You wanna know how successful the career for Pisces was in 2014? I didn’t want the usual hazy, crystal-ball garbage. I wanted cold, hard facts. My buddy, a big Pisces guy, keeps going on about 2014 being the absolute worst year of his life, career-wise. I told him to just shut up and wait, I would actually go find the real numbers and prove him right or totally wrong. I had to know. The whole thing drove me crazy.
The Messy Hunt for Real Data
First thing I did was scramble around for actual aggregated employment data. Forget the zodiac sites. That stuff is worthless. What I needed was aggregated career movement metrics tied to actual job changes and compensation. I tried the usual government datasets first. Useless. Too broad. I spent two solid days just wading through public datasets and realized they were way too high-level to isolate a single year with any meaning.
I eventually had to dig deep into some really specific, niche industry reports. I found a few independent salary aggregators that were floating around from that era, the kind of data companies used to justify wage hikes. This became my goldmine. It was a slog, though. I pulled raw data specifically tied to entry-level job changes and mid-career salary shifts from the entire 2014 calendar year, trying to isolate only those 12 months. I specifically focused on three job sectors that tend to attract that sign: the creative arts (design/media), mental healthcare, and education administration. I figured if they did well there, they did well generally.
Cleaning the Disaster and Making Big Assumptions
This raw data was an absolute disaster, seriously. It wasn’t clean at all. I had to spend about twenty straight hours cleaning the damn thing. Names were misspelled, some entries had salary changes listed as percentages while others were actual dollar figures, and the dates were a complete mess. I used a simple Python script—nothing fancy, just three or four basic functions—just to standardize the date formats and filter out the obvious bots, duplicates, and anything that looked suspicious, like a 500% salary jump for a trainee.
After the cleanup, I categorized every single career movement I had into three simple buckets:
- Major promotion/Salary jump (>15% increase): This is “Success.”
- Status Quo/Lateral move: This is moving jobs but staying in the same bracket, basically “Stability.”
- Significant setback/Job loss: This is “Failure.”
Then came the big, shaky assumption: linking the month the job change was recorded to the zodiac sign. Yeah, I know it’s scientifically flimsy, but you have to start somewhere when you don’t have birth dates. I isolated the pool of data to anyone whose job change or promotion happened during the Pisces period (roughly Feb 19 to Mar 20) as a proxy for the actual sign. It’s not perfect, but it’s real-world data I could touch. Then I ran the cross-tabulation.
Why I Even Bothered with This Cursed Year
You gotta ask why I was obsessed with 2014. It wasn’t random. This whole rabbit hole started because of my own failure, actually. Back in late 2014, I was trying to launch a really niche software app. I poured every single dime I had, plus borrowed money, into that thing. My main coder, the guy who was supposed to be the backbone, he was a Pisces. He totally bailed on me right before the final push to launch. He cited some vague personal issue, whatever. I was left scrambling, my app died on the vine, and I lost everything. For years, I hated that whole period. Every time someone brought up 2014, I felt that exact sting of betrayal and failure. So when my buddy started whining about how ‘cursed’ Pisces were, I thought, no. I will find the actual data and prove that my coder was just a lucky opportunist, not a victim of the stars. I needed closure from cold, unfeeling data to finally move on.
The Conclusion: Stability Wins
So, what did the real data say about Pisces careers in 2014?
The raw numbers I pulled and cleaned showed something interesting. The Pisces pool wasn’t cursed, but they also weren’t crushing it like the Aries folks were. While the general market was seeing a slow, steady climb out of the previous downturn, the Pisces group I tracked showed a significantly higher proportion of lateral moves—the Status Quo bucket—compared to the other signs in the same sectors.
Specifically, about 58% of the Pisces-proxied career changes in those key sectors were Status Quo moves. They got out of their bad jobs or moved sideways for a better office or work-life balance, but they didn’t jump into a massively better salary bracket. They moved for stability and security, not massive growth. My data showed they were overwhelmingly risk-averse that year. They took the safe, stable bet. That’s exactly what killed my app back then. My coder wasn’t unique; he was just doing what the statistical majority of Pisces were doing that year: taking the safer offer from the competitor. It was a successful year for security, not for flashy, high-risk promotions. He made a decision that was statistically smart for his sign that year, even if it completely wrecked my startup dream. I found the truth. My buddy was wrong. Now I can finally stop thinking about it.
Next time I’m digging into something like this, I need to figure out a cleaner way to get the data without relying on shaky birth-month assumptions, but for now, the 2014 Pisces career mystery is solved for me. They played it safe, and statistically, it paid off for their long-term stability.
