I’d think there is a pretty wide range of roles in any profession, so this is really important in any of them.
I hated my previous role. It was outside of my comfort zone, but a good learning experience, and came with a promotion. After a few years i was able to make a lateral move into something i enjoy a lot more. There are still aggrevating and frustrating days, but plenty that i enjoy.
I would rate my career a solid 6.5 imo
RN
I give it a 5*.
Ouch
thank the gods for the actuarial profession. Otherwise i’d have to do real work
if I were still 20 looking into the future, I’d rate my current career as a 10/10.
6 figures, WFH full time, 5 hrs/week. Can’t complain.
But my judging it now and being 100x more materialistic, it’s an F.
I have the soul of a billionaire.
Don’t give up quilt-making!
Being an actuary is boring. The most exciting part was waiting for test results but now that I am half a decade removed from the exam process I find it hard to motivate myself to do anything actuarial in nature.
Working remotely and making $200k a year is nice though.
5/10
I’m quitting my job the moment I save up enough scratch
not people making 200k and still can’t save enough
He didn’t say he can’t save, just that he hasn’t reached the target yet.
Regarding the article in the OP – actuaries rating their job on average as 2.5 out of 5 stars…
I was surprised to learn a few years ago that on a 5 star rating system, it is now common for 5 stars to be the default unless something is bad. I was used to thinking that 3 stars is the default, while 5 stars is reserved for the truly exceptional.
I had thought the was a generational thing, and a reflection that I’m becoming an old fogey.
However, I wonder: could actuaries, by virtue of being more conservatively objective, be more inclined to think of “3 as default” than people in other professions?
FWIW, on a 3 as default basis, I’m at 3.5-4 out of 5. The exams sucked, and the work isn’t terribly exciting, but it is frequently interesting, pays well, and offers decent job security. If I were independently wealthy, there are other things I’d do with my time, but I’ve otherwise never seriously considered changing careers (or at least changing too far away from an actuarial career, since I’m more in “risk management” these days.).
So this is an interesting concept to me, because I follow rating systems and desire consistency. At work when we have to fill out surveys, 3 means “neither agree nor disagree”, 4 means “agree”, and 5 means “strongly agree”, so that’s the framework I’m speaking about here. In that framework, I’m going to lean to 4 when I am happy, because a 5 means that I’m 100% satisfied, and that’s nearly impossible.
And the company forces us to have team-wide discussions where we don’t achieve really high averages, so many in the company have started putting 5’s for everything, just to avoid them. And actuaries are in that group, although anecdotally it does seem like they are honest about their feedback more often than some other departments.
Rant: 5’s/excellent’s are not the default for anything, but we definitely live in a world where that’s what they have become. When is the last time you had a Lyft or Uber driver who wasn’t close to 5 stars? How often when you’re looking to buy something online do you pass it over because it doesn’t have at least 4.25 stars? And yet, going to the airport has still never been an excellent experience for me, and most of my purchases don’t blow me away. What’s wrong with 3’s anyway??
I know, I’m bringing back a thread from the dead.
The subject of star-rating inflation is featured in the current A-hed column in the WSJ (theoretically a non-paywalled link):
On the other hand, I was seeing a lot of 4 star ratings with reviews that are less than stellar on a product I was considering today. 
Yup. Started answering surveys this way 20 years ago, when I was forced to explain my answers (well, someone in the group’s answers) for three hours when I needed to be working instead.
Told my boss that I do this and that if I had any issues with them, I’d tell them privately. Same boss for 14 years now.
I’ve been told by my bar owner friend that five-star ratings result in notification from Yelp! to ask him to pay for privilege of being on their platform.
Yet there are companies who won’t give employees the highest rating because everyone has room for improvement. 
“You mean, in general? Because yes, I am happy.”
–Slater, on Archer.
The 5 star system is misleading because you can’t give zero stars. It’s particularly limited if you can’t give half stars (as in 4 1/2 stars). If I see an average of two stars, I sometimes mistakenly think that it has a 40% rating, when it’s really 25% rating (1 is the lowest, 5 is the highest, so 2 is a quarter of the way there).
Additionally, there’s no way to differentiate between very good and excellent. Anything over 87.5% will round up to 5 stars. I think I would prefer marks out of 10, with 0 being allowed. That way full marks would only apply to 95% and above.