Yahoo News 17 Low-Effort, High-Paying Jobs That Have Me Reconsidering My Entire Career Plan
No matter how much you enjoy your career, many of us would probably be lying if we said we never daydreamed about having a job where you can make a lot of money for comparatively little work.
While most of the jobs that come to mind for that category — like “nepo baby model” or “executive at a company your rich dad owns” are pretty difficult to get without the right connections, there are some surprising, more accessible options out there.
A while back, Redditor u/rabahi asked, “What’s a low effort job with a surprisingly high salary?”
Disney
Here are 17 of the top answers:
Warner Bros.
"Owning a parking lot."
"My aunt and uncle own a fairly large field right outside of a small town. They do all of their harvesting by the end of August. Come the second week of September, a HUGE harvest festival is held. The town sees, like, half a million visitors in a weekend. They clean the fuck up every year for it by charging $12 a day to park. They even let people camp there and charge $45 a night for camping. They don't even do anything — they have a bunch of kids volunteer to park cars as a part of school community service. They donate maybe a quarter of the earnings and pocket the rest for 'operational costs.'"
Channel 4
"I.T. Manager at a university. The techs know their jobs and their users, and they manage their own schedules and workloads among themselves. Managers basically just have to rubber-stamp timecards, confirm parts orders, and make sure the techs don't all take vacations at the same time."
NBC / Via Max
"I worked as a massage 'model' at a massage school. My job was to lay there and be massaged for a few hours while the students did their lessons or took their exams. It was £30 an hour, which isn’t loads, but better than the £10 an hour office job I had before."
"Just to clarify, this wasn’t a full-time job. It was fairly casual, probably between four and 10 hours a week depending on how busy the school was that week, and only for maybe three or four months."
Nitat Termmee / Getty Images
"Business intelligence/data analyst. Do you know how to use Excel? Can you write basic SQL? Are you able to express yourself clearly and deal with getting variations of the same 10 questions for the rest of your career? Congrats, welcome to making $100K."
ABC
"International pilot! I make $200K a year as a widebody first officer. None of the decisions fall to me. I fly one leg to Europe (I get a couple hours to nap on each leg). I get 24–48 hours in a cool city, then I fly one leg home (couple hour nap again on the way home). When I'm home, there is nothing I could conceivably do for work so I just get to enjoy my many many days off."
"Don't get me wrong, the training was intense, but man, my job now is stupid easy.
In the US, I got my ratings at a flight school, worked at a regional airline, then got hired at a major. It took a while to get here, but I'm in my 30s with so much time off, and work is so easy. Love it."
Sony Pictures Releasing
"When I was backpacking, I signed up to a temp agency in Sydney that would hire 'well presented' front of house staff for corporate firms who liked to have a pretty, young, well-dressed person manning the reception desk whilst their clients came. I often got paid $30–40 an hour to welcome clients, show them to their meeting room, pour some water, and order their catering. And that's all I did in fancy, beautiful offices overlooking Sydney Harbor bridge, etc."
"Once their regular receptionist got back from leave, I'd be popped onto the next one. I did a stint at Sydney University at one of their newly built research centers. All I did was direct people to the lifts and the right part of the building for their meeting. I made enough money doing this to backpack through the entire east coast of Australia over three months."
Pepmiba / Getty Images
"The bulk of my job is essentially helping ICU nurses get through annual basic life support. Now that it's all on computerized dummies, I basically just click the link for them, adjust hand position now and then sit back. I watched Jurassic Park today because everyone is up-to-date. I make $120K."
NBC
"I do basic admin work for a city government. No degree required, $85K a year after three years (starting base is a little lower than that), full medical/dental/vision, and tons of PTO plus paid holidays. The work itself isn't particularly hard, but it is constant."
Xavierarnau / Getty Images
"Project manager for a US-based Fortune 200 Company. It's permanent work from home. I make six figures, and I do maybe four hours of actual work each week. I have my home office set up where I have two gaming monitors connected to my gaming laptop sitting on my desk directly in front of me. Then I have my work laptop sitting to one side that's got the volume turned up so I hear if I get an email or message. When I do, I handle that, then go back to my personal laptop."
"Most days I'm either playing video games, watching movies, browsing Reddit, studying for new certifications, or doing stuff around the house like laundry, dishes, cleaning rooms, food prep, etc. People on my team constantly say things like, 'Man, this workload is insane.' I've got the same and even more than some. It's so boring. But, they're paying me to dick around most days."
NBC
"I sell granite and quartz countertops. At first, it was go go go to get fabricators to buy from me, but now that I'm established, I just sit here on my computer, answer a call, and submit the order, and [then it's] right back to Reddit."
"I actually have a Nintendo Switch hookup for my PC for when I have to work on Saturdays."
Tero Vesalainen / Getty Images/iStockphoto
"My next-door neighbor works in a power station. His job is to sit in front of a monitor and make sure everything is working well. If something goes wrong, he calls the appropriate workstation and they fix the problem. Because an alarm sounds if something is out of sync (which rarely happens), he is able to play games or read a book 99% of the time. He is on $150 per hour to basically play games and chill at work."
Westend61 / Getty Images/Westend61
"If you can land it (which is very difficult), architectural 3D modeler and render guy. Usually, firms hire out the work, or they have interns do it. Some firms never have this set up so I become that guy. I make around $90K in LA. Usually, I model buildings in 3D, texture, then render. It's fun, and no one bugs you."
"I have everything sort of automated, except for the building part. I give them around a week so I can get the renders out."
NBC
"Call center management. Not even something high up like operations or quality assurance, even being middle management can be lucrative. I've worked a few call center jobs. The people on the bottom absolutely get fucked over, overworked, stressed out...but once you get to management, it's fucking easy. Last call center job I worked, I got promoted to management just due to how long I had been there. After the promotion, I was paid $50K per year to sit at home, listen to people do their job, fill out paperwork, and have the occasional web meeting. I spent more time playing video games and working out than anything else while on the clock."
"Funniest part to me is that when I gave my notice, they tried to offer me a promotion to stay because I was such a hard worker. I was super tempted to laugh and tell them how little work I actually did in a day."
ABC
"I do admin work for the government. My pay is $55K. At best, I get five emails a day with about two that actually concern me. No BS...On a super busy day, I have about 45 minutes worth of work to do."
Doug Berry / Getty Images
"Driving the massive dump trucks that serve mines. Starting salary is like $70K, and all you do is drive back and forth all day."
USA Network
"Senior Full Stack developer."
"This, so much. I'm really confused why they keep paying us all this money.
I chatted with a recruiter from another company last week who says his company would start me at a quarter mil USD if I pass the interview, and it's fully remote — I can live anywhere.
This is not a hard job."
Xavierarnau / Getty Images
And finally: "Security project manager here for a global tech company. My job is to meet with my stakeholders once per month to collect updates on risks and write reports every now and then. Six figures, and I'm interviewing next week for a position that is $180–200K/yr."
"I was actually having an existential crisis about this last night because I realized how income inequality is so fucked up. My job honestly doesn't matter or benefit society, but teachers and caregivers do, and it's just not fair. I worked 10x harder while in retail and customer service than I do now."
