I’ve always been a high achiever. I graduated second in my high school class, but I also had skipped a grade. After college was easy. I went to a temp agency and within a week found a job where I made 32k as an entry level admin assistant , which in todays money is 54,000. At most I worked an hour a day and no one cared.
I went to grad school with the hopes of being a professor, I loved school . between me starting and finishing graduate school though there was a huge shift from school hiring tenured track to adjunct professors.
I did a couple visiting professor gigs, but i couldn’t find anything full time permanent so i was unemployed or underemployed for awhile. I applied everywhere, even Sonics because I’m a good roller skater, but i kept getting rejections for being “overqualified.”
I found the the job I have now and for the first 2 years it was great. Then one of our senior managers decided we need to operate like a factory rather a boutique (her words). We work in a very thought-based job.
We spent several months on a project, and they started mandating everyone work at least 50 hours a week (we are salaried so no OT) my team and another team and some random people who werent even part of the project were ahead on our work but they said too bad you need to figure out something to charge. We also would give samples of our work to our client but our manager would want us to work SUPER ahead before we got feedback on the sample so we’d have tons of rework. I honestly just think they wanted to bill the client a much as possible.
i got in a huge car accident coming home from work that year in bad weather. I had two surgeries and a year of pt and i still have a limp. I was still required to come to work ( a desk job, which many others wfh) which was a 3 hour round trip commute. I paid crazy money to get an Uber to meet my nearest coworker to catch a ride with him. I worked on the third floor. I only had 2 days off that year, for surgery. I used all my pto and vacation for doctors appointment and PT even though i was putting in 60 hour weeks. We are required to work 8 hours Monday – friday, we can’t flex our time
With Covid things got even crazier. We had meetings at all hours because they said were just sitting home bored anyways. Ridiculous workloads were piled on, 50% being redundant busywork. we were expected to be on call all the time. I had to leave Mother’s Day brunch early to attend to something stupid One guy literally only took 4 hours off when his mom died. We were rewarded with pay cuts, layoffs, and demotions. Experienced senior staff were laid off to hire people for cheaper. Or, they were demoted with a huge pay cut to encourage them to quit or retire early. The basics of Our job takes at least 2 years to learn with extensive training. Our CEO makes 2 million a year our senior execs over 1/2 mil. we are a non profit . I’ve seen the budgets they legit pay $80 for a gallon of iced tea for their fancy meetings
As a top performer and a favorite my average performance based annual pay raise is 2.9%. My average ranking colleagues receive merit increases from .003 to 1.5%. Favoritism is rampant and obvious.We are constantly negged about how we should be lucky to have a job and we couldn’t get a job paying more. Well maybe that used to be true but since remote work is a thing now 6 of my colleagues (Of 40) have gotten higher paying jobs in the past two months (I’ve had promising interviews but nothing has panned out yet)
I also realize I’m lucky, other people that are just as smart and capable might be working some horrible job for $10 an hour and not have any pto because they haven’t had the same opportunities I’ve had
The rich aren’t rich because they’re smarter or better or work harder. They’re just luckier. the US government, criminal justice system , student loan system, healthcare system are all very corrupt
Your work would see you dead if they thought they would save one penny out of the deal
Tl; dr , success isn’t merit based, everything’s corrupt