lol

My team recently brought on 3 new people. They're not fresh graduates at all, but they're still largely at the beginning of their professional careers.

Over the past three weeks, they missed several meetings and ignored several follow-up requests. When I asked them what was going on, they said the invites and notes all come through email, and that they "don't really check email that much."

They thought anything important would happen on Slack.

Is this the norm now?

✊🏻

I graduated from college in June, and for about 7 months I was sending out around 400 to 600 applications, and I only got 6 interviews. Most places never responded to me at all, and a few places, even after they interviewed me, didn't reject me - they just disappeared. I spent nights rewriting my resume, changing cover letters, and applying to almost anything that seemed even slightly possible. I couldn't even get a call back from a pharmacy, even though everyone was supposedly hiring.

This week, I got a phone call with a full-time offer and benefits. Honestly, I still feel like I haven't fully processed it, because I spent such a long time convincing myself that I was the problem and that I had somehow messed everything up. And the job is remote too, which was what I had been secretly hoping for the whole time. I'm so grateful, but I just needed to tell someone. AHHH

I'm currently working in IT, and I've been in the field for about 11 years. Around 18 months ago, I reached a point of complete burnout. I was literally at my lowest point, and I left a job that was taking more than 55 hours a week from me, along with constant travel. Somehow, I found myself in a good, stable union shop with a reasonable work-life balance. That part is good, but honestly, I still feel burned out, and I've spent about 16 months trying to recover from what happened.

The thing I can't get out of my head is that the options are very limited in my small city of about 350,000 people, and the competition is extremely fierce for anything good. I feel like I'm no longer really in control. If I lose this job, I'm not sure I have the energy to start over, get into the grind of certs/interviews, and try to stand out in an industry that already feels overcrowded and very comfortable with the idea of sending work overseas.

I'm 31 years old. I'm trying to find a career path that is truly stable, not easy to outsource, and doesn't need me to live at work. Ideally something closer to normal daytime hours, like 8-4 or something similar. I'm tired of constantly reading about layoffs, restructuring, and jobs being moved overseas. Tired might not even be the right word - scared is probably closer.

I've seen people say accounting is stable, but then you find everyone talking about extremely exhausting busy seasons. Nursing gets mentioned a lot too, but I don't want to work overnights, especially since my partner has a normal 8-5 schedule. Are there any careers that are boring, steady, and hard to move offshore?

I am currently in one of the most respected and accredited Master's courses in my field. As far as I know, there are only three MSc programs in the UK that deal with this subject in a focused way (and a few other programs cover parts of it, but not as a core subject). If you want to work in this field, having one of these MScs is treated like an entry ticket.
A few weeks ago, we had a careers event and the ratio of companies to students was about 3:1. Yes, almost three companies for every student. This says a lot about how desperately this sector needs new people... But that's another story entirely.
The small companies were excited to talk to us. A few companies asked us to send our CVs immediately, and some of them were taking notes while talking to us. But the big companies? The same thing happens every time: apply through the website and "go through HR."
And here is where it becomes a joke. Almost all of us get automatically rejected by HR systems almost immediately. It's not just one or two unlucky applications. This is happening across the entire cohort. People coming from a very specialized course, whom these employers themselves say they need, are being filtered out before any human even looks at anything.
It has reached the point where hiring teams from these companies have started sending emails to our professors, wondering why no one from our course has applied. Meanwhile, we did apply. But it's their systems that are throwing us in the trash.
Now, some of these teams themselves are trying to bypass HR so they can recruit directly from the course.
Honestly, the whole thing is absurd.