Hey everyone. This year has been one of my worst, and I want to share with you all why.
Back in 2021, I landed a job with a small family-owned business with a rather sizable e-commerce presence. On paper, the position was data analysis and SEO optimization. In reality, it was being someone marketing could dump busy work onto, as well as being the person to catch mistakes the short-staffed customer service and warehouse teams were making before they went out the warehouse dock. And these weren’t small mistakes either – I’m talking about pallets of an item getting shipped instead of single count items. Regardless, I had hitherto no such experience in anything of the sort but I forced myself to learn out of a need to prove I was worthy of the opportunity I was given. I got quite good at generating reports on Excel, taught myself SQL and Python, taught myself a lot of what makes SEO, and a number of other things important to the business. The only other person on the data team had been there for several years and only knew how to do vlookups, so if I didn’t teach these things to myself, no one else would.
There was something very rotten about this company that I noticed as soon as I was brought on board. Many of those in customer service were scared into never taking lunches due to the overwhelming amount of work they had to do, their supervisor had a very nasty attitude of what I can only describe as incoherent smugness filtered through passive aggressiveness, management would frequently gather in the conference room to watch a projection of all camera feeds in the building – sometimes for hours on end, the company’s president (who was also the owner’s son) would frequently have his kids run around the office doing what kids do, the graphic designer tried providing insight on a request that was made to him by the COO only for their email exchange to be forwarded to everyone in good graces with the president as an example of someone disobeying what they’re told to do, and my direct boss never seemed to know what he was talking about as he helmed the process of transferring the company onto a new ERP system. Each time I’d get pulled into a meeting, which was frequently us consulting with an ERP implementation firm, our company would talk themselves in circles bringing up completely irrelevant things while the firm’s representatives would look at each other in disbelief. Eventually, I and I alone would get excluded from these meetings. And soon enough, much of the work I had been tasked to do was quietly taken away from me as well.
About a year passes of me trying to participate in anything they’ll give to me, all the while I continue being excluded from all meetings. During this time I managed to convince a handful of people who felt overworked and stressed out to actually take their lunches, and I made a lot of progress in revitalizing customer service to prevent a lot of the mistakes they were making in the past. After some time, my direct boss quit, leaving me subordinate to the marketing manager who also quit some months later, but before he did he hired 2 people who could replace what he did. It was around this time I started being brought into meetings again.
It was at this point I realized the company’s president could never be wrong, you are to never tell him anything he says is wrong or even imply he isn’t understanding something. If you did, his face would turn bright red and he’d completely shut down. I learned this after attempting to reconcile him and another manager talking past each other. Surprisingly, shortly after this I was offered the marketing manager position as the boss said it seemed I could lead a room. I remember telling them I had no experience in marketing outside of what I had learned there, and the president told me he doesn’t have any experience in a lot of what he manages and he does it just fine. Almost immediately after this, one of the 2 people hired (the web developer) started butting heads with me because he told me “I tried too hard to be smart” and that if I am to manage him I needed to “stop”. I took this pretty strongly, and had a breakdown in private about it.
I told the presidents underling what happened to which he sympathized with me and said he’d handle it. Then the day after, he said we’d all have a meeting to sort this out. A week went by and nothing. Then, I got pulled in by the presidents underling to get told I shouldn’t have accepted the marketing manager role if I had no experience and had it taken away. Then another week goes by and the president pulled me aside to tell me they were letting me go because the company was going through a rough time financially, which I knew wasn’t true because I could see our sales were going up as I had access to that information still.
I was let go towards the beginning of this year and after several months, hundreds of applications, and countless interviews, I found a job paying me considerably more where I do an hour of work each day max. It felt like hell looking for a job this year and it was the hardest time I’ve ever had with it for many of the same reasons many of you have already posted about. I’ve been at this new job for few months now and they seem to like me a lot, but idk I feel empty.
I’m not sure how to end this. Guess I wanted to share this with y’all because I think my take away is that everything is broken and it looks like things will just keep getting worse.
There’s so much more I can share about with regards to my previous job and my time find the one I currently have, but this post already too long. Thanks to anyone willing to read this shit.