Ah, May … the winter has finally thawed away, trees are dropping petals on every sidewalk, weekend barbecues are de rigueur … oh, and the nation’s college graduates set sail, bright-eyed and eager to start their first jobs.
Yet first jobs are notoriously uneven. Some are inspiring and educational, while others are unpleasant and keep their new recruits just barely above the poverty line. A good lot of them seem like they’ll be really cool because the company is, and turn out to be the exact opposite.
Valleywag, the tech gossip blog, rounded up what it considers the 10 worst entry-level jobs in tech, those that will “look spiffy on a resume someday,” but promise little but suffering in the short-term.
At the top of the list is online sales and operations account manager at Google, a position which boasts interesting-sounding tasks such as “collaborate with specialists and engineers” and “implement creative ways to improve our client relations” but is, according to one employee, nothing but a low-paying customer service representative position, dressed up to make it sound more appealing.
Also on Valleywag’s list was the job of support engineer at Amazon.com, “supporting platform infrastructure and systems architecture, including operating systems, hardware/storage configurations and performance tuning using Linux, system calls,” and so on. According to one employee, most people in these positions don’t even have a line of sight to a window, and are in offices with low ceilings.
Do you have any entry-level jobs stories that could put these to shame?