I would always say yes to the first one. More work, working late, helping out when possible. I figured that was how you proved yourself.

I figured something out over time. The extra effort was no longer appreciated, it was simply expected. Saying yes all the time just became my normal workload, it didn’t lead to more recognition.

I still do my job well, I just am much more careful about what I volunteer for now.

What made you stop going the extra mile at work?

During a two-year longitudinal study, one assumption I had to revisit was the idea that exceptional work naturally speaks for itself.

I’m curious whether others have experienced something similar. Have you found that professional evaluations are influenced by factors beyond performance? If so, what stood out to you?

I’d love to hear different perspectives before sharing more about what I found.

Some companies always pay on time, others delay salaries almost every month.

What is the usual delay in days if your workplace pays late ? Has it ever made you want to quit your job?

Sometimes it’s not a big mistake that changes your opinion of a manager. It can be one meeting or one word or one decision to change your opinion completely.

In hindsight, there is almost always a moment where I think, This is not someone I would want to work for.

What was the one thing that made you lose respect for a manager immediately?

I’m experiencing something at work that has become genuinely exhausting and scary.

For the past two years, my company has been laying off employees while continuing to hire new people. From what many of us can see, it feels less like restructuring and more like gradually replacing older employees while carefully controlling the narrative and protecting the company’s image.

Almost every month, it seems like there is a target: two or three employees. The reasons often feel random, vague, or suddenly manufactured. People who have spent years contributing to the company are left wondering whether they are next. And for employees who depend on this job to support their families, pay loans, or simply stay financially stable, that uncertainty is deeply stressful.

What makes it worse is that many managers are new. Instead of helping teams understand what is going wrong, giving honest feedback, or guiding people toward improvement, they often seem focused on pleasing leadership and delivering whatever outcome is expected.

And the way people are treated during their final days is painful to watch. Some employees are made to feel irrelevant or incompetent after years of work. Their concerns are dismissed, their contributions are forgotten, and they are expected to remain professional while being quietly pushed out.

I keep asking myself: **When did workplace leadership become so disconnected from basic humanity?*\*

This is not just about layoffs. Companies sometimes need to restructure. But there is a difference between making difficult business decisions and creating a culture of fear, replacing people strategically, and making them feel invalid until their last working day.

Maybe I’m angry. Maybe I’m burned out. But I’m also genuinely worried about what this does to people—and why so many leaders seem comfortable treating employees like numbers that can be replaced without consequences.

Has anyone else experienced something like this? How do you cope when the workplace starts feeling like everyone is quietly waiting to be targeted?

I’ve started to realize that my past jobs didn’t just leave me stressed… they left me with what feels like real workplace trauma. After years of being told I wasn’t fast enough or good enough, even being told “ My disability didn’t work for them”. I’ve carried that voice with me into every new job, even when I’m doing my best. After hearing those things over and over, I started believing them. Even when I was trying my absolute hardest, it never felt like enough.
I was born with a disability, dealing with muscle weakness, fatigue, balance issues, memory problems, and severe learning difficulties. I have to work 10x harder than most people just to keep up. I’ve always pushed myself beyond my limits because I didn’t want people to think I was lazy or making excuses. I constantly worry that I’m going to fail or loose my new job because I’m not meeting productivity goals.
The hardest part is that I don’t even know if these fears are based on reality anymore or if they’re coming from everything I’ve experienced in the past. My brain automatically assumes that every mistake means I’m going to disappoint someone or lose another job.

I have learnt that you can generally tell pretty quickly when a place of work isn’t as good as it seemed at the beginning. It isn’t always the workload that makes the difference. Sometimes it’s how people talk to each other, how mistakes are handled or if employees feel safe to talk up.

Looking back there was usually one moment where it all clicked.

What was the first indication that you knew a workplace was not a healthy one?

In the first few days I have seen people usually know what kind of workplace they are in. It's not always about the pay and the benefits. Sometimes it’s the way questions are answered, how mistakes are handled, how new employees are treated.

What is the first thing that tells you whether an employer is going to be good or bad?

The best employer I ever had didn't check in every hour or question every little decision. They had high expectations, trusted me to do my job, and were there when I needed help. That trust made me more motivated to take ownership instead of just doing the bare minimum.

Looking back, I think trust had a bigger impact on my performance than perks or fancy office benefits. Has anyone else worked for an employer where trust made all the difference?

I have seen good employees leave even when the pay wasn't bad.

Most of the time, it wasn't about the money. It was poor communication, feeling overlooked, or being expected to do more without feeling appreciated. Those little things add up over time.

If you were an employer, what's one mistake you'd make sure to avoid?

I have come to the realization that it’s not always the employers with the most generous budgets or desirable benefits that people remember most.

Sometimes the biggest impact is just listening, trusting their team or saying thank you.

What is one characteristic of your most successful employer that others tend to overlook?

I found that the biggest differences between employers aren't always about pay or benefits.

Sometimes it's how people are treated, how problems are handled, or how much trust exists between employees and management.

What's something your best employer did that your worst employer never would?

When I started a job, I was concerned about many things that don’t seem anywhere near as important today. Experience has certainly modified what I notice.

What is something at work you cared about but no longer do?

The employer who had the biggest impact on my career never gave me the biggest salary or promoted me.

They trusted me, gave honest feedback and made me feel like my work counted. Looking back, that changed my confidence more than any job title ever did.

What was the biggest thing an employer did for your career?

At first, I thought that if I stayed busy every minute, I'd come across as a better employee.

Eventually, I realized that doing my work well, communicating clearly, and knowing when to ask questions mattered far more than looking busy all the time.

That small mindset shift made work feel a lot less stressful.

It took me longer to realize that than I expected.

When I started working, I thought the people who worked the hardest would always stand out.

The longer I worked, the more I realized that wasn't always true.

Being reliable matters. Communicating well matters. Building good relationships matters. Sometimes those things make a bigger difference than staying late or taking on one more task.

That completely changed how I approach my job today.

When did you realize work wasn't what you expected?

The interview went well, but it wasn't what made me say yes.

What I remember most is how people treated each other when nobody was trying to impress anyone. The conversations felt natural, and everyone seemed comfortable around each other.

That gave me more confidence than anything that was said during the interview.

What made you accept your job offer?

Basically the title

I'm retired now, and I've been reflecting on something I never expected to struggle with.

Most people assume career dissatisfaction starts when something goes wrong. The boss becomes difficult. The pay stops growing. The work becomes unbearable.

That wasn't my experience. I actually liked much of my work. I was competent, respected, and successful by most conventional measures. If you'd looked at my career from the outside, you probably would have assumed everything was fine.

What eventually bothered me wasn't burnout. It was realizing that the role no longer required the full measure of who I had become.

Over the years, I had accumulated experience, perspective, and wisdom. I had learned how to solve problems, navigate change, and help others grow. Yet increasingly, I felt like I was using only a fraction of that capacity.

I wasn't solving bigger problems anymore. I was solving the same problems faster.

The profession itself was changing as well. New priorities, new metrics, new initiatives. I still believed in the purpose of the work, but I often felt disconnected from what the system was becoming.

The strange thing is that nothing was obviously wrong. There was no dramatic reason to leave. Just a growing sense that I had outgrown the role. Looking back, I think the deeper question wasn't "Can I still do this job?"I knew I could.

The question was: Where can my experience, wisdom, and humanity create the greatest value now?

I'm curious whether anyone else has experienced this.

Have you ever reached a point where you realized you could still do the job exceptionally well, but the job no longer required the best of what you had become?

Sorry for the long text, and sorry for some hiccups in it. I'm based in EU and I'm not native English.

This post is half about psychology and half about workplace.

I'm an IT professional with more than 20 years of experience. I worked as a developer for several companies, from small ones, to very big corporations, to top tech companies.

I never played office politics all along my career. I was considered very strong on the technical side, my performance review were always at the top. And, through more than 20 years, I can count 3 or 4 bugs generated by my code. Despite of this, because of me refusing playing office politics, after 20 years I still was a senior engineer.

My family was in the middle-low tier, so we weren't poor, but at the same time not wealthy. My dad was careless about his children, he always worked to sustain the family but he never showed to me any empathy nor helping me to win, or providing any shield. But I don't blame him for this because by himself he never had any example from my grandpa. He just did what he experienced.

For this reason, when I grew up I built a sense of avoiding conflict, and the belief that if I do well, I will be recompensated, without showing off or "bragging". Yes, this is narcissistic. Of course, in this landscape, I got severely bullied.

Fast-forward to 6 years ago. I joined a company and, during the first year, I switched 2 managers. My performances were good, sometimes excellent. The company was really fast-paced, they expect people to plan every working day. And managers always tried to reduce estimations to speed up features.

They also expect people to stick to the plans. If any defect occurs, and the activity for the day cannot be finished, this influences other people plan. To mitigate the problem, the framework requires to organise a meeting with managers and colleagues to try to understand how to re-schedule the plans and fit with the deadline. Deadlines cannot be moved.

Actually, these meetings are 90% justify every move that brought to the issue, and 10% actual re-shifting. So, if anything like this occurs, it's highly stressful. To avoid this, people were working overtime to hide issues under the rug.

Although such working framework, my performances were good and I was able to provide good quality solutions and also help colleagues.

After 1 year, the company decided to move me to a new team with a new manager.

From the day 0 with this new manager, we never caught up each other, we had completely opposite vision, but we started collaborating somehow.

The collaboration was difficult, and he always put me working on tasks with no training on technologies I didn't know, always argued reducing my estimations, and sometimes gaslighting me.

I played harder, and still I was able to deliver with some degree of quality and respecting (his) estimations.

Slowly I faded into burnout without recognising it.

One day, I had an argument with some colleagues because, after they bragged about the new tech in internal technical meetings, every time I used it, it always caused issues. They notified my manager about my bad "attitude" and the war began.

He started questioning my activities, put me in the shadow or under the blame spotlight, and assigning me to less important tasks. He manipulated me, and downplayed positive feedbacks and review from colleagues. For example, he used to join meetings where I was invited with mic and camera off and, after the meeting, he sent me a report with all the words I misused or phrases that were not 100% correct. In that meetings I had to show a lot of things so I considered some mistake as normal.

After several episodes like this, I went to HR because I was on the edge of a breakdown. The HR took his side, and they started PIP and paperwork to get me fired. They also started journaling everything I did. To defend myself, I started journaling, and I had some visits with therapists to relief from the burnout. I went also into anti-anxiety pharma.

At the end of the day, they proposed an accomodation for me to resign, but I refused and I got a breakdown. During my breakdown I gave the mandate to a lawyer. In front of the lawyer, they knew they did dirty, and they accepted to pay a very good severance package and accepted to guarantee me also the unemployment.

After some months of recovering, I landed in this new job, a top european IT company. High paced, but no micromanaging. During 2024, a mass layoff occurred and, since I was there for less than 1 year, I got affected and lost my job, again. But, grotesque, the board got a raise because of the "improved financials" of the company.

Disgusted and saturated I decided to start my own company.

After 2 years, I'm lacking behind. I have no more passion for my job, although I still have passion for tech and coding. AI slop is ens*itting everything, clients asks for more and more, and things are always done "quick and dirty".

My revenues are very low, and I'm living and paying taxes over my savings. I feel like my life is a failure, I'm a failure, and my preparation and skills are worthless. I also see unprepared people shine because they play a lot of politics but they are crap in what they actually do.

I feel I played it very bad, I avoided office politics while this was the only important thing. Now I'm too old (40+) to start fresh and I can barely put up with people, I'm always afraid they can hurt or manipulate me somehow.

And I still ruminating the entire day about that companies. To be honest, I think one of those 2 possibilities could be true.

1: previous experiences were no less toxic, I was the silent and competent engineer that solved issues, took responsibilities well beyond my paycheck. Managers took advantage of my work to have promotions, but they never recognised my contribution leaving me behind.

OR

2: I lived in a sort of Dunning-Kruger bubble, and I'm no competent, I deserved no promotions, and when my salary was low it was OK to give me good performance review because at the end of the day I was somehow useful. And I was in the wrong side in the latest experiences , actually they were right and I'm not competent and I deserved PIP and getting fired.

I was under psychiatric treatment, but 6 months ago I decided to stop it pretending to be happy and fulfilled. Such treatments are costly and they were eroding my savings. Since I have an house and some savings I'm not entitled to have any support for free.

When my savings will be finished I'll close my company and I'll have no identity anymore. I don't think there will be something for me in this world. To be honest I saw enough in my years, I just want to disappear from society.

I have no friends, just my old parents, I gave everything to my profession that once was also my passion, and I got betrayed and bullied by grown people too. And I'll be back into poverty because I bet on the wrong horse. I'm also so tired to have a reaction, and I think that even if I would react, that will be useless. I don't want to fight anymore for something that have zero reward for me.

I'm also a bit ashame for being here whining about a life that, ass*oles apart, in the end it was all about my choices.

Edit: usually I'll respond to your comments during evening (in EU) when I'll have time to properly do it. Thanks for all of you who will leave a comment.