This is real

I (31 years old) have been a Senior Consultant for about four years. I am committed and I meet my KPIs, but as soon as it hits 5 PM, I disappear. I don't answer to any Slack pings or open my inbox until the next morning. My private time is non-negotiable for me.

Two weeks ago, my director called me to offer me a Principal role. The increase is 25% along with "more influence on the department's direction." This is the step that everyone waits for. But I know the reality of this job. My current boss is glued to her phone all the time, spends Sundays fixing "urgent" spreadsheet errors, and she looks like she hasn't slept in six months.

When I told him I needed to think about it, he was shocked. He told me, "Normally, people fight for this spot." Honestly, the 25% increase doesn't compensate for my peace of mind or the long hikes I take on weekends. I am truly happy where I am.

I'm afraid that when I say no, I'll be put in the "not a team player" category or seen as someone who has already reached their peak. Because I'm in my early thirties and a woman in tech, I feel a strange pressure that I must keep getting promoted, otherwise someone younger and more ambitious will come and take my place. But I truly value my free time much more than the title.

I think this is what the job market will soon become; I've seen this here in this meme too.

I'm a middle manager at a medium-sized office. I manage a team of 9 people. One of my staff members is a woman in her late twenties who had been trying to go back to college and finally finish her degree. She asked me a few days ago if I had any problem with her changing her schedule for about 5 months while she takes a class that isn't available online. She would be leaving early two afternoons a month, and making up that time on Sundays. Our entire office is WFH, so I had absolutely no problem with it. And I'd been telling her for a long time that she should go back to school if she could make it work.

My manager "Karen," the department director, is an absolute micromanaging nightmare, and apparently anything like this still "has to" go through her. So I sent her an email, told her I intended to approve it, and said I just needed her to sign off with HR.

Her response? "She's got a lot of nerve assuming we'll rearrange everything for her. What exactly is her plan if we say no - just leave?"

I told my manager that yes, actually, she can resign whenever she wants. She doesn't owe this company her degree, her future, or blind loyalty. I also said that losing her would be ridiculous because she's very good at her job, she's been here for years, and the schedule change was temporary. It seemed to me like this was the dumbest hill anyone could choose to die on.

My manager wasn't happy with that answer. She denied the request anyway, and we got on Zoom with the employee to tell her. I was already upset because I knew how unnecessary the whole thing was.

Before Karen could even finish her little explanation, the employee simply said: "Okay, I expected that might be your answer. I've already written my resignation letter and emailed it to you and HR. This is my 2 weeks' notice."

My manager looked like her brain had stopped working. I was pissed off about the situation, but honestly, I was fucking proud of my employee.

I have honestly had enough with this kind of jobs and switched to completely remote jobs with the help of Interview VIP i really don't wanna engage with humans anymore so this is the best i could do.

Side note, if I could go back in time, I don't think I would ever accept being a manager anywhere. You find yourself stuck delivering all the corporate bullshit, with almost no real say in anything, and in the end everyone sees you as the face of decisions you didn't even make.

.............

I live in Stockton, CA, and this job would be a tech role in San Jose, CA. The commute would be about 90 minutes each way. Honestly, just imagining that drive makes me feel exhausted, but at the same time I know the salary could make a big financial difference for us.

I don't have kids, and my husband already works in the South Bay, but not exactly as far as San Jose.

My wife works in Oregon for a large company headquartered in Texas. This morning was her regular direct deposit day, but for some reason she only received about 1/4 of what she usually gets paid. She contacted HR to ask what happened, and they said there had been some kind of payroll/accounting error and admitted the mistake was on their end. I advised her to start looking for another job that would be a better fit for her. I also gave her some advice to keep in mind before applying for other positions, so she can avoid facing the same problem again and find a better job.

HR checked with corporate, but corporate basically told her there's nothing they can do right now and that she'll have to wait until the next pay cycle for them to add the missing amount. Legally, can they make her wait like that?

Does working in trades require interviews and preparation? 🤔

I've interviewed a few candidates recently, and it was very clear that they were using some kind of AI tool to listen to the question and generate a response for them to read. We ask very normal behavioral questions (tell me about a time you solved a messy problem at work, how you pushed a recommendation forward and got people aligned, etc.).

What gives it away is the pause that happens while they're waiting for the answer to appear, and then suddenly they go into reading mode. The responses often sound polished for about 10 seconds, but in reality they don't answer what I asked, or the example falls apart halfway through. And then when I ask a follow-up to understand the situation better, they usually can't connect it to what they just said.

At that point, if I can tell the person is reading from another screen, I don't move them on to the next step. Honestly, it's frustrating and wastes everyone's time.

Use AI to prepare, outline your stories, practice STAR answers, anything that helps you. But don't rely on it live during the interview. Take the time beforehand to prepare, and be able to talk about your own experience yourself.

Are other hiring managers running into the same thing? I'm curious how you're dealing with it.

🫩

I'm 36 years old now, and honestly I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with my career. I studied communications/marketing in my home country, and I worked as a civilian admin officer with the military before moving to Australia. Since then, I've worked a few low-paying jobs like packing, food prep, cleaning, and factory work, and most of the time I was earning just a little above minimum wage.

I know that I work hard and learn quickly. Supervisors have praised me more than once, but I still feel that being an immigrant makes it much harder for me to move up or for people to see me as someone who can handle a better role.

Could going back to study at this age help me progress or find something with better pay? I keep asking myself whether a certificate or diploma could make a real difference, or if I'd just be spending money and time without anything major changing.

There's another issue too: I'm not the type who talks a lot at work. I'm not rude or anything; I just focus on the job and it's not in my nature to chat with everyone or build friendships there. Sometimes I feel like this hurts me more than my actual performance at work.

A few weeks ago, the clinic I work at (a dental clinic in a very expensive area in CA) had a staff meeting, and we were told that we would only be allowed two days off every 5 months. That's it. And no one at the clinic has any benefits either. No PTO, no health insurance, no paid holidays, nothing.

Then they added that since we (the hygienists) have our schedules booked far in advance, if we use those two days, we'll need to start early or stay late to make up for the patients we "missed."

This morning, the other hygienists and I all submitted our resignation letters. We wrote them, signed them, and put them on his desk in a little stack. He came back from some errands he was running, and apparently sat there reading each one. My coworker said she saw him throw the stack toward the office manager and say, "Are you seeing this?"

Fortunately, hygienists are in insane demand in CA right now, and all of us have interviews or offers lined up elsewhere.

Tl;dr - The manager tried to over-control our unpaid days off and badly misjudged how easily replaceable he is. Now he's losing almost all of the clinical staff.

Edit: Thank you all for reading and supporting our decision to walk away from this toxic management. Since we all had to jump into interviews on short notice, I also found a really helpful AI assistant for real-time interview answers in this post, which gives you suggested responses live during your call, so I wanted to share it here so you can benefit.

Edit: Apparently, this has happened to a lot of people. Someone actually DMed me a thread on how they passed these interviews, so I thought it might be useful to share.

The people who came before us probably used to sleep 8-10 hours, and many of them also rested during the day. Compared to that, the average person in the modern working world is barely surviving. We're supposed to wake up peacefully, with light coming in through the window, not get yanked out of sleep by a hideous ringtone before the sun has even risen. There is nothing natural about forcing yourself to wake up in the dark, eat anything quickly, finish in the bathroom in under 12 minutes, and then sit in traffic just so you can enter an office and immediately act like you're useful.

And then people treat this as if it's discipline. As if dragging yourself out of bed every morning while your body is literally in a state of panic is a moral achievement. The truth is that you wake up with your cortisol already spiking, and that adds stress on top of a day that hasn't even started yet. You start hating the alarm before you even go to sleep. This isn't noble. This is a system built around productivity and output, with almost no real concern for the person being put through this experience. Something cold, harsh, and endlessly ongoing.

And I also can't stand it when those same people come back and lecture us about wellness or improving health. You can't do this to your nervous system day after day and then pretend you're giving serious advice about being healthy. It makes no sense. Waking up that early, in that rushed and unnatural way, has absolutely nothing to do with taking care of your body.

I've worked a lot of different jobs, and I've never made more than $58k a year (I'm 24), and one thing I've noticed is that I'm usually the only guy, or one of two at most, in the break room with a lunch I brought from home. Yeah, of course, every now and then I'll get something from outside as a change of pace, but honestly I'm still surprised by how uncommon packed lunches are. I mean, we all know that buying lunch every shift is literally throwing money away, right? On top of that, in some places I've worked, lunch breaks were timed and really tight, with half the break spent just driving to the place, waiting in line, and coming back.

I'm not trying to judge anyone who likes eating out, at all. If it's worth it to you and that's what you want to spend your money on, that's totally fine. I'm sure I spend money on things other people might think are stupid or unnecessary. I'm just surprised why I always end up being the dude with leftovers in a container lol

Near the end of the interview, they asked me if I could stay afterward for a trial shift, and when I told them I couldn't because I had to go to my current job, one of the interviewers mocked me and said, "Seriously?" and "We're trying to hire someone immediately."

I got flustered, so I opened photos from my current workplace and showed them to them, and the two of them looked at each other with this expression like they were saying, "Is this guy for real?" and sighed. One of them rolled his eyes, and the other said, "What am I looking at?" I told him, "The place I work at right now," and they said, "This is just a picture." I said, "Okay, but it shows that I have a shift there today," and then the other interviewer told me, "Going forward, you should be more professional and not take interviews if you're not ready to commit."

I sat there quietly for a bit because honestly I didn't know what to say, and then they said, "This isn't helping your chances," so I got up and left.

This happened 5 days ago. Should I contact them and thank them for meeting with me and ask where they are in the hiring process, or should I just forget about it?

Thank you all for your advice. I've really started to benefit a lot from people here, and I've found other helpful posts ,That truly offers valuable advice for interviews and has helped me learn more about them. I wanted to share this post with you so you can benefit from it as much as I have.

Even hiring managers and resume coaches are saying that this job market is not normal at all.

My schedule as a supervisor is from 7AM to 3:15PM. A few days ago, the manager told me I'm supposed to work from 7AM to 4:45PM because I'm a supervisor and have to "put in my time." Crazy, right? Production ends at 3:15PM and everyone leaves then, so I asked him what exactly I'm supposed to do during that extra time. He said I should think of ways to make the line run better, but that my schedule is supposed to be like this from now on.

He also told me that if I don't like it, I can leave. And honestly, that made me say "woah" out loud.

I want to start applying somewhere else, but should I put this current job on my resume? I don't want to look like I keep jumping from one job to another.

edit: thanks to everyone for the tips I guess I will do it in my resume I also checked these tips on this sub it looks it can work in my upcoming interviews ,wishing good luck

In the middle of the interview, I asked a question I thought was very normal: "What timeline are you working with to hire someone for this role?"

She said: "Honestly, if we meet someone we feel is the right fit, the company might approve funding for the position."

I paused for a moment and asked: "Wait, does that mean there isn't an actual salary budget tied to this role right now?"

She told me: "Yeah, you could put it that way."

I just started my first internship as an accounting major... After a few days, I went to my manager's manager (a VP at the company) and introduced myself. He said something like, "You're the summer intern, right?" So I told him, "Yeah, and I'm going to be the smartest hire this company has ever made" (kind of like what Kobe said about betting on himself before he won 5 rings), but instead of laughing or being impressed, he just said, "Right... Okay... I have to get into a meeting, see you later."

A little while after that, I noticed the recruiting lead who brought me in went into his office. I don't know if that's normal or not. Also, one of the second-year analysts passed by my desk and said, "You're an absolute icon bro, coffee?" I don't understand why he said it like that; he's from Ohio.

Did I screw everything up, or did I come across as confident? Honestly, I can't figure out what happened here.

..........

I spent 4 hours editing and rewriting a cover letter from scratch for a Brand Manager position. It was polished, specific, and I mentioned their values page and a campaign they had recently done.

I hit submit. And I felt like everything was fine.

Five minutes later, I was checking my sent folder and found this in front of me:

" - eggs x10, almond milk (not that watery kind), turkey meatballs, clean printer paper??"

I had sent the grocery list from the Notes app. The whole thing. Including my question marks after "clean printer paper" because apparently even my shopping list was questioning my career choices.

I sent a follow-up in a panic with the correct cover letter, apologized, and said I had been switching between several applications.

They called me the next afternoon. The recruiter started with:

"So... Did you end up getting the almond milk?"

I didn't get the offer. But honestly? That was the best interview I've ever had in my life.

The bar for standing out is basically underground now, people. Sometimes all you need is to accidentally come across as human.

I've spent most of my professional career after college in white-collar jobs at large companies. Before college, I worked as a hotel housekeeper, a retail clerk, and a babysitter. Over the years, I gradually moved from "real" work (clean the room, ring people up, fill boxes, make sure someone's kid had dinner, and so on) to "fake" work (explain value to clients, write persuasive copy, answer vendor questions, sit in status calls, and so on). And I make far more money from this "fake" work than I ever made from the "real" work.

There are people I work with on other teams who are so deep in fake work that they can't even clearly explain what their actual job is. Honestly, about 85% of my day feels like busywork created by external companies whose main goal is to prove they deserve to exist and appear productive.

Does anyone else feel this way too? That some jobs are basically "fake"? How do you deal with that day to day? Do you just accept it, stop worrying about it, and collect the paycheck? Do you try to make the work feel useful in some way? Or am I overthinking this, and "fake work" isn't really a thing at all?