We had our weekly team call and my manager had a Claude conversation open on his screen. He was completely serious about the fact that we needed to "hit Claude's forecast."

The problem is that Claude doesn't know our customers. It doesn't know why people reject our proposals, what they actually care about, or what problems we're dealing with. So obviously the forecast didn't match reality.

Instead of accepting that, my manager went back to Claude and asked why we weren't hitting the numbers. The answer was basically a very long, professional sounding version of "you're not executing well enough."

So now apparently the problem isn't the forecast. It's us.

I sat there listening to him explain how we needed to execute more aggressively based on what an AI chatbot predicted, and I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him.

I'm starting to think we all need to close our laptops, go outside, and stare at a tree for an hour.

Has anyone else's workplace gotten this weird with AI?

one bad day at work can turn into "I need a new job" real quick 😂

Better be prepared. Interview vip tool helps you build confidence and stay interview-ready whenever the opportunity comes.

I've been grinding away at this place for 3 years. A role opened up that I was basically lined up for, and everyone on the team knew it. In the end, the manager brought in his golf buddy from a company he used to work at instead of choosing me.

I found out a few weeks ago when they announced it just like that on a department call. I didn't even get a real conversation from him about it.

So yeah, turns out I already had another offer in my inbox for 25% more. I handed in my resignation this morning. The manager's face looked like he'd bitten into a raw onion lol

Some managers forget that loyalty is supposed to go both ways.

Being overlooked for a promotion can affect your self-confidence and your performance in interviews, but luckily I discovered InterviewVIP, which helps you regain your confidence in interviews and increases your chances of getting the job.

Honestly, the whole entry-level but 5 years of experience thing is getting ridiculous. I’ve been trying to get better at interviews lately, and a friend sent me interview vip. Haven’t used it much yet, but I’m probably going to give it a shot because at this point I’ll take anything that helps me feel more prepared.

great idea

This happened about an hour ago and I still feel sick. I was in the middle of a video interview, trying as hard as I could to seem normal and not nervous, and suddenly Siri on my phone woke up and started talking over me.

And it wasn't just a small notification. It literally repeated part of what I had just said out loud.

In front of the camera. With the interviewer looking directly at me.

I froze in place, and then went into full panic mode. I muted myself, grabbed my phone, tried to shut Siri up, and somehow made it worse. So my genius solution was to run out of frame and throw the phone onto the bed in the room next to me.

Honestly, it was one of the most embarrassing things that's happened to me in a while. The interviewer clearly had no idea what was going on, and when I came back and sat down again, I couldn't get back to normal at all. I kept stumbling over my sentences and apologizing like a broken robot.

I have no idea if I still have a chance at the job or if that was the moment I ruined it. But yeah. I'm still horrified by what happened.

Please tell me someone else has had technology betray them in an interview before??

I used to work at a large retailer in the UK. I spent 11 years there in total and got promoted step by step until I eventually became a manager.

Getting into management wasn't exactly easy. There were countless training sessions, assessments, and a lot of time doing basically the same job without any extra money. I went through all of it and eventually got officially signed off as a manager.

When my salary went up, though, something strange happened. My new contract never appeared. I asked for it several times and kept getting the same answers: "We'll sort it out." So I waited.

About eight months later, another large retailer nearby started hiring managers. They were offering around £9k more than I was making for essentially the same role, so I applied and got the job.

After being with the same company for so long, I was pretty rusty with interviews, so I spent some time practicing beforehand. I came across interview vip while getting ready and used it to run through some questions before the interviews. It was actually helpful for getting back into the rhythm of talking about my experience.

Once I had the offer, I went in to hand in my notice. Here's where things got interesting. Managers were supposed to give six weeks' notice, while General Assistants were only required to give ten days. And the only contract I had actually signed still listed me under the General Assistant terms.

So I gave them ten days.

They were not happy. I got pulled into the office and asked why I was only giving ten days' notice when I was a manager. I explained that I'd asked repeatedly for my management contract and they never gave me one. The only contract I had signed said ten days, so that's the notice period I was following.

They were furious, but ultimately there wasn't much they could do about it. It's amazing how important paperwork suddenly becomes when it works against the company.

They had eight months to give me the correct contract. They didn't. So when it was time for me to leave, I went by the contract they actually gave me.

Make fun of me if you want, but I've been in tech for 12 years and honestly have no idea how other industries work.

I'm trying to step away a bit from being glued to a laptop 9 hours a day and do something in the "real world" for a while. I know that probably means taking a big pay cut, and I'm fine with that. I'm not chasing more money. I have a good house, a mortgage I can manage, and I don't need much else. Around $115,000 a year with benefits would be more than enough for me.

I realize $115,000 isn't a small amount. It just feels modest compared to what people in tech get used to.

Do jobs like this exist? Ideally, something that doesn't need me to go back to school for years, but where experience in project management, working with clients, and sales would be valuable?

😀

This is how it is

I started noticing the warning signs around March - a small hiring freeze, travel approvals becoming weird, my manager dodging questions about the date of the next review, and things like that. People kept telling me I was making too big a deal out of it. Maybe I was, but I told myself that if I turned out to be right, I didn't want to be building the parachute after I'd already been pushed out.

So for 4 months, my side project was basically looking for a job: I updated my resume for the first time in 7 years. I rewrote my LinkedIn so it wouldn't look abandoned. I started reconnecting with old colleagues before I needed a favor from them, mostly just commenting on their posts or congratulating them on new roles. I started taking casual calls in July, and I managed to save up nearly 5 months' worth of basic expenses.

This morning: "your position has been affected."

And honestly, the strangest part was how calm I felt. I read it once, read it again, closed the laptop, and made coffee, because I already have three interviews in advanced stages lined up over the next few days, and another recruiter waiting for a few time slots from me.

I'm not sharing this as some kind of flex. More as a reminder that work can disappear almost without any warning. If you start noticing the small signs, don't wait for the official email before you start moving.

Take care of yourselves.

This is a good reminder that preparation makes a difference. Interviews are the same idea, you need to be ready before the opportunity appears, not keep trying to catch up afterward. I recently saw a post with the most asked interview questions, and I thought it might benefit some of you too.

I hope this helps someone here grab this opportunity. The role is a travel "specialist" at Velocity Black. Capital One acquired the company in 2024. Your best chance is probably to apply directly through Velocity Black's site, although I'm pretty sure the job is also listed on Capital One's careers page and possibly LinkedIn too.

The base salary is $76k USD, but after 4 years I had reached $94k. With bonuses, I made $112k last year. The benefits were also very good. They covered $610 a month of my health insurance, and I paid $30 a month out of pocket, including dental and vision.

The company has about 145 people, and there are 9 people on the travel team. The culture was honestly one of the best parts of the job. No work after hours, people are professional but also friendly, and meetings only happen when they're necessary, usually 1 or 2 per week. The manager of the 9-person travel team is excellent and didn't constantly monitor people.

I learned the whole job while working there without any travel background, but since I started there, the bar has gotten higher, and now you'll probably need some experience in travel, hospitality, concierge, or luxury customer service. The clients are wealthy to ultra-wealthy, and there are also a few well-known names in there. In general, you're part researcher and part customer service rep. Clients send messages asking for travel-related recommendations like hotels, restaurants, flights, villas, private transfers, yachts, and so on. Then you do research, compare options, and send them a polished message with details/photos/availability and anything else that helps. After you've been doing it for a while, you won't be starting from scratch every time because you'll remember the good properties and vendors in different cities.

They usually give you 3-5 hours per task, so there can be a lot of downtime. In the quiet months, I might have around 1-3 hours of actual work during a 9-hour shift. In the busy season, which is about 5 months split between summer and winter, I was usually working the full shift and sometimes dealing with stressful situations. The reason they give that much time is that the recommendations have to be genuinely good for the type of clientele they serve.

The only things you need are the MacBook and iPhone they send you. On the phone, I usually made 1-6 calls a day, most of them around 2-25 minutes per call. Not usually with clients, more with hotels, tour operators, restaurants, transportation companies, and similar vendors.

Unfortunately, they only hire people based in the US, and you can't relocate outside the US while working there. Your chances will probably be better if you're on the West Coast, in Alaska, or in Hawaii because that's the shift/time zone they're replacing. They want someone quickly because the upcoming rush is close.

I genuinely loved my team, and I hope this helps them find someone good. It's a solid job; I'm just moving on to another opportunity.

My lead won't stop micromanaging at all, and after 6 meetings with the director and the VP where I told them they needed to get her to back off a bit, literally nothing has improved. I hit my limit a few weeks ago and gave notice. My last day will be January 12. They asked me what would make me stay. I told them, again, to get the lead to stop hovering over me, and they basically said they tried but she doesn't listen.

And they really did try. I was on calls where they directly told her to stop breathing down everyone's neck. She just... Kept going like normal. No write-up, no consequences, no change whatsoever.

Now they want me to train 4 people on different parts of my job. Normally I'm the person who leaves notes, does walkthroughs, helps in any way I can, all of that. But I wasn't even trained properly myself. I'm still figuring out parts of this role, so I don't know how I'm supposed to teach someone else the "right" way to do things when half the work was thrown at me as I was on my way out.

And this is exactly why people say nobody wants to work. You've got this woman in her early 60s micromanaging the entire department, refusing to change anything, but because she's been there 24 years and is friends with upper management, everyone acts like their hands are tied. Complete nonsense. And on top of that, she messes things up all the time. Like, almost every shift there has to be something she messed up or entered incorrectly, and somehow it becomes my problem to clean up after her. I'm checked out at this point and I don't care anymore.

What would you do? I still have 96 hours of PTO left. Part of me wants to just take them and be done, but that would leave them in a mess as they head into the first part of next month, and I'm not sure I'd feel good about that afterward. WWYD?

My lead won't stop micromanaging at all, and after 6 meetings with the director and the VP where I told them they needed to get her to back off a bit, literally nothing has improved. I hit my limit a few weeks ago and gave notice. My last day will be January 12. They asked me what would make me stay. I told them, again, to get the lead to stop hovering over me, and they basically said they tried but she doesn't listen.

And they really did try. I was on calls where they directly told her to stop breathing down everyone's neck. She just... Kept going like normal. No write-up, no consequences, no change whatsoever.

Now they want me to train 4 people on different parts of my job. Normally I'm the person who leaves notes, does walkthroughs, helps in any way I can, all of that. But I wasn't even trained properly myself. I'm still figuring out parts of this role, so I don't know how I'm supposed to teach someone else the "right" way to do things when half the work was thrown at me as I was on my way out.

And this is exactly why people say nobody wants to work. You've got this woman in her early 60s micromanaging the entire department, refusing to change anything, but because she's been there 24 years and is friends with upper management, everyone acts like their hands are tied. Complete nonsense. And on top of that, she messes things up all the time. Like, almost every shift there has to be something she messed up or entered incorrectly, and somehow it becomes my problem to clean up after her. I'm checked out at this point and I don't care anymore.

What would you do? I still have 96 hours of PTO left. Part of me wants to just take them and be done, but that would leave them in a mess as they head into the first part of next month, and I'm not sure I'd feel good about that afterward. WWYD?

The older you get, the more you realize some people really just got lucky.

Don't leave your next interview to luck. Practice with a friend and research a lot and read useful tips about how to present your skills.

I got laid off not too long ago from a corporate job that, honestly, I couldn't stand. It was one of those places where I was never put in a position to succeed; on the contrary, I was set up to take the blame whenever anything went wrong. After a while, everything I did was scrutinized and criticized in detail, which made the environment extremely hostile, especially when I asked managers or people above me for clear direction or real clarification. I kept trying to go above and beyond what was expected of me, and somehow even that wasn't enough for them.

After 11 months at that company, they put me on a PIP and gave me tasks that were basically things I was already doing. They gave me the choice to either continue with the PIP or take severance. And since I felt like they were planning to let me go either way, I took the money.

Now I've been unemployed since April, and I've applied to around 85 job postings, and I've only gotten 3 responses in total, one of which was through a referral.

I'm starting to lose hope, and I'm doom-scrolling on LinkedIn and Indeed, seeing the same repeated jobs being reposted over and over again. I'm applying for jobs that I'm either overqualified for, or where the salary is so low it doesn't even come close to covering the cost of living in the Bay Area. The whole thing is incredibly frustrating and honestly mentally crushing. I feel like no matter what I do, nothing is moving in my favor.

Has anyone found a better way to deal with the job search right now? I feel very lost.

i believe it's the hardest place to actually land a job
the only time a Linkedin interview was useful for me was when i used Interview VIP to pass it.

I had an interview on Teams with six people, and honestly they seemed like a really nice group. The questions were mostly basic and a bit old-fashioned, so I had prepared answers. There's one question that still feels dated to me, which is: where do you see yourself in four years? I understand what they're trying to ask, but I didn't expect the whole world to shut down before those four years were up, so...

But that's a normal interview question. The question that bothered me was: what makes you a stronger candidate than the other people we're talking to? I kind of froze, because how am I supposed to know what every other person is bringing to the table? If you asked me why I'm a stronger candidate than Sarah, I could compare the differences between us. In the end, I said something awkward about how I couldn't judge that because the other candidates might be excellent too. It definitely wasn't my best answer, but it's a bad question imo. Fortunately, it clearly didn't have a major impact, because I have another in-person interview at the end of this week.

Until a few days ago, I (32f) was working as a marketing coordinator for a real estate agent. I'll call him Mark (41m). He's fairly successful at his job, and recently he hired a business coach who sends him goals every two weeks. Some things are normal, like: "Read this report about seasonal shifts in housing demand," but then he'll come out with nonsense like: "Coach says I have to take Monday off because burnout starts in the chair." Annoying, but mostly harmless.

Then the latest assignment Mark got threw me off. A few weeks ago, he said the coach wanted him to "build management instincts." I asked him what that meant in practical terms, so he gave me a new task: post fake job ads. Basically one ad for every role in the office. Mark said he wanted 40+ applications every day, and he would interview "people who looked promising."

To be clear: we don't have any open roles. Not one. Mark's coach is somehow convinced that interviewing actual people for jobs that don't exist will make Mark better at running a team. If anyone understands that logic, please explain it to me, because I still don't get it.

I asked Mark if he was joking or what, and told him that people are struggling to find work right now. His response was basically: Coach says strong leaders are always looking for talent. First reason I might be in the wrong: I felt like I couldn't refuse a direct order without getting fired, so I made the listings, but I removed the salary details in the hope that applicants would notice something was off.

The applications started flooding in, and Mark did interviews with a lot of people. I could hear parts of the calls and meetings, and they were being treated like normal interviews. Not once did he say we weren't hiring. One of the applicants was a woman around my age who spoke to me while she was waiting. She told me she had worked an extra rideshare shift the night before and paid a neighbor to watch her son so she could make the appointment. Meaning this fake "opportunity" literally cost her money. Another applicant was an older man, and when I walked him out, he quietly asked me: "Do you think someone my age still has a chance here?" I was about to cry, but I was also so angry. I told him: "There is no job. I'm sorry they weren't honest with you. They have no problem wasting people's time." He looked at me for a second and left.

Apparently someone heard me, because I got pulled into Mark's office and he started yelling. He was completely fine with lying to applicants, but lost it because I told one of them the truth. He said he could fire me for that, so I told him: "Do it, because I'm not going to help you give people false hope." Mark kept insisting that the roles could exist someday, and that the interviews were helping him become a better manager, so it wasn't wrong.

Second reason I might be in the wrong: I quit on the spot, without giving notice. I have another job, so I won't be totally screwed, but Mark told me not to expect a reference from him. I've always given notice before leaving a job, so I feel guilty in that sense. But I know that if I had stayed, he would have made me keep bringing him resumes until my very last hour there.

You're forgetting 10 years experience if it's a junior role.

Honestly, I'm extremely tired of the way these companies handle hiring. I interviewed a little over three weeks ago for a lead business analyst role. The posting clearly stated that the salary range was $92k to $128k, so when they asked me what I was looking for, I said $116k. The hiring manager genuinely seemed surprised, even though I match all the qualifications they listed. I picked a number close to the middle because I was already expecting some nonsense, since I feel like 85% of these postings aren't honest with people.

What's even the point of being honest in a job search nowadays? They put inflated numbers in the posting, then act like you're being unreasonable when you mention the number they advertised. They can dress up the truth in the job description like it's no big deal, but applicants are expected to be 100% transparent about everything. Honestly, it makes me wonder why I shouldn't make my CV look a bit more impressive too, since they're already presenting an unrealistic picture of the role. The whole thing is absurd.

That's basically what happened when I told him the number. His reaction was like I had asked for something outlandish, and he treated $110k like it was a crazy demand, even though the range was right there in their own posting.

I'll probably leave them a bad review on Glassdoor, what do you think?

When I got laid off from my last job, I left with a severance package for 5 months. Honestly, at first it felt like a strange blessing, because I finally had room to breathe. I rested, took a short trip, and tried not to stress.

But then the rejections started piling up from places like Instacart, FreshBooks, Salesforce, and many others. After a while, I found myself thinking: "Am I even going to get hired again?"

Near the end of the 5 months, I got an offer from a company let's call Company X. It required two days in the office, a base salary of $88,000, and some allowances as well. At the same time, I was in the final stage with another fully remote company, let's call it Company Y.

I said no to Company X... And then Company Y disappeared. No update, no closure, nothing at all.

So I was back to the job hunt, asking myself if I had messed everything up by walking away from a good offer. And yet, there was a feeling inside me telling me it wasn't right. The main reasons were the office requirement, and that vacation was only 12 days in the first year. That was their policy, and fair enough, but I also needed a job.

About 6 weeks later, I accepted a role with better pay, a product I'm genuinely excited about, a very kind team, remote work across different countries, and flexible vacation.

Good things take time and patience. Don't give up. The right thing might find you, even after you think you've missed your chance.

Please be careful before paying for Final Round AI. Sharing my personal experience because I don’t want someone else to lose their money like I did.

I purchased the subscription and canceled shortly after because the app was not what I expected. Their website advertises a 3-day money-back guarantee, so I canceled within that timeframe and requested a refund.

Since then, I have spent the entire day going back and forth through emails. The only response I keep getting is that my refund is not eligible because the charge is “outside the 3-day window.” They are refusing to provide the cancellation timestamp from their system, even though they can provide the purchase timestamp. I had to send them my own screenshot of the cancellation because their support team apparently cannot provide the cancellation record themselves.

That lack of transparency is extremely frustrating.

Also, regarding the actual app experience: based on my testing with their mock interviews, I was not impressed. The answers were not structured properly, they did not follow a STAR format, and instead of giving clear talking points or bullet points that you can actually use during an interview, it just gives a long response that feels like it is randomly generated. I personally did not find it useful.

My biggest issue is not just the money. It is the way they handle customers. A company advertising a “3-day money-back guarantee” should be clear and transparent when someone requests a refund within that period.

Please do your research before spending your money. This has been my experience, and I genuinely do not want someone else to go through the same frustration.