How long did you flip burgers for? Depending upon the location/business, it means standing on your feet in a hot environment for hours. They've hopefully gotten better, but plastic gloves are also murder on the hands.
Maybe less challenging mentally, but physically way more demanding.
It sounds horrendous. In a reasonable world horrendous jobs like flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets would be far more rewarded than fulfilling jobs like writing code.
My own history of jobs involved delivering f pizzas for a small firm (great, very little pressure, just listen to radio all night), and stacking shelves in a corner shop (I lasted 3 hours)
You literally couldn’t pay me to stack shelves, and I in turn rarely go to shops, I won’t support such a terrible environment.
Flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets can be done by literally anyone. On the other hand, the demand for people who can code like you remains high.
This is the reason why investment bankers make bank. Granted, many of the "signals" are dubious, but the people who can _actually_ do the work of a MD are extremely low.
