What I mean is everyone wants both. And I’m not talking huge differences. I don’t mean go from 30k per year to 120k per year or going home sweating everyday to watching Netflix most days. What brought the question up was I was in hospital and the computer the scanned all the medication and machines into was on my right side of bed and Iv pole where all medications were on my left. Nurses also had to deal with wired scanners which they had to hold up above the bed to walk around. Not a huge problem but cover 30 rooms with 4-16 different medications to swap out per day was probably a major pain(nurses can chime in disagreeing).
Another thing I’ve seen is people in a warehouse with systems logging all locations a product could be in and saying yeah we have some of that in one of these and they have to walk around to check several locations to find which still has some.
So you want a 2k-6k raise… If your job was easier how much would that make you stay instead of just demanding a raise?
Edit: this is not a real situation but say I have 4 employees under me and an extra 25k in budget. Would you prefer a raise or to improve your job?
All that matters is a good manager who has your back. I’ve only quit managers, never jobs. Also the most overworked I’ve ever been in my life was working minimum wage… I felt like an actual slave. The more money I make the more relaxed my job somehow is. I don’t want to doxx myself since I have a pretty niche job (this helps a lot btw. Especially trades or semi-engineering jobs) which can narrow me down a lot.
Find something you’re interested in, and try to line that up with demand that’s consistent for years or decades. Anything involving maintaining critical infrastructure, repair, fixing stuff, estimating, helping people do those things. That’s going to be pretty crucial as our society enters old age. Our infrastructure is at the end of its life and we’re out of debt capacity… That means we start prioritizing things that are critical and diverting funds away from “repair/replace all bridges” to “repair/replace only the bridges that would paralyze the nation if they were missing” which is cheaper.
My job is a mix of in the field wrench turning, fiddling, pulling cables .etc along with elective decision making, engineering, cross-domain collaboration, inventing my own tools to fix my unique problems that maybe 1 other guy in China also has? Maybe? That is extremely difficult for AI or robotics to replace. It can supplement certain aspects of this but it won’t be able to replace all of it by the time I’m retired (ha! I might die first but who knows) or if it can, everyone is out of a job.