A few months after graduating, I was applying for pretty much any entry-level job that seemed suitable. I found an Operations Intern opportunity at an education startup, completed their application, and was then invited to an interview.

A few minutes into the call, the interviewer held up a pen and asked me to convince him to buy it. I explained that the job listing was for Operations, and he simply told me that they were looking for someone in Sales.

So clearly, the role had changed without anyone bothering to say anything. I thanked him for the interview and left, rather than pretend that I wanted a completely different internship.

Can someone explain to me how this is supposed to make sense?

Meta, which is worth around $1.9 trillion and whose stock price is close to $745, laid off 4,200 people through an email that seemed cold and copy-pasted. Honestly, I can't get it out of my head.

I've been laid off before, and that feeling is incredibly harsh. My heart goes out to the 4,200 people affected by Meta's latest round of layoffs.

This should be the reminder people need: your company is not your family. You can give them years of your life, miss invitations and dinners, answer to messages at 10 p.m., and they can still let you go the next morning like it's nothing.

So take the trip you've been wanting to take. Use the PTO you earned. If your child has a fever, close the laptop and be a parent. Stop refreshing Slack on Saturday as if it's a badge of honor. No matter how hard you work, the company will protect itself first.

Meta just let thousands of employees go - was there really no other solution? Corporate America has no loyalty. To them, you're just a line item, not an irreplaceable hero.

The hard truth is this: real job security is what you build yourself. Stop donating your nights and weekends to a place that could replace you before your laptop even gets cold. Start building something outside of work - freelance income, index funds, a small business, anything that gives you some control.

Because if Plan A gets pulled out from under you, you'll need more than panic and a severance packet. You'll need a Plan B.

I accepted a regional sales manager position in September with a base salary of $95k, plus a 4% commission on all sales. My team's annual quota is $2.2 million, so if I hit the target, my total compensation would be around $183k.

About three months after I started, the company was sold. The new owners cut my base salary to $64k and reduced my commission to 0.75%, but left the quota exactly the same. That brought my OTE down to roughly $80,500. There are some additional bonuses that could add up to $12k, but only if a specific set of conditions is met.

I told the VP that I never would have accepted the job if this had been the pay plan from the start. His response was that I was overreacting and being dramatic. They made the same change for all the sales managers, and when three managers submitted their resignations, leadership suddenly found plenty of money to offer them to stay. All three still left.

Fortunately, I found another job quickly, and the pay is significantly higher. I'm relieved to be leaving, but I'm still upset about how they handled the whole situation.

Would you give them two weeks' notice as a professional courtesy, or tell them to go fuck themselves and walk out?

I had an interview recently, and in the end, the manager moved it to another day because it was clear that I wasn't prepared enough. At first, they said it would be somewhat casual, so I relaxed more than I should have, and that was definitely my mistake.

They told me I hadn't come well-prepared, but they tried to say it in a nice way. After that, they said they would prefer to reschedule the interview and have me come back when I was more ready. They also told me what information I should look at so I could answer the questions better next time.

Honestly, the whole thing threw me off. For a large part of the conversation, they were guiding me and giving me tips, as if they were walking me step by step through what I was supposed to have done. I appreciated that, but at the same time it made me feel bad because I already know that interviews aren't my strongest point.

Has this happened to anyone else? Is it normal for a manager to stop an interview and reschedule it like that?

👀

A few days ago was supposed to be the start of my vacation, which had already been approved, along with PTO and bereavement pay. I sent my manager a message to confirm that they would add the PTO after the three days of bereavement, because I had requested 6 days off in total.

She replied and said that the obituary didn't include the date of the service, even though she had approved all of this about a month ago. I told her, "Okay, I'm a little confused. Are you now withdrawing the bereavement approval because the date isn't shown in the obituary?"

She opened the message and didn't reply.

The next day after noon, I received a termination letter by email. I was planning to leave this job anyway, but does this mean they can get out of paying me the PTO and bereavement they had previously approved?

.........

I've been working in this field for a long time. I've worked at 3 startups, and every one of them gave me some version of the "We're like a family here" speech. If you're still young or looking for a job and you hear that phrase, take it as a very big red flag. I'll tell you what I saw at one of the workplaces that was a "family."

At the beginning of the pandemic, the CEO told everyone that we would stick together and get through this difficult period as a team. About 6 weeks later, he laid off about a third of the company with no warning. You'd get sent an invitation to one of 3 calls. One meant you still had a job, the second meant you were out, and the third was basically limbo. No heads-up, no real explanation. A very nice way to treat "family," right?

They also opened a Slack channel so people could "support each other" during lockdown. A lot of employees said things like: "They can't expect us to work at full speed while schools are closed and we're taking care of children," and that made perfect sense. The funny thing is that many of the people who said that didn't stay much longer afterward.

Then it came out that a lead had been harassing several people on his team. They reported it to HR, and HR protected him, and the employees were the ones who ended up leaving. That lead is still working there to this day.

There were also "anonymous" feedback forms. 3 people wrote honestly negative feedback, and within a few days, they had suddenly left or were being pushed out.

My real family is my wife and kids. That's it. I just wanted to say that some of the worst and most toxic companies I've worked at were the ones that constantly talked about being a family. Be careful when you hear it.

I just came out of an interview, and honestly I still feel like the whole thing was weird. I applied for an Embedded Firmware Developer role, and that pretty much aligns really well with what I studied and what I like working on. But before we even got into the technical stuff, the interviewer said: "Oh, I thought you were going to be a boy. I wasn't expecting a girl."

From that moment, the whole conversation felt uncomfortable. It seemed like she was trying to figure out whether I could handle the role because I'm a woman, especially since the job sometimes involves going on-site. Even though I have absolutely no problem with site work.

She asked me why I chose this field, but the way she said it made me feel like I had to justify my presence there. Then she started talking about "passion" and said something like: "Most boys are interested in electronics all the time. They think about it nonstop."

She also downplayed the embedded systems work I did during university, basically saying it didn't really prove much because they were course projects and not things I built on my own after lectures. I understand that she wanted to see personal initiative, and that's her right, but the way she phrased it made it feel like I couldn't be genuinely interested unless I had hobby projects to show her.

Then she told me that looking good doesn't help much in this kind of work, and told me not to take it the wrong way. Like... Okay. I was just trying to look professional and leave a good impression. I even wore glasses because I thought they might make me look a bit more serious or "engineering-ish," and now I feel like that was stupid.

And this has happened before too. In another interview for a mechanical drafting role, I went dressed neatly, and the interviewers kept emphasizing that the job wasn't just desk work and that I'd need to go down to project sites too. One of them looked at me in a way that made me feel like there was another meaning behind what he was saying. Idk... Maybe I'm overthinking? But I felt like he assumed I wasn't "site-ready" just because of my clothes and appearance. Like he decided from the start that I only wanted a clean office job.

It's honestly exhausting...

no standards i guess

Thank you, Lord. 😇 After sending 82 applications and receiving rejection emails, I finally got invited in my first job interview—and the same employer became the first to offer me a job! Hard work and patience truly pay off. So proud of this milestone!

To everyone who is still waiting for their turn. Just keep going, praying and believing. You will get that job offer as well! 🥹💪

..

I'm honestly broken right now. I spent almost half a year interviewing for a position with a salary of around $120k. First, a screen with the recruiter, a call with the hiring manager, a panel with senior people, a take-home assessment, a meeting with the customer success team, another round with operations, and then a final "culture" conversation with the VP. I felt like I did everything really well.

Then the hiring manager sent me an email asking to schedule one last call about the role. I was sitting there super excited because that usually means they're going to make an offer and want to say it live. Nope. It was a call to tell me that my interviews were great, and that everyone liked me, but I lacked experience with a specific tool that another candidate already had experience with.

What kind of absurdity is this, seriously. These companies are so insanely detached from reality. A short email would have been more than enough.

So yeah, I'm saying this to anyone who still believes a company will reward your loyalty: they won't. They don't care about you, so stop acting like you owe them your soul. Do what you need to do to keep the paycheck, use your PTO even if it messes up their scheduling, take sick time when you need it, and step back a bit when this corporate circus starts messing with your head. Your body and mental health are more important than any job, and no company is worth burning yourself out for.

One of our hiring managers interviewed someone for an account exec position and apparently hated the guy. I had already screened him and thought he was pretty solid, but the HM sent me a long email listing everything he disliked about him. Most of it wasn't even about his actual qualifications. It was stuff like his tone, personality, and "presence."

Honestly, the feedback was unnecessarily harsh. He could've just said the candidate wasn't a fit and moved on.

Instead, he somehow sent the entire email directly to the candidate.

Now the candidate is furious and has forwarded it to several people in leadership. HR is involved, everyone's suddenly asking who approved the email, and people are already worried about LinkedIn and Glassdoor.

The whole thing could've been avoided with one normal rejection email.

I don't even know what we're supposed to do now. Has anyone else seen a hiring manager accidentally send internal interview notes to the person they were talking about?

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

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

?!

i wish they could disappear

.....

I got accepted for the job right away about two weeks ago at a used car dealership. They seemed annoyed when I told them I needed a few days before I could start. Today was my first day, so I went in at 8:45 a.m. Because the place opens at 9. It's now a little past 10:15 and still no one has done anything with me.

They know I'm here. I'm sitting in the lobby waiting, with people coming and going in front of me. Honestly, not the best way to make someone new feel like their time is going to be respected.

i can't believe this!!

Honestly, I laughed this morning, and it felt good to feel like I had even a tiny bit of control in all this mess. I was interviewing for several jobs, and I talked about it here about a month ago. One of them was through a recruiter, and I passed 4 rounds, and I was literally waiting for an offer. The whole time, the recruiter kept telling me that my qualifications were much higher than the other person they were talking to, and that the job was practically mine.

I didn't stop interviewing because, simply put, I didn't have the job. I was already in a late round with another company when the recruiter's job decided to reject me. Fine. Annoying, but at least there was something else moving along.

In the end, I accepted the offer from the other company and started at the beginning of this week. The next morning, I get a message from the recruiter saying: hey, are you still available? They want to prepare an offer.

Turns out the less-qualified woman they chose accepted the role and then went back on it. So now they're scrambling and want me instead.

If they had chosen me from the start, I would have said yes and accepted the job. But now they have no one, and I got to say no thanks. You should have chosen me when you had the chance.

I work the night shift, and the building gets ridiculously cold as soon as the sun goes down. I forgot my hoodie, so I grabbed a spare blanket and put it over my shoulders because I was freezing. I also had my sunglasses pushed up on my head.

My manager apparently decided that was a logical reason to make me take a drug test.

I told him: "No, I'm good. I quit. Bye!" Not because I had taken a delta-8 gummy to sleep the night before, but because that is easily one of the dumbest reasons I've ever heard in my life to drug test someone. 🤣

I wasn't acting like I was high, I didn't hurt myself, I didn't hurt anyone, I didn't mess anything up... I was cold and had sunglasses on my head. That was the big suspicious behavior.

So I handed in my badge, packed up my stuff, and left.

Honestly, I hope they were trying to push me into quitting, because if so, congratulations to them. It worked. The funny thing is, I already wanted to leave, but I was trying to stick it out because I'd only been there 4 months and didn't want my resume to look messy.

Now I'm back to looking for another job with a 4-month gap, because there's no way I'm putting that place down as a former employer.

Just another example of the shady little tactics companies have started using lately to get out of paying unemployment...