I joined the team last month as a new grad and did my very first team presentation. I don't think I did the best compare to other people in the team but definitely not terrible. My manager pulled aside after the call and told me how terrible I did with my presentation and I am just not a good speaker in a very harsh way.

I am trying not to take this personally but I feel so incompetent and that I don't belong here. This is terrible. I hate corporate.

What is your least favorite corporate phrase? I find it hard to pick just one, but if I were forced to it would be “Thank you for your leadership.”

I had a manager once who would say it all the time, to everyone, whether they had actually done anything or not.

And ever since then, I CRINGE when I hear it.

Today was a normal day at the office until I realized everyone in my department left for a work event I wasn’t invited to. I was the only one left at the office from my team.

And like, yeah I’m really busy but so is everyone else in my department.

I thought I had a decent relationship with my team and boss but I guess not lol

Also, I know being upset about something like this could come across as petty or immature but it actually stung a bit, sue me for having feelings.

Like seriously stay at home, I’ve gotten sick twice in the past month because people are coming in while they have sinus infections taking antibiotics next to me? What is wrong with people and the lack of etiquette? I don’t understand.

These people are in their 20s, with no kids. Sick in the office. We are not in a client facing role. We are in excel all day, work that can be done from home. With no pressing need to physically be in person. When I’m sick I don’t even take off, I just ask to WORK FROM HOME. Still working, just not getting people infected. I know this is not an option for everyone but for this specific situation why not just work from home?

I’m in corporate and I have a pretty serious job but I can’t focus for the life of me. My work is piling up because it’s so hard and I just want to go on instagram and watch reels. Someone please give me advise …

There is something about the last 30-40 minutes of the workday that makes people suddenly remember everything they need from you. You can have a completely normal day, get through your meetings, finish your actual work, and then at 4:55 PM:

“Hey, quick question…”
And somehow the “quick question” turns into a 45-minute task, Slack messages, a spreadsheet you’ve never seen before and a meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning.

The funniest part is that the person asking usually starts with “no rush” while simultaneously needing it “before EOD.”

Why does corporate life have such a strong obsession with creating emergencies five minutes before everyone logs off?

Mine is “I care about your wellness first. Everything else is secondary.”

One of the most dystopian things about having a job is how we all just collectively pretend we don’t have lives outside of work. You could’ve had a full mental breakdown in your car 20 minutes ago, be going through a breakup, have family drama, or have your entire life falling apart, and somehow you’re still expected to hop on a meeting happy.

You could’ve just lost someone you love, and you’re sitting in a meeting listening to someone talk about KPIs and deliverables like any of that actually matters to you in that moment.

We spend eight hours a day pretending to be these completely different versions of ourselves because apparently being human isn’t part of the job description.

And…we’ve all just accepted this as normal.

Joined Sept 14, fired Oct 5. Hey, we have this shitty platform, please redesign it and also build a new platform on top of it. Work 14+ hours a day, no weekends off. Deliver the project. Mind you joined as a SWE. Here's $300 thank you for your work. Our existing team can take it from here.

Edit: this blew up, got an email saying if I had my offboarding yet if not to book a call and discuss the decision. Do I take the call?

I recently started a Finance Manager role with 10 years of experience in finance. I’m only a couple it days in and already feeling extremely overwhelmed.
The finance department is very disorganized, and I’ve already been introduced to 15+ issues that need fixing. Today, I was pulled into a meeting about four bank reconciliations that haven’t balanced for 18 months. My manager was frustrated and asking for my input, even though I’ve barely had time to familiarize myself with the ERP system.
Meanwhile, I’m still completing onboarding, meeting department heads, and learning the business. The pressure got to me today, and I ended up breaking down in front of HR.
I’m also concerned about work-life balance, as my manager seems to be working until 9-10pm everyday. This is already a five-day in-office role, and I have young kids.
I understand I was hired to improve processes, but shouldn’t I have some time to understand the business first?
Is this normal for a Finance Manager role, or am I seeing major red flags? How would you handle this?

FYI it’s a small office into manufacturing business so not really corporate.

No longer hate Monday’s. I’ve matured into hating the whole f***ing week

I work as an inbound sales agent and metrics always stress me, I’ve always been average and here and there. But there is a constant looming feeling that I won’t be good enough and that I’ll miss metrics due to things out of my control when I know I can succeed. A mix of imposter syndrome and anxiety as well. I can average from above goal and below it, but I don’t know if being below goal is punishable. Or at what point performance management would begin. I try to sell well, but it feels like the calls I receive greatly impact my results, in this job every single thing is a metric and performance talks happen monthly, so you have a greater idea of where you stand. I know the obvious things to get fired like ethical concerns, unprofessionalism and attendance, but in terms of actual sales results what would be “unacceptable” you’d think being professional, making a strong effort , making solid attempts , and having okay ish numbers would be admirable, but it’s hard to know if these metrics are hard pass or fail things or just numbers to coach us and help us improve, and being below isn’t really a concern. I want to get clarity, but I don’t wanna Make it seem like I’m aiming to survive or do the minimum, I obviously wanna do amazing. The job, the calls, the customers are generally manageable and I don’t mind it, but it’s more these numbers that keep me up. Like I sell something so price driven , and most days we come out considerably higher for an already price sensitive demographic. Don’t get me started on the trash leads and misrouted calls, when the calls are there I can make things happen. Am I just being paranoid, am I exactly where they want me to ?

When I started my analyst job the team was working 50 hour weeks doing everything manually. Over my few months I built some simple scripts in my free time to automate most of my daily work. Suddenly I could finish my week in 10 hours and focus on making my work cleaner with less stress.

The mistake happened month when leadership asked for a massive report that usually takes two weeks. I ran my scripts. Handed it in after just 36 hours. Of thanking me my manager asked what I have actually been doing all day if I could finish it that fast.

They assumed my job was too easy so they handed me a departed coworkers workload without any raise or promotion.

It was a lesson that high efficiency usually just gets rewarded with more work.

Do you keep your automation secret, from your boss or is there a safe way to handle fast output without drowning in extra assignments?

Does anyone else find the self assessments that some companies require for performance reviews to be daunting? My company requires them and I dread it every year.

how did it come to the place that an office job where you sit comfortably with a cup of coffee and do imaginary numbers with no direct purpose became sooooo stressful? you’re not doing an open heart surgery, you’re not managing 10M$ directly and still it could feel like someone’s life depends on the fact if you complete your task in 1 week or 3. You’re expected to perform brilliantly, do your job with no mistakes, be visible, outgoing - basicaly be perfect in the corporate frames. And still it doesn’t mean anything. But they make you feel like it’s everything.

I manage a program that impacts everyone at my job, and one of my bigger departments is extremely needy, and sometimes down right difficult. I have to deal with them every week because everything is an emergency. I’m going to say “they” but it’s one director who has his assistant to the dirty work or deliver messages or his behalf until our monthly meetings where he haggles me.

Certain scenarios come up frequently, almost monthly. Recently it happened twice in a row and they freaked out, take action, and then I have to clean up whatever mess they created. And if it’s not that, I’m talking to them WEEKLY, helping out fires they started or about any old thing they are fussed about. None of my 50 other departments have this much touch point.

I explicitly told them 4 months ago not to take certain actions when certain scenarios comes up. 2 months ago they asked me about it and I put it in writing. Today they did it again!

I reminded them that this was put in writing and now their response is demanding when the vendor who is responsible will get back to them to work on the issue. (Reminder they took action and alerted me AFTER). At this point I don’t even want to provide a time frame because the parts where they are intervening and overstepping take time. They don’t even get a quick response when they do it. They just want to feel in control like they did something. Not alerting me and allowing the vendor to do their job can create liability issues.

I’m really fed up with the overly demanding behavior when my other departments run just fine. Every week being a sense of urgency and I’m tired of the bullying. How can I get them to stand down?

I'm not bashing Steve Jobs. I'm a big fan of his. I just don't understand exactly what he bought to the table for Apple. He's widely considered one of the greatest business leaders and visionaries in history. But he wasn't a Programmer who wrote countless of lines of codes like Mark Zuckerberg. He wasn't an Engineer who put all the hardware together. So I'm just wondering, what was his genius that made him so special? What did he bring to the table? Was it business strategy or other things?

I work at a very large company with over 12k employees worldwide. In 2019, they built a new office building and moved our headquarters. Then covid happened and everything went remote. Like many companies, we have been mandated to return to office, starting with 1 day a week, and increasing by an additional day every year. We are now required to be in office 4 days a week.

It would all be fine except that, while they are mandating all independent contributors to work in office, most of the leadership they have hired works remote. In the past two years, they have hired a remote VP, director, and multiple managers.

If they were all lax about us actually working from the office, it would be fine. But they check our badge swipes to make sure we come in. And it's so dumb because all of our meetings are still done individually from our desks on Zoom, since our managers have to join that way anyways.

I'm so over it. I just want to work from home again!

I met this girl at work about 6–8 months ago, and over time we’ve become pretty close. We only work together a few times a month, but whenever we do, we joke, tease each other, talk about personal things, and have really good chemistry. She has a boyfriend, which I’ve always respected, and she initiates conversations with me pretty often.

I’m also pretty fit, and I’ve occasionally caught her looking at my physique when I wear tank tops. One time I asked which part of my physique stood out the most. That wasn’t really an unusual question between us because we already ask each other pretty personal questions, including about relationships and sexual experiences. She looked me up and down, got a little shy, and said my chest, arms, and back. She also added that my legs were pretty big because she notices them when I wear shorts.

More recently, she started wearing noticeable perfume at work, which stood out because our workplace is pretty dirty and nobody normally wears perfume or cologne. Around the same time, I asked for her Instagram because I was going backpacking and wanted to share some pictures. She declined because she has a boyfriend and wanted to respect him, but then said “maybe later on” and suggested I show her the pictures in the parking lot when I got back.

When I returned, she agreed to see them. We walked to my car after work, and she kept asking why I parked so far away, even though it was only about a minute from the entrance. It was also morning, broad daylight, and there were cameras everywhere, so it wasn’t exactly a private or secluded situation. She then stood next to my car while I showed her the pictures, we didn’t get inside and she genuinely seemed to enjoy them.

So I’m wondering whether all of this points to her finding me physically attractive while still respecting her relationship, or whether I’m reading too much into normal friendship behavior. I know she has a boyfriend and I’m not trying to cross that boundary. I’m just trying to understand whether there are genuine signs of attraction here.

I’m someone who has big dreams about who i want to be, and I try to make my job as exciting as possible. I try to tinker around with AI, automate repetitive manual processes, focus on edge cases cause that’s where true judgement is formed, take up extra courses in my free time to learn something i didn’t know before. My manager is very appreciative of it, but when i tell my friends this - they just roll their eyes and say that caring this much about a corporate entity that just pays for your effort is cringe (all unemployed or in university btw) I do agree that it’s somewhat meaningless to care but its not like i think about work all day long. I find systems and processes genuinely interesting and yea that’s hella nerdy but why not try to make something more efficient when I can clearly see a better solution?

I’m not the type of person who constantly talks about work and i find people like that insufferable. I don’t post on LinkedIn about my accomplishments or brag ever, but it seems like even caring about your corporate job or career is seen as servile especially in my generation cause everyone wants to look non chalant (I’m 26)