"They Pay Me To Do Nothing": People Are Sharing The Jobs That Pay Unexpectedly Well, And I May Or May Not Be Considering A Career Change
There are plenty of jobs in the world, and some of them pay more money than one might think. Recently, Redditor u/FlintTheDad asked people what job they or someone they know work that pays unexpectedly well, and some of them are quite surprising. Here are some jobs that you just might find yourself looking into:
1."Repairing slot machines. I'm currently getting $32/hr, and the benefits package and vacation time are incredible. Some days are busy, but last year, I managed to read a few books during my shifts."
2."I am a 'cannabis consultant' (budtender) for the government, and I make $28/hr to stand around and sell weed. I'm so overpaid; it's great."
3."I make six figures working at a lab in the Arctic and away from civilization. We get very few samples, and I spend most of my day watching YouTube — three weeks on, three weeks off. Essentially, they are paying me to go somewhere with peace and quiet and do nothing."
4."Mail carrier. I make $230 a day (wages are based on route value), and on Fridays, I start at 7 a.m. and am home before 9 a.m. Mondays are longer, and working on Christmas can suck, but for 10 months of the year, I work a max of four hours a day. We're unionized and have good benefits, PTO, personal days, and more. It's the best job I've ever had."
5."I work as a management consultant. I earn six figures, and my only real task is to listen to my boss whine. That's it."
6."I worked as a recruiter for Microsoft during the pandemic. There was such a fever pitch for tech talent that we were basically throwing $175k checks at anyone with a pulse. We have a lot of amazing tech talent, but some of the people we hired had no business being there. Like, they were literally twiddling their thumbs and handling one or two small projects each week while reaping almost $200k a year."
7."I'm a fashion photographer. My day rate for a campaign is $10k."
8."I get paid just under $80k working nights at a gym. I get all my work done in less than two hours and can basically do whatever for the other six. I watch football, scroll through the internet, and whatever else. It's not awesome money, but it's excellent for what I do."
9."I'm an overnight phlebotomist, and I get paid extremely well."
10."Real estate agent — if you work in the right market and have built a solid book of business and status within it. I work in a secondary/investment home market, and sometimes I do 'real' work, like organizing and implementing a six-figure improvement budget for a listing, in-depth CFA, equity forecasting, etc. This rather often still amounts to nothing earned, which is sometimes frustrating."
"However, there are other times when past clients or people I've just gotten into contact with are like, 'Hey, I want to buy this waterfront mansion. Can you handle the contract?' I then get the fairly short amount of necessary info, input it into a very standard digital contract, and email it over to another agent. Those are often healthy five-figure checks for maybe four hours of work that anyone can do effectively in full once the necessary follow-up is carried out. I sometimes feel much more validated in working for 72 hours straight for a couple of clients to get paid a total of $4k or not at all than I do having some wealthy guy pick me to write down his terms and receive a $25k check."
11."I'm a 911 operator, and I make $36 an hour with no degree needed. I mean, I do have to listen to some pretty fucked up stuff, but luckily, I've been emotionally dead for over a decade now, so it works out well for me."
12."Medical administrator. I know a married couple with the same medical admin bachelor's degrees and a one-year online master's in medical admin. They walked out of college into six-figure jobs over 10 years ago, and they now make about $500k each. I can't tell if they actually do anything for the hospital. During the pandemic, they took advantage of healthcare loans and didn't have to pay them back. They also own a second vacation home and worked there remotely throughout the entire thing."
13."I tangentially know through a friend a third-string quarterback in the NFL. He almost never actually plays in a game and basically sits on the bench. By the time he retires, he'll probably have made over $50 million. There's way too much money being thrown around in professional sports."
14."Event technology. I get $75k a year to set up projectors and microphones. Most of the day consists of waiting to break everything down after the event. There's lots of downtime — like, a lot. I was able to finish my associate's degree with all the free time I had."
15."Bartending. Depending on where you are, the money is amazing. All I do is pour and mix drinks, and I make an easy $6k a month."
16."I worked as a simple warehouse person and made over $100k the last three years. I made $146k last year alone. That said, there are many 'easy' jobs like that where you can make good bank."
17.Lastly: "Definitely consultants. I have an MBA, and after racing to leave a big law job I'd gotten right out of school, I briefly found myself at a consulting firm in DC. People there, including me, got paid obscene amounts of money to do very little. I felt like the firm was a parasite on the side of the whole corporate apparatus. Managing directors, many of whom were barely ever in office, got paid $500k (before bonuses) to oversee their teams of associates and directors who were largely doing wildly overpriced work that clients not only didn't need but were often redundant."
"I shit you not, I was once on a team that would fly around the country to review corporate documents that other teams had already reviewed in the past. In some cases, we’d be reviewing boxes of old litigation documents that had already been reviewed two or three times before. We’d just catalog them and essentially mark down, “Yep, the docs are still here in storage.” And yet there we were, a team of people making six figures, each billed out by the consulting firm at hundreds an hour (while staying at luxury hotels and eating out at expensive restaurants, ALL expensed and billed to the clients). From the outside, people even view that job as prestigious. But that was the first time I realized how much of the corporate world can become just a circular employment scheme."
BRB, going to learn how to repair slots. If you work a job that pays unexpectedly well, what is it, and what kind of work do you do? Let us know in the comments, or you can anonymously submit using this form!
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
