asked if I could just use my person laptop and they said sure. Then I started getting messages and calls constantly from someone I didn’t know asking why I wasn’t working (according to the tracking software on my company toaster).
They then wanted to install their software on my personal laptop, it told them they could try. Watching this lady try to open an exe file on my Debian system for an hour was classic. I tried explaining it to her from the beginning but to her I was a lazy ungrateful kid who was taking advantage of the company. She called IT in to help her who I was good friends with and he told here was already tracking software on there and opened up the syslog file and pointed out the timestamps. So I had to send her a file with timestamps at the end of each day, which I just wrote a script to generate instead of sending her my actual syslog.
In the end they made me go back to the shitty windows laptop and I kept getting calls about not working during the periods the laptop was crashing and taking 30 minutes to reboot. I also started getting calls from my boss about why projects weren’t being finished.
Sorry for the long reply, I can never be quick when I talk about that place. I still get skeeved out.
messages and calls constantly from someone I didn’t know asking why I wasn’t working.
Do you think they were literally outsourcing worker spying and harassment? That’d be a pretty ridiculous low and yet wouldn’t surprise me anymore…
That honestly wouldn’t suprise me at all, although I was almost never in the office so I didn’t know most of the people there outside of my small circle and a few higher ups. I do remember asking a friend who was in the office more if this person was legit and she said she’d never seen her but has gotten a lot of emails from her about “not working”.
I’m a waitress, I make about 60K USD give or take 5K. It varies significantly throughout the year, though. In Chicago, that’s enough to support a family of five.
I am amazed that you can support a family of 5 with 60k!
That said, i am also amazed that you can make 60k being a waitress! Is that after paying taxes?
before taxes
the secret is simple: no car. It’s a huge expense and in a city like Chicago, completely unnecessary. I never would’ve been able to buy a home with that millstone around my financial neck
You have a house and 5 people on 60k in Chicago… That’s crazy
lowest CoL major city in America
Electronics Engineer, UK (in the North), £39,000 after 5 and a half years of experience.
My field pays about the middling amount for the engineering profession. If I were to move overseas I could expect a 50% to 100% increase in pay.
Though my current company is great because they treat me very well. Hybrid work on offer with a minimum of 2 days in the office but since my job requires being in the office I don’t use that except for Fridays or when I’m not feeling great but still able to work, flexible working hours as long as I’m available during core hours of 10am to 4pm and Fridays are usually a half-day unless I’m very busy. There’s a pay-adjusted profit share bonus (the lower your salary is, the more you get from the bonus) and they try to match inflation with automatic pay rises.
Much better than my previous place which gave me suicidal depression, anxiety, and workplace-stress-induced PTSD where raised voices and slamming doors trigger an anxiety attack.
As an American, I’m pretty shocked at your salary. Is that comfortable for you?
https://plannit.ai/ppp-calculator/united-kingdom
It translates to around 53k US. Could be comfortable, depending on where they live.
This is so, so variable. Cost of living in US can swing dramatically with food and housing.
Definitely. Same with UK.
The north is very cheap to live. And they put gravy and cheese on their chips (as a non-Northerner sounds revolting until you try it).
Lol. Like poutine?
Eh it’s the best I’ve had and honestly, it’s about average for a mid-level Electronics Engineer without becoming Senior Designer / Team Lead or Manager.
Thing is that there’s not much of an industry here in the UK compared with the States. Also it’s not a direct one-to-one as if I were to move to the states they’d probably pay me about $80k because they’d want some value (saving on wage) for going through the extra effort of a H1B visa. On top of that there’s also whatever I’d be expected to pay for health insurance.
Do you think the HS2 will change things by opening up more tech positions and making it more competitive?
If they ever finish the fucking thing properly.
They made two classic British engineering mistakes:
Mistake A: Bundling the whole thing as one humongous engineering project and creating a single entity to deliver it.
Mistake B: Starting construction in London.
WARNING: ENGINEERING RANT AHEAD!
On Mistake A:
A single entity created for this huge megaproject makes for good political hay when raising interest and funds but that’s where the usefulness stops. What it devolves into, particularly with the UK’s rainforest-worth of planning laws and frameworks, is massively over budget and horrendously delayed.
What it should have been was a broad vision with dozens of smaller projects funded and implemented separately with constraints in place so all the individual sections line up once the whole thing is finished.
This fixes two things:
Fix 1: Breaks the scope of the project down into more manageable chunks with separate design authorities, construction contractors, and project management. So when they inevitably run into planning issues, they can be resolved much quicker through the courts and the committees because they’re dealing with 1/10 of the fucking reading material! It also keeps cost ballooning down as large projects work-hours scale logarithmically not linearly.
Fix 2: Allows them to bundle in small related upgrades that will have a more immediate effect once the smaller projects are completed.
For example, a new station section needs to be constructed for the high-speed lines. Well since you have to partially demolish the station to create new walkways, utility connections, toilets etc. why not also upgrade the passenger common areas like the departure boards, the outside areas, the retail space, the existing low-speed tracks and points that haven’t had any fucking upgrades done since steam was rolling on them!
Dozens of these smaller changes gets more local stakeholders (i.e. residents and commuters) on-side and more willing to put up with disruptions because, see Fix 1, the project won’t be as heavily delayed.
On Mistake B:
Starting in London might look to make sense at first glance since it is the largest city by both population and GDP per capita. But it means that the later stages of the project, when it inevitably gets delayed and spirals in cost, are the ones that are much more easily axed. This goes against the whole point of the project which was to shorten the commute to London from Northern Cities like Manchester, Leeds, and eventually Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Cardiff.
What we will have now is a very slightly faster journey time between Birmingham and London. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to regularly travel between Leeds/Manchester and London you’ll be aware that all of the delays and cancellations happen immediately north of Birmingham.
Birmingham to London is already well serviced whereas an upgraded route between Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham would have a measurably better impact on passenger numbers and reliability. This is because Westminster has NEVER cared about infrastructure beyond Cheltenham and only goes to Birmingham out of convenience as the next largest population centre.
In and around London, by far, is also the MOST expensive place to build anything, blowing most of the initial budget within the boundary of the M25.
By applying Fix 1 and Fix 2 you can start implementation by using Fix 3: Start at multiple locations.
Starting the station and track construction from the other population centres of Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham with these smaller projects means that you can then source funding from combined local authorities, implement the projects faster because of the lower density and cost to build than London, AND insulates the overall vision from being scrapped when the political climate changes.
The average salary in most US states is only a little more than this, and this is for Northern England where you can expect to earn 50-100% less than London depending on field
That’s the average salary overall. An average electronics engineer makes $109k a year in the US. and even more in places like California.
This is true, but you asked if it’s comfortable for them, which is more a factor of average salary than the wage gap of a specific field. They are pretty much spot on average for northern areas.
Yeah but making average wages doesn’t necessarily mean they’re comfortable.
I guess you meant “as an American [in the same field]”, whereas I took you to mean just as any American which is why I made the comparison.
i.e. going by averages outside of the field, you’re about as comfortable here as an American would be, looking only at salary.
Apartment superintendent. $62k plus free rent and utilities.
I work on cars.
My dad did too, starting in 74. They paid for his ASE certifications and he raised a family on his income. With commission I make around 17 an hour and working on cars now is a fucking nightmare. Dont.