I’ve been offered the office job twice in my life now. I’ve always worked in a shop in industrial electrical manufacturing and field service. The first time was my old job, I ended up quitting entirely and walking out on a promotion for drafting, which paid less than my current job’s base salary and which has just exploded with raises, bonuses, overtime, double time on Sundays. I’m pretty happy where I’m at. But now my boss just mentioned there’s something available in the office at the end of the year and he’ll keep me in mind.
I’m kind of at a crossroads. Do I keep the job I physically enjoy doing more and keeps me busy and on my feet and hanging out with people who I enjoy their company? Or do I take the job which is gonna be a lot more boring, a lot of killing time, with relatively boring strangers, but would push me a lot into more knowledge and skills? And I’m genuinely interested in the field and want to learn more and apply myself, but I’ve never been someone who could sit at a desk all day. I’ve never had a job like that. But also I’m starting to outgrow my current position and it does get awfully repetitive testing and doing QA all day. I told him I’d think on it.
Keep in mind that more physically demanding jobs wear your body down faster. And if you took the office job and it wasn’t your cup of tea, how difficult would it be to go back to your current position?
My wife turned down an office promotion but negotiated basically all the pay and benefits of it to keep her current role, maybe you could give that a shot?
So my old job involved a lot of lifting heavy shit, drilling & fabricating, installing / bending heavy power wire and conduit. Where I’m at now is honestly pretty low stress on my body. I’m on my feet all day but it’s testing / QA. It’s honestly more paperwork of writing reports, testing, and half the time the field service is programming anyway. Also a lot of maintenance crews will do the heavy lifting on site.
So it’s a bit of a moot point in that regard.
If I left this position I doubt I could ever go back. They’d need to replace me with whoever I trained to take my place. We’d have to get sooo much more busy to justify more than two people in my current department.
Definitely a tough call, but it does sound like you have a good thing going. It sounds like your boss values you, so I’d suggest you take the route my wife did. She didn’t want to deal with the meetings/paperwork of a promotion, but talked her boss into getting a pay raise and some benefits while keeping her current role. Doesn’t hurt to ask. Best of luck!
I work 13 hour days, full of the risk of life and death, assault, cleaning up incontinent people, and massive legal liability. I barely make enough to afford a 1 bedroom apartment with my bachelor’s in my “professional” degree. When I get my master’s, and I get to diagnose conditions and prescribe medications, I’ll get ~10,000 more per year.
Nursing? We treat nurses and EMTs like crap for hope much they have to deal with. You prior deserve to be treated like the insanely hard working and caring people you are, but in our society the more you care the less they pay you.
Judging by their username I feel they probably work in robotics.
Protip: dont be that programmer.
You might think that working hard and putting the weight of everything on your shoulders is honorable and will be rewarded. But, no one will care. No one will care until you stop. When you stop dragging everyone else, when they have to start pulling, they’ll blame you. To them, things were going great until you started slouching.
I learned this lesson after about 5 years into my 15 year career. Busting your ass and going above and beyond just rewards you with more work. When i discovered what i was capable of, rarely did i give over 80%. The bonus there was when something was actually high priority, you can turn it up to 100 and get the recognition for going above and beyond.
Ive cruised until those moments. Im now outranking some of my peers who have gone hard and always “exceeded expectations” on their performance eval. Corporate life is bullshit and totally not fair. Its very political and very much a buddy-buddy in group
Edit: grammar. Words are hard first thing in the morning
If you spend your whole time doing your job you dont leave any time to kiss the ass of the guy who decides if your job performance is worthy.
