Antiwork

I just had another recruiter call. Here's how it went: Them: Hello! I found your resume on Dice and wanted to see if you're in the job market Me: Yes, I would definitely be interested Them: Great! This position is with (company) for the role of Sr. Systems Engineer, fully remote Me: That sounds good, and what's the pay range for this position? Them: That depends on the candidate's experience. How many years of experience do you have in engineering? Me: About 15 years Them: Great! And what is your current hourly rate? Me: I can be flexible on that, which is why I asked for the pay range Them: Like I said before, that depends on the candidate's experience. This is the pre-screening Me: So they aren't willing to be upfront about their pay range for the position? Them: …How many years experience do you have with Linux administration?…

“Bachelors of XYZ”, 1pt font, 0% opacity, and place the text in a random white spot on the template. Invisible to human eyes, but visible to ATS systems. I never went to university, and a degree is not the end-all-be-all to live a good life and make good money. But apparently lots of companies in the USA disagree, with my resume not even being looked at if it doesn't say the word “University” on it. So I said “fuck 'em!” and decided to add those keywords and make them invisible to the naked eye. My response rate has improved a decent amount since I started doing this (not a great amount, maybe 30-40% more responses if I had to guess). I should also mention that I still remain honest about my background/skills in every interview I attend. The only reason I do this is because it helps gets past the…

I’m so heated over my increase, and I should be grateful that I am making a paycheck and got an increase. But it’s the way that it was presented to me that I feel insulted. I work for a large corporation and about a year ago they announced that our position would be increased to a base pay of 20.00 an hour. Now I have been there for 2 years now, so the question arises, will we be paid the same as someone walking through the door? That was unsure at the time. Yesterday I got me answer. To get existing employees to that base pay, we had 2 increases over time, getting everyone to that wage. I had a hard time looking past a new hire making a much as existing employees, but I decided to look past that, but when I saw my end of year review, I…

I've been contracting as a software developer at a particular company for 17 months. Around 4 months ago, the company made a motion to transition me to direct hire, because they were happy with the work I was providing. In the process, they pushed off discussions of wages. They got a benefits package (a fair and standard one, nothing terrible but nothing outstanding) set up with HR, but no talk of salary was had for months. That was at the end of last year. In the second week of January, they finally brought me in to discuss salary. But instead of give me some clue on where they stood, they let me put an “offer” of what I thought was fair. After a night of consideration, I set on a figure informed by numbers I was getting from recruiters. I'm in I.T. so I get recruiters sending me offers on…

“If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’. I didn’t like to work.” And a few other gems: (Excuse me if this is not perfectly in line with the sub…) “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be. The future ain’t what it used to be. Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets. The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase. No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded. When you come to a fork in the road, take it. I never said most of the things I said.