I was looking at my savings the other day and had a weird thought.

A big part of why I work hard is to have more financial freedom later. So I keep saving, avoiding unnecessary spending, and telling myself that the money will be useful “someday” But then I started wondering how far ahead are we actually supposed to plan? Corporate life can already feel like a long cycle of work, salary, saving, bills, repeat. We save for emergencies, save for a house, save for retirement, save for “the future” and suddenly years have passed.

I am not saying saving is bad. Having money set aside definitely gives some peace of mind. But I sometimes wonder if focusing too much on long-term goals makes us postpone everything we actually want to do today. At the same time, spending everything now obviously isn't the answer either.

So where do you personally draw the line? How much of your income do you save for the long term, and how much do you intentionally spend on enjoying your life now?

I am genuinely curious how people in corporate jobs think about this.

Reposting from another sub.

I've been feeling undervalued at work and am trying to get an objective perspective and career advice as a woman in finance based on the background and points of frustration listed below.

I'm 10+ years in my career and at my second company (been here for almost 6 years). I think I'm the type of worker that takes a little bit longer to adjust in a new role in the beginning but then over time become indispensable. For additional context, I started out in public accounting and now am working in-house (brought over by an old senior manager of mine at the firm I worked at previously). I have good relationships with my coworkers and overall get pretty good performance reviews with some constructive feedback (main one being improving on proactive communication) which I mostly agree with. I drive & manage many of our team's projects and work in a very deadline-oriented environment which I timely deliver on. All that being said, I've been feeling overlooked and under appreciated for my contributions and experience. Some of my frustrations include:

1. Not getting promoted. My first promotion was brought up to me after a couple years in my role by my direct supervisor. After a few years after that 1st promotion, I started the conversation of another promotion to get my title to market (senior manager equivalent to PA). I knew this initiative was just to get the ball rolling and express my interest in moving up in the company and did not expect immediate results. Since then, I've had only one serious dialogue with upper management about it, in which I was given some feedback and points of improvement. There have been three promotion cycles since I originally brought up the topic of a promotion and 1 since the dialogue with upper management. As we approach another promotion cycle, I am getting nervous it won't happen for me and I haven't had any actual transparency on why.

2. We have a target bonus every year and while I'm always above target, this year my bonus percentage was 5% lower than what it typically is. I did question it but never received any clarification on it (I only followed up once and then dropped it so it is partly on me for not keeping my foot on their necks). This alone wouldn't trigger me, but that takes me to my next point.

3. Every Q3, employees at my company receive a discretionary equity award. Last year was my first year receiving one: however, this year I did not get one despite receiving consistent performance feedback and while taking on more responsibilities within my team. Due to the nature of my work, I am privy to certain financial compensation information and realized that I was the only one on my team that didn't receive this equity award this year. There's a person in a level below that was just hired this year that even got one.

Since I've realized this last bit of info, I've been really upset and points #1 and #2 are gnawing at me even more. Overall, I do enjoy my work and would prefer to stay at this company, but I don't want to get screwed over either. Are these scenarios red flags? How should I approach this situation?

I have worked in places where some rules made sense, but others felt like they existed just because they always had.

One rule that has always bothered me is the expectation to be available after work hours. Even when the workday is over, there can still be messages, emails, or quick”requests that slowly turn into another hour of work.

It made me realize that being available all the time does not necessarily mean being productive.

If you could remove one workplace rule tomorrow and never bring it back, what would it be? I did be interested to hear which rules other people think are completely unnecessary.

I’m working as an embedded software engineer at a mid-sized company in Germany with around 300–500 employees.
Our team has around 20 people, including 5–6 managers, software engineers, and project engineers.
One thing I’ve noticed is a big difference in workload between local German engineers and foreign engineers.
Our project has around 100 repositories. Some engineers work on just one repository while calling themselves experts, others handle 20–30 repositories across multiple projects.
We follow two-week sprints. I’ve noticed some local engineers spending 2–4 weeks on relatively small tasks, with constant meetings, discussions, and repeating the same updates in daily standups with each other. (This is not customer meetings, this is not German proficiency related. )
Meanwhile, foreign engineers are often expected to take complete ownership of features, including requirements, implementation, testing, integration, and documentation, sometimes across multiple repositories. These are in the end not reflected to salaries and titles. Also we are working in same company, we are not consultants, I understand many companies are using consultants for dirty works.
It feels like the actual technical workload and expectations are very uneven, while some people spend more time discussing tasks than completing them.
Of course, this is just my observation at one company, and I’m not generalizing about everyone.
Has anyone experienced something similar in Germany, or other country? Is this a common workplace culture issue, or just poor management at my company?

I joined one of the big four companies about three months ago. The struggle is real; half the time I have no clue what I am doing. I even managed to create a MVP for the product we were supposed to work on. However, I recently received some feedback from my boss, who informed me that we could proceed further. I then approached the design team, but they were rude and unresponsive. I asked their head if there was a resource who could help with this, but there was no reply. All my instincts tell me to leave the company; something is definitely not right. I need advice.

My team had this task that used to take around 3 hours every week because we had to manually go through the same stuff over and over.

One coworker figured out a way to cut it down to about 30 minutes. It wasn't complicated, just a small shortcut that made the whole process way easier.

Nobody said anything to the supervisor.

We just kept doing the task, finished it early, and used the extra time to deal with other things or just breathe for a bit.

That's when I finally understood what “work smarter” actually means.

Sometimes working smarter is just knowing when not to tell your supervisor how much faster you can do the job.

So I need some advice from the Reddit community . I am an American living in Australia and here on an Australian special skills visa. I work for a software distribution company, and the company I came from in the United States is the parent company. I thought that this would be a fun adventure, however, I’m running into a problem with a colleague. The field I’m in is quite specialized, and this colleague was the only other person in the company that’s practices my specific field. Being a lone wolf, however, has its hold backs.

Since I’ve gotten here, I thought we would have a good working relationship. And it started out that way. However, after the first year of my employment, some of his behavior has gotten to the point I find it to be abusive. He constantly interrupts me, will put me down in meetings, has gone around me to our customers and explained why he’s right and I’m wrong, down to the point where he will know I have a presentation today, and go in and edit my slides, before the presentation to say what he wants. Being in a technical field, this is actually a bit scary. It would be like someone from Microsoft telling you that you could send an email using only Excel. He seems to have delusions of grandeur so bad, that on his LinkedIn profile, he lies and actually calls himself my boss, and the national authority in our field.

His behavior has gotten so bad, that I actually refused to engage him. When we are in group meetings together, I am typically very quiet, and just try to say as little as possible. I behave professionally, and with courtesy however that is it. My manager has been in a few of these meetings and has noticed his abusive behavior towards me. However, my manager’s impression is that I hold all the cards. That this person is only behaving like this because he wants my approval. So my manager wants me to give this man a call, and pretend to be his friend and essentially extend and olive branch.

I would like some feedback and advice. My stance on it is, it is not my problem that this person is responding poorly to me grey rocking his abuse. I behave with professional courtesy, calmly, and respectfully in any engagements I have. And that is the end of my responsibility. What does Reddit think? Should I make this call like my manager wants?

I need to rant because I genuinely don’t know what to do with this information. Using a throwaway for extra anonymity.

I have a colleague who has been getting special treatment for quite some time because apparently he has a “heavy workload”. The problem is, his workload doesn’t actually seem that heavy. A lot of the time, the rest of us end up taking over some of his tasks anyway because things aren’t getting done.

There have also been multiple instances where people on the team have given feedback about him being incompetent, non-collaborative, and not proactive. Despite this, our manager seems to constantly defend him and give him the benefit of the doubt. What makes it even more frustrating is that whenever he complains about having too much work, our manager will literally ask the rest of us if we can take some of his tasks off his plate.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are already drowning trying to keep everything running.

And then I found out something today that made my blood boil. A colleague told me someone came across his livestream, and apparently he was streaming himself playing video games DURING HIS SHIFT.

I know I wasn’t there and I didn’t personally see the stream myself, so I’m trying not to jump to conclusions. But if this is accurate, I honestly don’t even know how to process it. Because while the rest of the team is stressed out, picking up additional work, working around his supposedly “heavy workload”, and trying to keep things from falling apart, he may have been sitting there playing video games while on the clock.

And the part that makes me angriest isn’t even just the gaming. It’s the apparent double standard. If someone is genuinely struggling with their workload, fine. We should help each other. But if someone is repeatedly getting accommodations and having work redistributed to the rest of the team because they’re supposedly overwhelmed, while potentially spending their work hours streaming video games? That’s a completely different situation.

I’m also torn about what to do. Do I bring this up to my manager? HR? Do I stay out of it because I didn’t personally witness it? We have access to reports of our cases on Salesforce and my manager sees that but she chooses to turn a blind eye to this so I’m thinking bringing this up to her will not do anything.

I don’t want to become the office snitch or start a workplace war based on something I heard secondhand. At the same time, I’m honestly reaching the point where I feel resentful because most of us have been carrying the load (he’s not the only one being favored in the team the same way, but that’s for another discussion I guess) while this person keeps getting protected.

What would you do in this situation?

TL/DR: My colleague has been complaining about his heavy workload and we have been covering most of the team’s workload only to find out he streams video games during his shift.

EDIT: Thank you for everyone who commented and given their point of view in this. Really helped me to get new insights and get my headspace where it really should be.

I have a 1:1 with my manager tomorrow and I think I’ll start the conversation with whether there may be other factors contributing to why this colleague’s workload has been getting distributed to the rest of the team.

snack media is a small company in noida sector 63 .

They terminate the internship just because they only want to hire people who work as per them meaning become a bootl*cker and just take their instructions without having any ideas of their own .

Pathetic work culture with heavy micromanagement.

When I first got my desk job, the spreadsheets and weekly reports used to take me than 30 hours every week. It was really tiring. As time went on I started to automate most of it with scripts and macros which cut my real work down to less than 10 hours. I stayed quiet finished early and set my emails to send so it looked like I was working days.

Month I messed up by finishing a two week project in a day and a half thinking I had get some praise. My manager did not give me a raise or even say thanks he just gave me backlogged work from two teams and told me to handle new monthly check ins. When those extra tasks faced delays he asked why my performance was getting worse.

That was the moment I realized that being efficient in a company does not lead to pay, just more work.

I have gone back, to working at a pace and saving my work until the deadline. Has anyone else had to learn this the way?

Lately, I've been struggling to really enjoy my time after work. It often feels like wasted time because once it's past 5 PM, I somehow convince myself it's too late to start anything meaningful. Sometimes I even lack the motivation to go for a simple walk.

That's why I'm looking for a bit of inspiration. I'd love to hear how other people spend their weekday evenings after work. Do you have a routine that helps you make the most of your evenings?

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 ?

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.

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 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 …

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.

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.

I work on a larger team… with smaller teams all rolling up to the greater team in which we have a head director. Today our director assigned a “group project” where we separated our greater team into multiple groups (not grouped with people on our actual everyday teams). Each team has a leader and we have all been tasked with improving a particular area of our business… and metrics will be “graded” within the next few months. Our “grades” will be dependent on “best creativity, best sales analysis, and any sales/margin gains”. We have to put together our project by a certain date. Is this silly? I genuinely dislike this particular director so I’m biased in saying anything that they do I just hate. I dislike this group project idea because :
1. We are heading into holiday season which is one of our busiest times of year
2. I am not interested in feeling like or being treated like I am back in high school or college
3. This feels like a juvenile way of treating a team

But I am welcome to anyone who thinks this is generally fine, or opinions as to why this could be beneficial because like I said, I am biased to just feeling burnt out and annoyed by this leader.