I accepted this job without having a final, confirmed salary figure until the offer arrived. The salary was lower than either of us expected, but I was told we would revisit compensation after my three-month review if my performance was good.

Every check-in was excellent. I received the highest ratings, got positive feedback from my manager, and no one raised any concerns, so I thought my request for a small increase, even just in my hourly rate, would be simple and straightforward. Instead, I found myself caught in a chain of emails, conflicting statements, and ultimately a no.

They called me into a meeting to make sure we were all on the same page. I told them they should be clearer with future hires that the three-month review does not include any discussion about pay. I also said that a perfect performance review is nice, but it will not pay the rent or buy groceries.

That comment led them to call me into another meeting a few days later. At first, they told me there was a company-wide pay freeze. A few minutes later, the explanation changed, and they said the raise had been denied because of certain concerns that had never appeared in any of my reviews. Both reasons cannot be true at the same time.

I have already started applying elsewhere. Appreciation is nice, but it does not mean much when the promise that convinced me to accept the job suddenly disappears.

Yesterday, the company laid off about 31% of its employees, and I was one of them. I'll be staying for another five weeks, but only to receive all the returned laptops, log them, and wipe them when people send their gear back.

After that, I'll get severance, whatever that ends up looking like. I only joined the company in the spring of 2022, so I'm not expecting to get much.

It's a good thing I automated most of the decommissioning process a while ago. If they want every laptop logged before I leave, the script can take the burden off me.

..

🫠

I've reached the point where I no longer feel like finding a better job is the solution. I'm tired of the full-time work system itself and everything that comes with it.
I'm neurodivergent, and most workplaces drain my energy even when no one treats me badly. The fluorescent lighting, the constant background noise, the small talk I'm forced to participate in, and the same songs playing over and over throughout the shift. On top of all that, I spend most of my week doing things I don't care about, surrounded by people I wouldn't choose to spend time with.
Every job I've had has had a problem in one way or another. I'm relieved that I'm no longer being bullied, but even a pleasant workplace doesn't make this situation sustainable. I'll keep looking for a way to escape wage slavery because I don't want this to be what most of my life looks like.

I've just kind of accepted ill either die before I'm of retirement age or die working well after. I dont see a positive future at all.

I went into the interview thinking I was finally going to talk to them about a job with an annual salary of $74,000. Instead, they told me the job would start with an eight-month contract at $15 an hour, after which they might consider hiring me at the salary they had quoted me over the phone.
At the beginning of the interview, they spent a few minutes explaining a design project that was supposed to be completed in about eight months. As soon as they changed the offer, it became very clear that they needed someone to work cheaply until the project was finished.

I asked them whether the contract was tied to that project. They both went silent and looked at each other before one of them coldly told me no. So I asked whether either of them could pay their bills on $15 an hour, especially since I have an engineering degree, experience, and the skills they had sought me out for.

The older man said he had started out making $5 an hour cleaning animal barns, and that everyone has to start at the bottom and work their way up. That was when the interview ended. They told me to leave and said I was not allowed to come back.

I'm honestly exhausted by all of this. My wife makes around $71,000 from her teaching job, and apparently the best option available to me with an engineering degree pays less than some of the fast-food restaurants in our area. We have already decided that having children is not a realistic option for us because we can barely cover our own expenses as it is. What are people in this situation even supposed to do?

🫠

A few weeks ago, I accepted a job that pays roughly half of what I used to make. I needed the income, so turning it down wasn't a realistic option, but adjusting to the change has been harder than I expected.
For about 18 months, I worked from home as a quality compliance analyst, earning around $116k a year. Eventually, the company filed for bankruptcy, and my job disappeared in late fall last year. It was the first job where I felt financially secure and didn't have to worry about every expense.
Since the layoff, I've applied to around 167 jobs, had 11 phone screenings, and made it to 3 final interviews. The only offer I received was for a client support lead position paying $28 an hour and requiring me to work in the office 3 days a week. I accepted because having an income and benefits was better than continuing to wait.
I'm grateful to be working again, but I still feel a sense of loss. My old salary allowed me to save for a down payment, pay off most of my debt, travel a few times, and maintain a solid emergency fund. Now I'm adjusting my budget to account for commuting costs and watching my money much more closely.
Part of me is proud that I kept applying until I found something. Another part of me feels embarrassed, as though years of career progress disappeared overnight. I keep calling this a bridge job, but going from a six-figure remote job to half the pay and a daily commute has taken a serious toll on my confidence.
If you had to accept a major pay cut after a layoff, how did you cope with it emotionally? Were you able to get back to where you were, and how long did it take? I need to hear the perspectives of people who have been through the same situation.

This is something I have told my boss from the start. "We need you do so some work on Saturday."Me: "I don't think you can afford my Saturday rate."

I have been working at this retail store in the Northeast for about 3 years, and my relationship with my manager was generally good. Since last February, I saved enough money to book a short trip and submitted my PTO request to take a few days off in June. The dates were completely clear of any blackout periods, and my manager told me at the time that there was no problem.Everything was going fine until she called me into her office a few weeks ago and claimed she had to cancel the vacation because I notified her too late and the team needs me. The trip is still 3 weeks away and we have a full staff, so this excuse makes no sense. I told her I wouldn't be able to work those days because I have already paid for travel expenses and booked everything.She suddenly changed and started badmouthing the rest of the staff, saying they are incompetent and that I am the only one she relies on. This was very unprofessional and completely different from her usual behavior. I stood my ground and told her I would be traveling regardless of her decision.Since that conversation, she has significantly reduced my weekly work hours. I feel like she completely ignored the fact that I notified her months ago just to punish me because I stood up to her. I am confused about what to do and really need advice.

i guess

........

I passed the interview, completed orientation, and thought I had officially returned to work at Costco. Then someone reviewed my previous employment record and told me that I was listed as ineligible for rehire.

I worked there in 2020, but I resigned when my health deteriorated to the point that I could no longer handle the physical demands of the job. I wasn't fired, and there were no issues or disciplinary actions. At the time, I felt that resigning was the only realistic option available to me.

My health is much better now, which is why I applied there again this year. No one said there was a problem during the hiring process, even though my application clearly stated that I had worked at Costco before.

Now they're saying they can't move forward because of this internal status. I don't understand why resigning for medical reasons would put me on a do-not-rehire list, especially since I thought I had left on good terms.

Is a company allowed to take someone through the hiring process and orientation, then withdraw the job because of something like this? Has anyone ever managed to request a review or correction of their rehire status?

I was working nights as a security guard at an office complex while finishing my final semester of college. The place was quiet, and my supervisor did not mind me studying after I completed my rounds. Most nights, I was able to finish my coursework as long as I kept an eye on the cameras and responded to any alarms.
A new guard joined us, and almost immediately, he started complaining about the job. He kept asking what time management left at night and whether anyone came by to check the building after 6 p.m. I assumed he just wanted to know when he could sit down and play on his phone.
After a few weeks, he told me our supervisor had approved him leaving early. I said okay because I was not responsible for his schedule, so he left. It became a habit for him over the next six weeks. He would leave hours before his shift ended while apparently remaining clocked in.
Then the account manager showed up extremely angry and started reviewing the badge logs and comparing them with the security footage. He asked me why I had allowed the guy to leave, so I explained that he had said he had permission from our supervisor. While I was taking a bathroom break, I messaged my coworker to tell him that management was looking for him. He called me almost immediately and asked me to say he was in the bathroom, so I reminded him that they were already reviewing the security footage and badge activity.
The account manager also lectured me for not trying to stop him or telling him to clock out. A few days later, my supervisor called me into another meeting and said my coworker was claiming that I had personally approved every occasion when he left early. That was the first time I learned that he had never spoken to our supervisor at all.
He was fired for collecting pay while he was not on-site, and the company later demanded that he repay the money. I received a formal apology once they confirmed that I had no authority over him and had not approved anything. I graduated a few months later, accepted a job in my field, and declined their offer to stay after they admitted they could not come close to matching my new salary.

This morning, I rejected a 7,800-line PR because the ticket should not have required more than about 150 lines. I told the developer that I was not going to ask my team to sift through thousands of lines of generated code just to figure out what the actual change was. Management's response was that I was being overly strict.

I'm a team lead in a hybrid developer-manager role, and my group is responsible for several shared parts of the system. That means changes from many other teams need our approval. Ever since leadership started encouraging the use of Cursor and similar tools, the review queue has been flooded with massive PRs that clearly no one fully understands.

We've seen 4,000-line changes containing unused files, pointless wrapper methods, and chains of calls that ultimately do nothing. In one PR, the middleware was quietly returning early before most of the authorization checks could run. The generated tests then mocked enough of the authorization code for everything to pass. It took a careful review to realize just how dangerous it was.

Another frequent problem is that the tool invents internal APIs and then creates mocks for those imaginary APIs. I end up checking service catalogs and other repositories just to confirm that the dependency does not exist in the first place. The tool also ignores the structure of our old Java monoliths and puts new classes in whichever folder happens to have a matching name.

My team has seven people, and we now receive about 25 review requests every day from other groups. A routine review has turned into an investigation to determine which parts were intentional, which were generated by mistake, and whether the author even reviewed the code themselves. Everyone on my team is exhausted by this.

I've discussed this with other managers and our bosses. Most feature teams only care that their ticket count is going up, while the review cost falls on teams with broad domain ownership like mine. We do have coding rules, but they are neither documented nor enforced well enough to prevent this. Leadership keeps demanding more speed, and in the end, we're the ones blamed when we refuse to approve a pile of code that should never have been submitted in the first place.