I think that is more a testament to the lives we now live as Software Developers more than anything else. It's not uncommon to find anecdotes of others on HN talking about how they maybe work 2-3 hours a day and take home 150k+ a year.

I started working my freshman year in high school in 2008 as a busboy at a local restaurant making $4.50/hr + tips from the servers working that night. I couldn't even drive yet so I pocketed most of that money and was grateful for the opportunity. (This ultimately allowed me to build my first PC and I allowed me to get into programming.)

I moved from there to another local restaurant with a similar job title, but quickly moved up into working in the kitchen as a line cook. I think I made $8 or $9/hr when I got the "promotion". After graduation I wandered around some and eventually ended up as an asst. manager at a Burger King.

Now, over a decade later, I can sometimes look back nostalgically at my time in food service, but I don't know that I would ever go back, for any amount of money.

The things I am nostalgic for are structure, a defined start/end time, and being able to leave work at work. The pay was awful, the people were generally nice enough, but there's always a rude customer at some point or a manager with a power trip. I don't miss waking up at 5am to man the drive-thru, or going home after midnight smelling like grease.

If I woke up tomorrow with no qualifications to write software, I would sooner go into a back breaking trade than go back to retail.

I think we will see automation really start to take over these retail spaces in 2022. In my city (Dallas), pretty much every single fast food restaurant has mobile ordering or a kiosk available. My local Kroger expanded their self checkout lines and after 10pm, there are no more manned checkouts open. I've frequently had to scan and bag a full cart of groceries using self checkout (which sucks).

The past two years have opened up a lot of time for these giant corps to invest in R&D as the labor pool shrinks. Through the perfect storm of chip shortages and labor shortages, we haven't seen a large scale roll out, but I'm confident it's coming as soon as parts and installers are available.

Oh, I definitely feel like I'm working in the top 1% of jobs now.

Full time WFH since significantly before covid, it's B2B so even though I'm nominally on call, that's just a nice chunk of extra pay for maybe 1-2 calls a year. I do work hard when required, but it's not as required any longer, so I end up with a lot of free time when there are no issues to solve and I use that to go the extra mile to keep my customers happy.

Depends on the factory and what you're doing there. Last time I worked in a factory I was debugging printer-eating robots, shooting high powered lasers at things, and blowing stuff around with blasts of compressed air. (And I got to program all those things).

You haven't really debugged things until your tests involve forklifts and 10t cranes. O:-)

I wish, this was more about working several summers near a large, hot furnace with no AC.

Oh, that's no fun. Sorry to hear it.

Fortunately people are working to make that kind of thing less necessary (though it can't be eliminated completely of course; someone still needs to watch and maintain the machines).

I mean, this isn't completely unsolvable--better AC would've made things better. But it probably wouldn't be that economical, because industries like that are rather price sensitive.