What's the best or worst job you've ever had and why?

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My best job was operations analyst at a bank and I liked it because I was able to do many different things such as writing technical documentation, looking for ways to improve processes, and testing applications. The job required a lot of statistical analysis which I love doing. I was able to sit in my cubicle most of the time without much interaction with coworkers. It took me several years to prove myself and work my way up to that position - I started as a data entry clerk. I quit the job after it became too demanding - I was having to work later and later each day, around 60 hours a week when I quit.

My worst job was hostess at a diner. I quit after the first day. The entire job was all about greeting people as they walk in the door and just standing at the doorway the rest of the time. Obviously a terrible job for an aspie but I didn't know I was an aspie at the time.

I'm currently a software tester and I like it but not as much as the analyst position. I'm happy to stay where I am though because the testing position is not as demanding as the analyst position was.

It's a toss up between my most recent job, and one of my first jobs.

One of my first, at which I spent years, was delivering pizzas. Had an arrangement with the owners where I did not receive an hourly wage, but instead got a percentage of all the deliveries I took. Which meant that, when waiting for delivery orders to come in, I didn't have to do anything. Spent half my shifts playing pinball (got really good too, owner took to calling me Tommy) and the other half driving around smoking cigarettes and listening to music. And I'd still average more than $20 an hour. Only problem was getting enough hours.

My most recent was durability testing of prototype cars. The pay was crap, but the work was awesome. I'd get assigned a car at the start of the shift, drive it around the city all night along a set route, and wait for stuff to go wrong. For someone whose special interest is cars, this was a dream job. But there was a lot of BS to put up with.

Worst was working in a grocery store. Some shifts, they had me working in the bakery. Which was cool, just hang out by myself and make cookies and bread and stuff all day. But, most of the time, they had me working as a bagger, which was a nightmare. Just up and quit one day. Turned around and walked out while a manager was chewing me out for something, and never came back. Didn't even bother picking up my last check, that's how little I wanted to deal with those people.

Right now, I'm doing training to get my commercial license. Lot of work around here for truckers. Shouldn't be too bad, I'll be able to be out on my own all day and the pay is decent and the schedules pretty flexible. Don't mind hard work, but I can't function when I've got someone watching me all day.

Last edited by mds_02 on 02 Jul 2012, 5:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How does one go about becoming a software tester? I've heard people here give good reviews of this job. How does one get it?

I once worked a summer job at an animal shelter. There were only 4 or 5 employees there. We'd drive around, 2 at a time, pickling up stray cats and dogs all over town. Very cool job. The employees were nice.

The worst job? I'm not gonna list them all because they all sucked. The one I stayed in the shortest amount of time was when I was a pizza maker at Pizza Hut. The Nazi bosses talked down to you, they wanted the pizzas made yesterday, and I just couldn't get the smell of the ingredients out of my hands. The onions, garlic and other condiments practically burned themselves into my tissue.

The longest running job I had was my years as a nurse. You got yelled at by the bosses. You got yelled at by the patients. You got yelled at by their visitors family & friends). It was torturous pain, misery and suffering every day. They just piled tons and tons of work on you and expected you to finish it yesterday. Most of the other employees were foreigners, so their grasp of the common language was practically nonexistent. Oy! The things we do for money!

It's also sometimes called "QA Tester" or "Quality Assurance Associate". You have to have some proven skills. For example most software test positions require knowledge in the Microsoft Suite and basic networking/IT skills. Usually a degree in computer science or equivalent experience is required. I don't have a degree so I got the job based on my bank operations experience, as the company I work for develops banking software. Basically you install whatever application you're charged with testing then make sure every aspect of it works based on written requirements explaining exactly what the application is supposed to do. You report any bugs you find, a development team fixes the bugs, then you get a fixed version of the application and you repeat the process of making sure everything works as it's supposed to. You keep doing this until you have a "release" version that's presumably perfect. That version gets released to customers who have purchased the application. It's impossible to find every bug, so your performance is normally measured against an acceptable level of bugs that are allowed to exist in the release version. Aspies have strong attention to detail so I would think they could excell at this type of work. I know I do.

Here's how I got the skills required for software testing to begin with. I began my banking/testing career as a data entry clerk at a bank (you only need a high school degree and reasonable typing skills for this). I believe data entry is the perfect springboard for any aspie to start their career because it's a fairly mundane job to prove yourself and from there it can branch out into all sorts of new and interesting opportunities within the same company. Data entry positions are usually available at large corporations, financial institutions, insurance companies, etc. My job at the bank was to encode the bottom of checks with the amount that was written on the check. Sounds boring but I thought it was interesting to see where all the checks were coming from, who wrote them, what they were written for, etc. I also liked to challenge myself to encode the checks as quickly and accurately as I could, forever trying to beat my record. It wasn't long before my supervisor noticed my high performance and put me on a more challenging task which I excelled at, and I kept moving up the ladder and obtaining new skills from there. The progression from data entry clerk to operations analyst took eight wonderful years. I would have been qualified for a software testing position by around my 4th year, but at that time I had not given any thought to software testing and was more focused on statistical reporting which I believe is another gratifying aspie job but harder to get than software testing.

If you start out as a data entry clerk someplace you could eventually become a software tester for whatever software application you were using to enter the data, because you would have experience as a user of the system you would be testing. This is what I did, I've been a software tester for the past eight years, and my yearly salary is now $65,000. That's with no degree.

Factories are fun. /sarcasm

Worst job: Subway by far. Total Aspie nightmare with the rudest most picky customers imaginable. It was essentially "Starbucks meets McDonald's" as far as the type of customers I had. Trashy, picky, and always looking for something to complain about. Oh, and NEVER enough mayo. Then, if you manage to survive the customers, the next line of punishment would come from the corrupted, power tripping management.

Best job: My freelancing art gig I'm currently doing. There's nothing better than being my own boss doing something I enjoy without having to deal with horrid customers. I also get to make my own schedules and actually eat when I get hungry.

Worst McDs! Lasted 4 weeks. I hated the rude, dirty and disgusting customers. There are bins there but I can count on one hand how.many used them. I now have a phobia of touching old food lol! The final straw was being forced to sing happy birthday to an ungrateful spoilt brat with even.worse.parents. My job description did.not specify SINGING!! !
I did.not return after that.lol!

That sounds awful. If someone tried to force me to do that I would have either quit on the spot or flat out refused and dared them to fire me so I could file for unemployment.

Worst job was Chik-fil-a. My managers picked on my appearance and tried to make me over in their image, when I just wanted to be myself and do a good job. I didn't have body piercings, tattoos, a purple mohawk or anything like that (always wanted to but don't have the guts), but I didn't look "normal" enough for them.

Next worst was working for a crazy person at a consulting firm. For some reason they had me doing computer graphics, which I sucked at, when I applied for a writing position. The guy had a thing about neatness and in one meeting he went off about a certain employee having a paperclip under her chair and the fact that she hadn't picked it up meant that she didn't care about her work. I don't remember anything else about the meeting because all I could think of was, "Is it me???" Oh, and the 30-mile commute during rush hour was absolutely hair-raising.

Best job was in a bookstore, being in charge of magazines. Second best is the one I have now, closed captioning.

Best job - Professional abseiler. Rock climbers are all a bunch of weirdo's so your colleagues are very tolerant of odd people, you spend most of the time hanging in mid air off some industrial structure or rockface so you don't have to interact with any customers and there is very little in the way of 'office politics' because it is a bad idea to screw people over when you have to put your life in their hands every day.

Closed captioning sounds interesting. Pardon my ignorance but does this job simply entail typing out the closed caption from what's said on the TV program? How would one go about finding a job like this? What's the job title and what are the requirements as far as education and work experience?

Best job to date: Pizza delivery. Traffic can be pretty stressful at times, but on busy days, you spend 90% of your time driving around alone and listening to music. You also get to learn the layout of your city in almost microscopic detail. Most of your customer interactions are seconds long. Heavy tolerance for quirkiness. Free pizza. I haven't done it in ten years and I still miss it.

If that happened to me I'd have to hide somewhere or tell them I'm not doing it and if they insist quit and walk out.

I've never been able to sing. In school I would lip sync in music class and never had music classes after fifth grade so I got to stop doing even that. In reform school they tried to make me sing once but even as strict as they were they couldn't make me and when I tried I couldn't even make any sound come out. Singing is something I never do, not even if I'm alone.

I'm considering doing this for the first time but my car is not the most economical on gas. I'm tired of line cooking and can't get away from it for some reason. Can you make enough money delivering pizza these days, I wonder.

Best job: library in college and when I'd "supervise" a "computer cluster" (yeah, I'm that old lol ) which basically just meant I'd sit there and play MuDs and refill the printer paper; occasionally I'd actually have to fix one of the computers. I was naturally gifted with object-oriented programming as I'm a heavy pattern-verbal thinker. My self-esteem has always been crap and I never knew I was Aspie til this year so I wish I'd have stuck with computer science in the late 90s.

Worst job: Bottle room worker at the grocery store... broken glass, the smell is god-awful, the customers really, really suck and bust up the machines constantly, I broke a rib unloading one of the containers because the jack slipped and fell on me.... after that, I never had to work in there again! Still quit, because grocery store jobs unless you're stocking really suck.

Now I'd like to go back into computer programming or finish my master's. What the heck is there to do these days anyway? Can some magic fairy make me into the next Bill Gates or something that would be cool.

Fortunately, I work from transcripts that have already been typed. I have to heavily edit the transcripts because the transcriptionists here barely have a high-school education and don't bother trying to comprehend what was said. Then I sync the words up to the video. I think at least a B.A. in English (or whatever your captioning language is) would be helpful, as well as a well-rounded liberal arts education. You'll have to know how to spell or find out how to spell lots of weird, obscure things. My job title is "Post-Production Closed Caption Editor". I had to teach myself how to do it. I am the first and only post-production captioner where I work.

One of the things that drives me nuts with our transcriptionists is that one of them won't start a sentence with the word "and". We are transcribing speech, not writing a term paper! People start sentences with "and" all the time when they are talking.