I really dislike this - an article with unverified sources and no original content in the BBC, what I consider a very reliable, ethical news source. To me this is yet another example of the cheapening of modern journalism - quora has been "partnering" with several "content distribution partners" including BBC to market themselves while doing the newspapers' jobs.
At least some publishers have been called out and ended up doing the right thing, like when huffpo published unsourced, ridiculous answers about trader joes' two buck chuck:
I personally thought that the BBC News jumped the shark when they introduced a "BBC Capital" section. It really rammed home Chomsky's point about major newspapers having a "business" section but no "labor" section.
It's been a downhill slide ever since Hutton, to be honest, and a crying shame.
Oh the irony in linking to a third-party contribution to Forbes as your source of this news. Is this what each newspaper's online presence is going to devolve into across the industry?
I know the dog walking statistics are in the ballpark for San Francisco at least since I know a few people who do that. Regardless, I do generally agree with your point of view.
It's amusing that they did include this disclaimer at the bottom:
> Quora respondents are required to use their true names under the site’s Real Names policy. To help ensure legitimacy and quality, Quora asks some individuals, such as doctors and lawyers, to confirm their expertise.
Yet there was not a single doctor or lawyer quoted in that article.
>“My 19 year-old boss was taking home $35,000/year with benefits,” he said. “Plus they train you on the job for free. She told me that she was on track to be a regional manager by the age of 30 and would make 100k by then.”
>Katie Nellis said managers of Walgreen's drugstores in the US “often retire in their 40s.”
Are we just taking these wild, likely highly exaggerated claims at face value? And did the BBC really just re-publish comments from Quora as a story with no additional verification?
In that case, the most surprising salary is for journalists at the BBC - I'm surprised they can keep a job at all.
I've heard it called grain of sand journalism. It usually goes from a couple of very broad statements about the entire desert directly to an in depth look at a few grains of sand.
I'm not at all sure why these are 'surprising'. $100k/year for a dog walker is not possible in most areas unless there's a lot of dogs to walk for a lot of dog owners with disposable income. That $96k figure is 'up to', and while much may be in cash, it's probably closer to 50-70% that on an annual basis. If you're doing this in an area with enough rich dog owners to sustain that business year 'round, you're living in an area where earning, say, $60k isn't going to afford you a great lifestyle. Liveable, certainly, but not wealthy.
The 'not surprising' part really is the down to hustle - it should not be surprising at all that some people can hustle up paying customers for services that we'd ignore or look down on. The dog walking gig - you must really love dogs to be cleaning up dog crap for up to 8 dogs at a time, 5-7 days per week, 6-8 hours per day.
I've known dog walkers and pool cleaners. Most don't make anywhere near that, because they're not good hustlers - they're not networked sufficiently, and don't know how to attract enough customers and manage a business. Someone with the skills to attract customers and properly manage 'busyness', money will flow almost in spite of whatever skills/education they may have or, more usually, not have.
The oil boom in northern Alberta, Canada is another good example of high paying jobs without any skill or at least education.
Many small towns and fishing villages have been de-populated of men aged 20 to their 40s who went to work in the oil fields.
Going from seasonal work drawing unemployment benefits to $100,000+ working six months and all your food and lodging paid for even free tickets to fly to and from home.
Small towns now have big loud trucks from Alberta and lots of "that's not how we do it in Alberta" arguments. Small town poor boy makes it big can create some assholes.
> Small town poor boy makes it big can create some assholes.
A lot of them came back to Newfoundland and the feeling is pretty much the same. That province is going through an oil boom of its own and the influx of yuppies, crime and condos is excruciating
"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com."
It's not that weird if you understand the market in the UK.
As the BBC is a publicly funded broadcaster in competition with advertising supported private entities it has to be very careful to keep a Chinese firewall between it's commercial arm BBC Worldwide and the stuff that is done with public money otherwise the other broadcasters will jump all over them with the regulator and the fair market bodies.
Not surprised at all re: construction workers. That they can make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year is sort of a semi-open secret. The catch is that construction is a feast or famine occupation. During building booms, contractors and workers can make a small fortune. During busts, they can go bust. New York is a great place to be a construction worker, as there always seems to be a steady supply of new projects underway. San Francisco, right now, is making a lot of construction workers quite wealthy. But this boom will go bust eventually, and when it does, the demand drop will shock supply, and the jobs will dry up virtually overnight. Nobody has any great idea when that will happen, but the workers I've talked to [1] are an odd mix of giddy and pessimistic. There is sort of a "get it while the getting's still good" mentality afoot right now.
As you might imagine, any jobs tied to real estate development very closely track the real estate market, be it residential or commercial. That market can be exciting, but it's also inherently unstable.
[1] I don't work in construction, but I have invested in a few buildings, and I talk to contractors and workers pretty regularly.
> The catch is that construction is a feast or famine occupation. [...] There is sort of a "get it while the getting's still good" mentality afoot right now.
Indeed, and that's not good from the point of view of construction standards. When the going is good, contractors go pedal to the metal and will do everything they can as fast as they can, inevitably lowering their average work standards (both in terms of output quality and safety measures). Plus, construction booms typically lead to more widespread economic bubbles.
I wish we could find a way of stabilizing that particular market.
I think it's more of a symbiotic relationship: construction is the first sector to accelerate when things start looking good and the first to crash when things start going sour, because it relies on debt more than others. Because of this position, it plays a very important role in exacerbating trends.
Likewise mining, but to a larger degree. A supervisor or crew boss can make good money, when they have a job at all. Also its dangerous. My relative got a back injury in a mining accident. All the therapy in the world wouldn't remove all the pain. It changed him forever. Was it worth the money?
What does it take to get into construction? I wouldn't mind doing physical labor for a change of pace. I would love to learn construction skills and I could always go back to programming when the construction market busts.
When the construction market busts a lot of stuff busts with it, usually. It's not a good time to hunt for a new job. Not saying that your idea is not going to work out well, but be prepared for some bumps in the road.
> In India, hair dressers can earn more than employees in the software industry. During a recent visit to the salon...
Are they really using Quora as a reference? Even if this is honest, the responder went to probably one of the top salons in Bangalore, in which case the same would hold in Western countries. Most hair dressing jobs in India are low paying, and most of the rest are average paying.
I went to India for my job about 2 years ago. Actual sign by the break room: "Food is not allowed in the pantries" or something like that (don't make a mess eating here).
The company does have an actual cafeteria where you can have more than coffee and tea, though, as well as street vendors outside the security gates. Who knows, maybe the street vendors make more than my coworkers :-)
I don't buy the numbers on dog walkers. I live in NYC, which is probably at the high end for this and many other things, and I don't know anyone who's paying $25/day to walk a dog with up to 7 other dogs. People will pay more to have their dogs walked by themselves or in small groups. I don't think I see groups of more than 4.
The theater/opera carpenter one really surprised me. I wonder why they are paid so much? Unions?
Construction I totally understand. I come from Perth, Western Australia, which is in the midst of a resources boom that has been going on almost unabated for 15-20 years. The scope and scale of what is being dug up from the ground or drilled from the sea is probably unprecedented.
This puts an incredible amount of pressure on construction. So much so that in 2000 you could buy a house for ~$100k in Perth. 5 years later that same house was $350k+. Most of that was just increased construction and materials cost, not land appreciation.
The problem with such massive increases in the cost of construction is that it feeds into virtually everything else. If you've ever been to Perth, you'll know it's an incredibly expensive city now. Back in the 90s I lived comfortably as a student in a 2 bedroom apartment and all expenses for <$200/week.
I often wonder if Australia will suffer (or is already suffering) from Dutch Disease [1]. It's a place now of the haves (those in mining/construction) and have nots (everyone else). Even if you're one of the lucky ones, the standard of living is not great.
I say this as someone who lives in Manhattan. But New York City has way more options for the whole income spectrum. Less than $200k can get you a 1 bedroom in Sunnyside, Queens that's <30 minutes to Midtown.
In Perth, there are no cheap options anymore. Even 5 years ago, 40-50 year old crappy apartments were being rented out for $300/week sight unseen.
Anyway I don't begrudge any of these jobs their good fortunes (I am a software engineer after all). I do worry about construction in particular however because of the on-flow effect into everything else.
Construction really is a mixed bag too. Highly paid crane operators? That's a stressful/demanding job. No problem there. 6 figure incomes for guys who stand on the street with a stop sign wearing a hard hat? Well, that's just a racket.
It's $25 per session... Their math is $25 * 8 dogs * 2 times daily * 240 days a year. That's how "up to eight dogs" turns into "eight dogs every day, every time".
Working your way up to store manager has its perks. According to Murray Godfrey a Wal-Mart store manager “of a store in a moderate-sized locale can easily make $200k plus bonuses based on sales.”
Don't forget the other part of the job: scheduling much of the just above minimum wage workforce under you to work less than 30 hours/week so they don't get benefits.
Several years ago I knew a hair dresser who made 90K working only a few hours a day while I worked three times longer as a software engineer making only 75K. A third of her income was from tips (and I've heard that a lot of people don't pay taxes on those).
The dog walking job, at $96,000, is a flat-out lie. I owned a dog walking company for several years. There is lots of competition and no barrier to entry.
Agreed. It's someone extrapolating out 1 45 minute dog walk @ $X/hr x Y dogs, saying "they work 6 hours per day".
Yeah... perhaps of actual 'walking'. This says nothing about the time required to actually market your business, sign people up, deal with angry customers, not to mention deal with sick dogs, cleaning up crap for multiple dogs daily, and dealing with year-round weather.
If you're in an area where there's enough business to support $100k/year in dog walking, you still can't afford to live well, because that $100k will buy you relatively little.
I am not surprised at all. Whenever my leftist friends bring up the "poor" who cannot find a job I ask them if they know how much does a dog walker make and why is it so.
> Quora exec Marc Bodnick sees the media deals as a win-win, where Quora writers get more distribution, and media partners get good content. (http://allthingsd.com/20131119/quora-will-push-its-most-link...)
At least some publishers have been called out and ended up doing the right thing, like when huffpo published unsourced, ridiculous answers about trader joes' two buck chuck:
>This blog post contained un-sourced claims about Two Buck Chuck and its proprietor, Bronco Wines. It has been removed from the site in accordance with our blogger terms. (http://www.starkinsider.com/2014/08/trader-joes-two-buck-chu...)