I’m a depressed web developer who’s hypothetically thinking about a possible career change. The issue is I live in a rural area. I’m wondering what kind of new career paths would be available to me out in the country? Two I can possibly think of would be a welder and construction, but I have no idea beyond that. Plus there’s the plethora of things I could possibly do online that Inhave no idea about.
I will most likely just stay as a work from home web developer, so don’t worry too much about me. But still wondering what possible alternatives there are out there, if anybody has any ideas they wouldn’t mind sharing.
I also realize that “rural” might not be specific enough, but I don’t want to get any more specific than that for privacy reasons.
It’s absolutely not a job for everyone, but damn-near every 911 dispatch center in the country is always hiring.
It may or may not work well with you being depressed. You hear a lot of terrible, depressing things of course, but if your depression is all about your job it might feel good to do something that can make a difference in your community.
First: Dispatch pays shit.
Second: the PTSD is usually a bigger problem than the depression, since you’re going to hear people die as you are trying to talk to them.
I work dispatch, that’s why I suggested it, it’s one of those jobs that’s everywhere that no one ever thinks about.
Pay certainly could be better, but who doesn’t think that about their job? Some agencies do better than others at compensating their dispatchers to be sure, the place I work does alright, I’m not struggling financially, I’m just not rolling in it. And you can’t overlook the value of a solid health plan and pension and other benefits.
PTSD and burnout is a real concern of the job, but it doesn’t hit everyone the same way. I’ve been here about 5 years, I was at my old job working in a warehouse about the same amount of time. If I’d stayed there much longer I’m pretty confident that I was heading for a mental breakdown within about a year. I was fed the fuck up with it, it was soul-crushing, mind-numbing work, and if you want to talk about being underpaid I could go on for days about how shit the pay was there and I was probably just about the highest paid guy in the warehouse after my manager. But with dispatch I still feel like I can stay at this job for another 20-30 years until I can retire, maybe that will change, a lot can certainly happen in a few decades, and I won’t pretend that I haven’t taken a handful of calls that will probably stick with me for the rest of my life, but the way my brain is wired and with the support systems I have in my life, I don’t have a problem living with them.
But like I said, it’s not a job for everyone, there’s a lot of reasons that we’re always hiring, some people can’t hack it mentally/emotionally, some want better pay, or don’t like the hours, some use it as a stepping stone to other careers, etc.
As far as pay goes, doing from web development to dispatch is (probably) going to be a pretty big step down in most cases. Going from warehouse to EMS dispatch is probably going to be largely a lateral move (although likely with better benefits, if you’re working directly for a municipality).
As far as my own pay rate is concerned, I would be fine with the amount that I was paid if it was annually adjusted for inflation and cost of living. As it stands, I make less money–in terms of purchasing power–now than when I started five years ago.
For me, and of course YMMV, dispatch was a significant pay upgrade from the warehouse I was working in in addition to the benefits. The dispatch center I work at is actually one of the lowest paid in my immediate area, but they’ve done a pretty good job of giving us raises, I’m definitely in a better financial place than I was when I started here even with everything crazy that has happened with the economy over the last few years.
And at the end of the day, it’s hard to put a dollar value on just not hating your life because of your job. I could barely call what I made there a living wage, and in truth it really wasn’t, I needed 2 roommates to afford a shitty apartment. But if the roles were reversed, and the warehouse was the higher paying job I might still have made the move to dispatch and taken a pay cut and considered it worth the necessary lifestyle adjustments.
For me, even just the hours I work are worth a lot, I avoid a lot of traffic because our shifts don’t line up with rush hour traffic, my commute takes me about a third of the time it used to despite working twice as far from home. I love working night shift (though I get thats not something that’s for everyone) and with the schedule I work (we do 12 hour shifts, which means longer work days but more days off, which I can certainly manage sitting in a chair in the air conditioning as opposed to breaking my back unloading a shipping container that has been baking in the sun,) never having to work more than 3 days in a row unless I want to take overtime, having a 3-day weekend every other weekend, and having days off during the week to run errands is amazing. I actually struggle a bit to figure out how to use all of my PTO because I can just plan everything I need/want to do around my schedule.
That’s a good one, thanks for the suggestion. You mentioned another contributing factor to my hypothetical career change too. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to work at some place that has a more direct impact on my community. My current job is more indirect, I would say.