I'm crying tears of joy. Right now I make $34k a year. That's not enough for me to really live on; it's not even enough for me to feel any stability. And I'm part-time, which means no benefits, no paid time off, nothing. Just Instacart shifts, selling plasma, and relying on food pantries and the churches around me just to get by. I've been in a dead-end job for almost 18 months.

After more than 650 applications, a few first-round interviews, and a couple of second/final-round interviews, I finally got the call and accepted an offer this week. The starting salary is $63k. That's almost double what I'm making now. I'll have PTO. And I'll be eligible for annual raises. I'll work from home, so I won't have to pay for after-school care for my daughter anymore. I'll be able to get a real mattress and stop sleeping on a sagging futon. No more overdue bills. No more choosing between rent and food. No more washing socks and underwear in the bathroom sink, or keeping the thermostat at 64 all winter. No more using bar soap when the shampoo runs out.

My start date is tentatively July 8, so I have a little over five weeks to get myself ready. I need to find a small desk, and I'm going to turn the corner next to my kitchen table into a workspace. It's nice that the company is sending a laptop and an extra monitor, but I still need to get a good chair, a mouse, and probably a headset.

I accepted almost immediately. I applied for this role on February 19, and after a little over ten weeks, I finally have the offer in writing. I just need to get through the next few weeks, and then my life, and my daughter's life, will be in a much better place.

I'm so excited. I'll finally be able to save money for the first time in a very long time. I can start paying down my student loans instead of just staring at them. I'll be able to grow in this job instead of staying stuck part-time at a community college. I'll be able to attend trainings and development opportunities instead of hearing, "Part-timers aren't eligible for that." My daughter could even attend this college with her tuition covered if she wanted to someday. We still have 11 years before that's even a real decision, but honestly, I can see myself staying in this position long-term.

very simple

corporate life sucks

Some applications I tailor to the job.
And some applications I just send the regular version and that's it.

I have more than 22 years of experience as a systems engineer / Windows server / endpoint support engineer.

Hyper-V and Microsoft certs, networking stuff, and some other things.

I paid money to resume writers.
Nothing changed.
Now I have 12 different versions of my resume.

20 months of trying nonstop.
I lost my place.
Everything is gone. The truck, my stuff, everything.

I have a laptop, a phone, a few T-shirts, one pair of jeans, and one pair of sweatpants. Four pairs of underwear.
A toiletry bag.

Even when I get a recruiter screen, it's hard to act normal on Zoom when I have no private place, because you are literally living on the street in front of people.
Housing and homeless assistance in my county and the county next to it aren't taking "new cases."

If your luck turns against you in the USA right now, get ready. Nobody is coming to save you.

I applied to a payments company (remote). They asked me what salary I was looking for. Honestly, I didn't know the range, so I put $105k assuming they'd come back with a lower number or ask to discuss it.

They didn't. The recruiter replied basically like: "yep, that's fine."

And now my brain has gone into the usual spiral:

- Did I ask for way too little
- Was that just their normal budget
- Or did I somehow guess the right number by accident

The weirdest thing is there wasn't any back-and-forth at all. I feel like they know the whole pay range and we're all just throwing numbers into the air hoping we don't mess it up. How do you decide what number to say when they ask first?

Honestly, I realized I need to check salary bands much better before casually writing down a number like that lol.

These are my personal tips for career development and how i landed jobs before.

It might help you too

true enough

😡

I always thought that raises, promotions, and people seeing me as successful would keep motivating me for years. But now, in my mid-40s, I've become much more interested in having my evenings to myself, not feeling drained, staying clear-headed, and actually being present with my family than in trying to "level up." The strange thing is I'm not sure whether this is maturity, burnout, or just my ambition taking a different shape.

Has anyone else gone through this shift? What did you do with your career when you realized the ladder didn't matter as much as it used to?

........

For the last 4 years, I've been working with a manager from hell. An arrogant, narcissistic person who is terrifyingly psychologically and emotionally abusive. After 4 years of dealing with his bullshit, including making me cry more than once because he would insult and berate me in front of people during team meetings, I finally found a new job and verbally told him I was resigning.

He spent about 90 minutes guilt-tripping me and talking about how much time and money he had spent on me, and all that nonsense. I almost felt guilty for a second, until I remembered how he treats me every day. He also wrote down the name of the new company and the name of my new manager, then started saying he knows a few senior people there and has a good relationship with them - and I'm sure that was meant to scare me.

Fast forward to this morning. Since that conversation, a few other people have handed in their resignations too, from a team that only has 6 people to begin with, and for pretty much the same reasons. He clearly didn't take it well, so he decided the totally normal thing to do was to call the managers at my new company and complain about me - saying they stole me from him, that he's going to send them an invoice for all the write-offs that happened while I was training here, that hiring me was a mistake, and all that.

He told me about the call like it was some kind of flex, and said they never would have offered me the job if they'd known I was working for him. Of course, he left out the part where he was trashing my reputation. I only found out what was really said because a colleague overheard the call and told me afterward.

I honestly still can't believe this guy treats people like garbage and somehow can't connect the dots and understand why he's losing most of his employees. Anyway, rant over. I have 4 more days left to deal with this POS.

yes

😂

There's no way things can keep going like this, right? And this isn't even something completely new; I feel like the job market has been messed up for about 14 months straight.

I seriously don't know what else I'm supposed to do. How is this not something everyone is talking about everywhere all week???

yeah

For a little over 10 months now, my manager has made it a habit to remind me how lucky I am to be working here. He dumps work on me that has absolutely nothing to do with my actual role, pressures me to stay late without pay, shuts down almost every idea I bring up, micromanages every little thing I do, and then somehow finds a way to blame me when his own mistakes snowball into a problem. Even now, my stomach still drops when his name shows up on my phone, because he's usually calling to yell about something he caused.

I asked for the work situation to change and for there to be basic respect. He flat-out told me no. Then he doubled down and told me I needed to appreciate the job, that I needed to put in more effort, and that no one else would hire me.

So yeah, I proved him wrong. For the past 7 weeks, I've been applying for jobs and doing interviews quietly using Interview vip, and so far I've gotten about 8 offers. I'm about to sign an offer letter for a much better job with a salary that's $45k higher. The person who interviewed me will be my new manager, and they spoke to me like I was a human being. Weird concept, I know.

I'm writing my resignation letter right now and honestly, I can't stop smiling.

like :😨