Was on a jury for a murder trial dec 2021. The trial gave me a new found respect for how trials are conducted, what evidence is allowed in, how defendants are protected, and the general thought and reasoning behind it all. Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide. It was an absolute shit show in false pretenses, irrational conclusions, biases, logical fallacies. We ended up as a hung jury. I was in the minority opinion and we let the offending party ( again in my opinion ) walk.
~$50,000 USD per year in dividends from individual, public stocks, which isn't bad considering I do not seek out dividend payers specifically. Was earning another $25,000 or so renting out an apartment, but sold that recently to look for a larger property.
My first thought after reading the article was that it was ridiculous to fire/scapegoat the author for hitting the wrong key, too. This has happened to me before, where a single keystroke ( in my case, a line break in a config file ) caused me to take down a production system. My punishment? Designing a more robust system that would protect itself from a badly formatted config file. To this day, ten years later, a similar error has not been repeated, despite several attempts of people to push bad config files to our production systems. If I had been instead fired, no doubt a similar, but perhaps not exact, error would have been repeated every year or so.
If I had made the same mistake twice without any attempts to fix the situation long term, then, yes, I think that would have been a fire-able offense.
If you're working with people who care primarily about their own positions and egos without regard to the team as a whole, well, be prepared to be thrown under the bus when it comes time for those people to protect themselves.
Why take a minimum wage job when you can probably contract yourself out doing a number of different things? I worked part-time one summer for $6/hr ( ~ 0.75 higher than minimum wage ) in between sophomore/junior year in high school. Towards the end of the summer, I started mowing some lawns for some people I knew and was making ~$20 per lawn ( which took about an hour each ).
Next summer, I figured if I only mowed one lawn a day, I'd make the same $$$. Ended up mowing 10+ lawns a week at $25-40 a piece ( I averaged ~$20 - $25/hr depending on the week ). My favorite move was to go to my customer's neighbors and say "Hi! I'm cutting Sam's lawn for $x. If you let me cut your lawn for $x - $5, I'll knock $5 off Sam's lawn as well. Get your lawn cut and save your neighbor some cash." That worked pretty well and kept my transit time down.
Even if you take a min wage job for stability, try contracting yourself out a bit on the side and bank that cash. You'll get where you're going quicker.
1.) Graduated from a top engineering school with little debt ( ~$10k ) thanks to wonderful parents who planned from day one to send my sisters and I to our top choice colleges.
2.) Consulted, tutored, did odd jobs throughout school to help pay for living costs and continued this for my first year out of college while I worked at a large engineering company ( one year out and I had saved ~$40k, which > than a year's expenses at the time ).
3.) The $40k allowed me to take a risk and join a smaller company in the financial/software space that was offering half the salary other companies were offering, but with very good upside potential.
4.) Company has been doing very well -- much better than I anticipated. I invested my earnings well ( avg'd just over 20% return per year since I started investing during the turmoil in 2008 --- took very little, IMHO, investing risk --- turns out obsessive-compulsive tendencies can be put to good use digging into and understanding 10k reports ). I made my first million before I turned 30 and have multiplied that a few times over in the next few years doing pretty much the same thing. There was no one event that dropped a bunch of cash in my lap. I accumulated ( and continue to accumulate ) cash ( at an increasing rate --- snowball effects are amazing ) over time. Still cranking away.....
Best advice I can give for those who want to accumulate wealth. Find something you enjoy, can reward you well financially, and then grind it out for a decade. The last part isn't talked about that much because, well its generally not all that glamorous --- but I enjoyed it.