Month: August 2023

TL;DR This is just a vent/rant. So, if you are in the market for some old school, American grade, bitching that doesn't involve politics, this is the post for you! I have been at this company for a little over 2 years. I was hired on to a team of 3 systems engineers and 1 network engineer that managed all IT client and server systems for a ~500 person startup, along with a small service desk team for level 1/2 issues. This team replaced 1 guy who had run it all himself for a time, after his entire team of 5 people+a director, all basically walked out. When he finally burned out and left, they replaced him with the team I ended up on, and I was the last hire. Two years in, the team is now me and 2 network engineers, one of which I am pretty sure is…

So I've been creeping this sub for a while and thought I'd share my story. I worked in Daycare looking after kids 4-12 years old. It was a small local daycare in a relatively large village. I grew in it from intern to one of the few people who knew all the routes and schools by heart and head alone and could explain the routes with ease to “new” people. Along the way in that we got bought by a larger foreign company looking to expand in my country. First this was great, but pretty soon the first cracks appeared. First they changed the company structure This meant that there was no “team leader” position any more and the only “acknowledged” leadership was the one manager who grew in to this position along the years and replaced the one that got promoted. This basically meant there was little to no…

I work as a project engineer fresh out of college for a general contractor. My project manager asked if I could work this weekend. I said “no I'm busy with family commitments”. She asked which day. I said “the whole weakend”. And she left it at that. I live 35 min from my project site. There's no chance I'm gonna commute an hour on my day off to baby sit people on a job site. Don't let your work take over your personal life. I will never volunteer to work extra unless they tell me I have to and even then I might not if can get out of it. All my colleagues volunteer or don't even protest if they are asked to work weekends. And they wonder why less people are interested in working in the construction industry.

The system is so broken. Imagine a monkey tells another monkey to gather 100 bananas so they can get a reward, the reward ends up being 2 bananas that they gathered anyway. Imagine a monkey hoarding all the bananas and watching the other monkeys starve. You really think those monkeys are just going to sit there and starve? Well that's what us humans are doing just letting them walk all over us. All we do is talk about how we can change things since we out number them, but at the end of the day we do nothing. It's sad.

I've been trying for decades now to find a life of dignity. I joined the workforce at 18, and I've done 40 hours a week, every week for nearly 20 years. A series of bad events Monday broke me, and this time in a way that I don't know if I can fix it. Housing is unaffordable and I still can't get outside of entry level. I have to cut back on meals just to make sure rent gets paid. My wife is disabled and works what she can but it isn't enough. We make too much to qualify for EBT, but not enough to afford groceries. I got turned down from a job paying $1 more an hour than what I'm making, because 15 years of experience is too low for their entry level position. My current job is doing RTO next month, and the gas isn't in the…

I work for an international company. They agreed multiple times to let me relocate from the UK as it makes no difference to them. I found a new house in the new country, and they wrote me a new contact in 2021 (with a pay reduction to reflect the new country, fine) to start work in August 2022 (had to do the contract early for visa etc). I got pregnant in January 2022 and so didn't start this new contract until 2023 when I returned from maternity leave. In my absence everyone had pay reviews, and I was even given a little bump. But I don't get an actual raise. The pay review was for my UK contact and won't be applied to my new one (lol) because they insist that they magically foresaw inflation rates and predicted the 2023 landscape and so whatever foreign contract from 2021 says, that's…

All of my last jobs have lacked in training, it seems to be normal now. I start a job next week, and have been warned of not a lot of training. How do you make the job worthwhile? And get through it? I don’t have a lot of hope it will last.