You've never worked in fast food have you? "Taking it easy" is not how it works. You're on the clock 100% until you clock out, no rest, no breaks, if a burger takes more than 60 seconds to land on the customer's tray the boss is on your ass. If you miscalculate how many patties to slap on the grill and either run out or you have to toss some because they've sat in the steamer for more than 15 minutes you are in for such a dressing down. The machine tracks from the start of the order till it is closed out so he knows. He has some bullshit regional contest thing with all of the other franchisees in the area that he has to win if he wants to make that boat payment. If there are no customers you are cleaning, even if you just cleaned it. Plus you had to spend like half of your time training new recruits or filling in for them when they stopped showing after like two days. I did one summer of that in college and it cemented me in my tech career path. I couldn't deal with the stress.
* 7 days per week although Sunday would only work 3 hr - this was because my boss could provide much more compensation because we were paid 1.5x hourly above 40 hours. He would illegally manually adjust my hours downwards in the computer system to ensure it didn't get too much out of hand :)
* Was promoted to "shift manager" after 6 months (meaningless title)
I agree with nearly all of your points:
* no breaks
* boss monitors waste, quality (customer complaints), service time per order
* regional competitions
* cleaning in downtime
* constant churn training new recruits who would suddenly quit
Your conclusion fast food is difficult seems off to me. The work is repetitive so each individual step requires little thought. To make a sandwhich you put the bread in oven 1 and click button 2 then you put the patty in oven 2 and click button 7. When it comes out you wrap, bag, add napkins, and hand it to the customer. Crucially when your shift is done you go home and don't care. There are no objectives that line employees care about at a quarterly level. You were able to move around the entire day and interact with people rather than being sedentary behind a screen. You didn't have to have any education or work experience beyond completing ~9 grade (compared to CS where the most common path in the US is 3 years of highschool, 4 years of college). Most employees at my location were young, more social, less attached, and better looking than my colleagues in big tech (ok myself included).
I would trade my new line of work for my old in a heartbeat if the compensation and career prospects were comparable.
Well I appear to not be shadowbanned if this comment shows up so I must of been reported to death. I can see why, and it was a silly thing to say, but after a long day of nothing but solving deep bugs in a terrible tech stack I have little control of, while getting virtually no praise by the organization for my work, mindlessly flipping burgers seemed pretty nice.
I think when you work low paying jobs you quickly learn that the worst part is how most people treat you. Customers, managers, etc. We in tech take for granted how we’re treated.
