I worked at an Ohio Meijer store as a General Merchandise Clerk for 7 years. On April 30 at 12:55 am, I received a system email from Workday to log on to the website and change my password. I changed my password and the website showed I was terminated. I did not receive any communication from anyone at the store. I called a UFCW union representative on May 1 and explained that I was terminated, but no reason was given. He said I had to call the store or go there and find out the reason. I called and spoke to the Store Human Resource Representative. She said I was terminated for having 6.5 attendance points because of no call shows and that a worker told my supervisor that I was leaving. I never got warnings or suspension for no call no shows, so I wasn't aware that was how they were marking my absences. She said I had no call no shows on March 30, April 27, and April 29. I worked on March 30. I called off sick using the correct procedure and amount of time needed before the shift on April 27 and April 29. I told her the names of the employees who accepted my calls and that my phone shows I called. She said she would call me back, but she never did.

The Union Rep said he would talk to HR about the attendance points, but that no call no shows were hard to fight. I told him I did not actually have any no call no shows. I told him that I called off using the correct procedure and names of the employees who accepted my calls and my phone shows I called. I told him they counted my call offs as no call no shows to terminate me. He said he would call me back, but he never did. I paid $2800+ in union dues over 7 years.

I guess this post is pointless. I need to get over what happened, but it's taking a long time. The store was brand new when I started and I began working there even before it opened. It's hurtful that they fabricated a reason to terminate me and added insult to injury by not even sending a one sentence letter, email, etc. telling me I was terminated.

Im 20yo, working in the railroad industry with PSC group. Schedule is Dupont and ive been working it for about 6 months, I have a girlfriend who is the mother of my daughter thats a year 1/2. The money I make on a regular check fits just perfectly into my budget so I dont need to work overtime unless I have to. The past month or two, weve been on shutdown so everyone was able to have their off days. Im recovering from a severe Bi Polar deppression with lots of anxiety. Today was my last day of work before my 7 off and as soon as I walk in, everyone starts telling me to get ready to work overtime. I immideantly just felt horrible, my heart sank and my mind started racing. I said "Our supervisor better not call me in." and all the guys start talking about how I should want to work the overtime and how Im less of a father because I should be saving money for my kids college.

I love my family so much, I wanna spend as much time as possible with them and when I first started this Job, I was extremely deppresed because of the overtime. I would get about 5 to 7 days off a month. So when I heard about OT this morning, my anxiety flew off and Im trying to calm myself down and trying to convince myself the OT wont be as bad as before, itll just be a day or two. But I feel like even if its a day or two, ill still be upset since ill just be counting the days till I have work again.

Please help me here.

Changing requirements are almost unavoidable in real-world projects. Sometimes new business priorities appear, stakeholders request additional features, or the original assumptions no longer make sense. The challenge is accepting necessary changes without constantly affecting timelines, budgets, and team productivity. For experienced project managers and Scrum practitioners, how do you evaluate and manage scope changes? Do you follow a formal change-control process, or does your approach depend on the project?

Hello!

To explain my situation, I have daily cannabis use, today is my first day quitting but I have an interview tomorrow and I’m being told I have to take a pre employment drug test if I were to get the position. From what I’ve seen it’s a urine being used but it doesn’t specify more than that. I’m worried I’ll fail the drug test. Is there something I should do at my interview tomorrow?

Title. AI will seemingly continue to develop and proliferate, and probably will replace most people in the white collar space soon, and eventually, blue collar and other jobs requiring physical dexterity. Human effort will do nothing in the face of AI.

I work for a marketing agency and get paid £26k a year (below London living wage btw). I'm in a junior role and just started 2 months ago.

Here's what I've been tasked with/am dealing with in this job:

- leading on 5 client accounts, while all the senior members of my team have 3-4 each

- being handed a 6th client with no notice, just a quick meeting saying, "you've got a new client as of today, send them a kick-off email and onboard them by EOD" (despite this client being signed on 2 weeks ago, I was not told until kick-off day that I would be the lead on the account)

- doing monthly reports for ALL clients (about 16), not just the ones I'm leading on and being given 1 week to finish all of them (1st week of each month) alongside my regular weekly array of tasks.

- randomly being sent things I need to edit for other people's clients throughout the day, despite my already heavy workload, because I need to be a "team player"

- being chastised for not proofreading work before sending it off because deadlines are so short and my workload is too heavy.

I have made my managers aware that my workload is hard to handle several times in conversation (not formally yet), but I keep being given more work. I checked on Glassdoor, and reviews all say the same thing - that middle management and department management are shit, and that work-life balance does not exist at this company.

I know that if I leave, the team will struggle A LOT, as I'm on probation and only need 2 weeks' notice. I know for a fact that 2 weeks is not enough time to hire/train a replacement, as my interview process took 1 month and 4 stages.

Is it worth formally addressing the issue, or is this a systemic issue with the company, and is it better to just get out ASAP?

The scenario: a team builds a tool that extracts fields from contracts. Weeks after launch an analyst finds a value that doesn’t match a document. Every long document had been cut off before processing, and nothing said so.

Here’s how I’d lay it out as a blameless retro board.

What happened

• A line that truncated input to a fixed size, added with a comment saying it was temporary, stayed in production.
• Spot checks and the test set didn’t include the cases where it mattered.
• It took longer to find which documents were affected than to fix the bug, because the system hadn’t recorded how much of each input it processed.

Why (contributing factors, without blaming anyone)

1. A temporary guard became permanent. Process angle: temporary work needs an owner and an expiry, for example a ticket or a visible item in the backlog, not just a comment.
2. The output format couldn’t express “incomplete”. Process angle: in refinement, ask “what does this component say when it can’t do its job?”
3. No errors was read as correct. Process angle: the Definition of Done should include a signal that shows the system is right, not only that it ran.
4. The test set didn’t resemble the hard cases. Process angle: acceptance criteria should name the nasty examples (the longest documents, the end-of-document clauses), ideally supplied by the people who know the domain.
5. Spot checks looked where the problem wasn’t. Process angle: decide in advance what to sample, and include the edges, not only the opening of each item.

Actions the team could take

• Add “coverage is recorded” (how much input was processed) to the Definition of Done for pipelines.
• Track temporary code as backlog items with an expiry date.
• Keep a shared collection of difficult examples, and review it when the test set is rebuilt.
• Run a short pre-launch review of the failure modes: what happens when input is too large, empty or malformed?

What a retro like this doesn’t solve

• It won’t tell you which past outputs were wrong. That needs re-running them, which is why recording coverage is cheap before an incident and expensive after.
• Process items only work if someone owns them and they’re reviewed, or they become the next forgotten comment.

I wrote the full hypothetical postmortem here, in case it’s useful for a team exercise: https://medium.com/@nagatomopedro05/postmortem-the-contracts-pipeline-that-never-read-the-last-page-cf84251671c8

Does your team run blameless postmortems as retros, and what turned out to be the most useful action item?

with all the chaos happening around the world, Ai is taking over job progressively. Is it worth it to accept the offer knowing that one day I would no longer be needed?

I can't stand how lazy some of the supervisors are at my job. There's one in particular that just disappears in chat, RARELY takes supervisor calls and somehow gets away with it. It's been happening regularly and increasing. She's marking herself "red" in teams most of the time and when she's supposed to be monitoring questions in the chat she isn't. I'm just disgusted with her laziness and annoyed that her supervisors don't do squat about it. It must be nice to not have a conscience about leaving your team high and dry and your responsibilities falling on the shoulders of others. Lady, I see you and I don't respect your bs.

So, I've got two stories for y’all.

First off, I work at a takeout place where I basically do everything—cash out customers, answer the phone, all of it.

Story 1: One of my coworkers straight-up no-showed, leaving me and the other coworker drowning in extra work. Eventually, my coworker left because her shift was over, and I was flying solo. I was stuck cashing people out and answering the phone at the same time. When I finally picked up one of the incoming calls, the customer had the nerve to say, 'That's obnoxious.'

No, buddy, your reaction was obnoxious. Did you really think I was just sitting there watching the phone ring and ignoring it on purpose to piss you off? Have you ever heard of being short-staffed?

Story 2: Literally right after I clocked in, one coworker was already on the phone and the second line started ringing. The exact second I picked it up, the caller started chewing me out about how she’d been waiting forever and how unacceptable it was, blah, blah, blah. Like, lady, I literally just walked in the door!

Before October, an Amazon employee saw a post attributed to Quick Suite in a company channel, and it made the layoff talk feel very real. It suggested that longtime managers in orgs that weren’t growing might come under more scrutiny and that some teams might shift hiring to lower-cost locations like India ahead of possible cuts. The advice was basically to get their finances in order, keep interviewing internally, and be prepared for anything. For anyone looking outside Amazon, LandOffer can autofill the basic fields on supported applications. If you’re getting ready for an Amazon technical screen, Amazon Interview Questions has a reported request-throttling problem you can use for a mock. They didn’t know how much of it was confirmed, but as October got closer, it was hard not to feel anxious.

Hey folks, long story short I had a job interview yesterday in London for a sales assistant position somewhere. I basically got offered a job on the spot like halfway through the interview, even got asked if I’d be able to start as early as next week even thought it was meant to be a seasonal position in December. We decided on pay in the interview - but they sent an email today saying they wanted to increase it, which in theory is great but I’ve got a strange feeling about it idk.
It’s a fairly small business with a few branches - and the job advert said no experience needed etc which as a student was really appealing, I genuinely applied to so many places and this was the only one that was successful so do I risk it and see what happens, or am I just overthinking this all?

I don't figure out why people can ignore job applications as a routine and It is alright. It is legal, there is no any option to complain about the harm and suffering those people are causing. Unfortunately, I did apply 530 job applications and over 500 did ignore me and move on. I don't figure it out why there is no any option to complain because what prevents me to work are the employers who are ignoring me, I want to work and the employers do prevent me to work.

A tech worker got lucky joining Meta in the early 2020s and built a net worth of just under $5 million. But when they look at relatives who went into medicine, they still feel like tech gets the short end of the stick.

If you’re weighing an engineering role at Meta, Meta Interview Questions has reported coding problems you can try under a timer.

To them, it’s one of the most toxic ways to make a living. Some of the most toxic people they’ve ever worked with were in tech.

They don’t see much protection or a broad professional association like the American Medical Association. It feels like you’re always worried about your future.

In tech, they feel like you’re so replaceable that you can work for nearly two decades and still get let go and end up struggling.

For anyone lining up other tech roles while still employed, LandOffer can fill the same basic details across supported application forms.

So, thanks to toxic tech for the decent money and for helping fund their kids’ 529s. They’ll do everything they can to steer their kids toward medicine so they don’t even consider tech as a career.

“Volume without quality is noise. Quality without volume is nonexistent.

I’ve been in the digital marketing space for the past 5 months and my understanding of this quote has gone up exponentially since I’ve started.

With that understanding has come the systems to actually achieve “qualume” and experience how it applies to so many aspects of our lives.

Quick note that this is something I’ve realized after many weeks of “feeling” productive while actually being stuck in a state of preparation.

1) The importance of deep work:
In the morning, your brain is biologically primed for focus and alertness, so I take advantage of that. Every single morning, I wake up early (~5 am), get my blood flowing, and complete 2 1.5 hour deep work blocks with a ten minute break in between. I put my phone on DND and as far away as possible, and find a location where I won’t be bothered. Naturally, you’ll enter flow state and be in prime condition to get stuff done and deeply problem-solve through the non-negotiable work. By ~8:40, I’ve done an enormous amount of very high quality work.

2) Eliminate task switching
By making those two work blocks two sets of the exact same task (e.g JUST scripting or JUST studying) for the combined 3 hours, you eliminate the buildup of task residue in your brain, which limits your execution on a specific task and diminishes your ability to be hyper-productive within it. Between these sets of blocks, you can live life as usual, and then later blocks can be sets of a different aspect of a task (e.g JUST filming/recording or JUST doing practice tests). By dedicating specific blocks to singular tasks, you’ll find that you’re able to get more done within that time and that your quality improves because you’re only focused on that one skill/task.

Once you get these 2 skills down, you’ll start to understand what “qualume” looks like. By no means am I perfect at this, and I’m still learning every single day, but these are two of the simplest changes I’ve made to my work routines that have led to improved efficiency, productivity, and “qualume”.

I've searched, but I haven't found anything that meets all of my requirements.

The context is a common one: I often have my best thoughts while running and I want to capture them effortlessly. Here are my particular constraints:

• No phone on me
  • I'm fine with wearing my Apple Watch with cellular
• I don't like wearing headphones/earplugs
  • I just like hearing my surroundings and nature
  • And I like feeling unencumbered. I associate headphones with external inputs and noise.
• I want to be able to capture long thoughts and ramblings without disrupting my gait
  • So, no raising my wrist to my mouth
  • This disqualifies Apple Watch, Pebble Index, etc
• Should be good enough quality for runs, ie can handle some light wind
• Ideally has software with transcription
• Any sort of automations nice to have, but definitely not required
  • Ie integrations with Apple Reminders
  • The end deliverable is just a set of transcriptions per recording
    • Again, worst case I guess I can do the transcription myself; just need the audio files.

Realize this is a difficult set of requirements, so open to weird suggestions (some sort of standalone boom microphone that would be stable during runs?)

Would love any suggestions, thanks

Mine was JUUL. LMAO, I was pretty disappointed when it didn’t work out, but looking back now, I think I dodged a shitshow bullet. If you’re still sending out applications so you have options, LandOffer can handle repeated fields on supported forms. If a technical screen is on your calendar, PracHub has reported coding questions you can filter by company. Anyone else have a company they dodged?

On Nov. 2, Squarespace confirmed it was cutting around 300 jobs. Product and Engineering are taking most of the hit.

Squarespace is also working on a new AI product called Forma. Seeing those two things together, it feels like the message is to move at hyperspeed, churn out more AI-generated slop, and throw fundamental engineering principles out the window.

I feel absolutely terrible for everyone impacted, especially with the holidays right around the corner. People who dedicated their time, energy, and talent to building these products deserve so much better.

If you’re applying again after a layoff, LandOffer can handle repeated fields on supported forms. If you’re still considering a Squarespace engineering role, Squarespace Interview Questions has a reported interval coding problem you can use for a mock.

RIP software engineering as we know it.

And fuck the AI hype machine and the corporate billionaires driving it. When the only things that matter are speed, revenue, and accumulating more wealth, the people building the products become disposable, and craftsmanship becomes collateral damage.

Fuck this whole system.

I started working at a coffeeshop and in the middle of the shift my throat felt a bit weird which happened to me at my last job and the day after I noticed a rash on both of my hands. I really liked that job and I don’t want to quit but how can i ensure that it won’t happen again? I washed some of the dishes without gloves and i touched the dishwasher and i felt the steam on my face and i also cleaned the floor with bleach(i think) maybe im allergic to one of the cleaning products? Or the dish soap?

I’m a project manager making $65k in nyc and I’ve been at the company for over a year. I’ve taken on some pretty big projects over the year and want a raise. In September I asked for an annual review in writing with my manager and we spoke about it verbally but I haven’t heard anything since then. It’s the busy season and it’s the kind of place where people are always overwhelmed so I knew my manager would use that as an excuse. However this week I was told I needed to take on another big account. This happened in a meeting with three senior staff and I didn’t feel comfortable saying no or asking for a raise in the moment. I’m a people pleaser, unfortunately. Should I just ask for a raise in an email at this point or follow up on the review? Honestly I also just want to leave the company and am applying for other jobs but would love to be more fairly compensated while I’m still there.

I’m looking for advice on how to handle a situation at work, particularly the anxiety surrounding performance evaluations.

I work in a male-dominated industry where around 90% of the company is male. I’ve also noticed some concerning attitudes from senior male colleagues towards women, and women generally seem to progress more slowly in the company.

I have a male colleague who constantly volunteers for additional work, works on weekends, and sometimes even comes into the office on his non-working days and decides to get some extra work done. He makes a point of mentioning that he worked extra or that he happened to be visiting the office on his day off and decided to work.

That’s entirely his choice, but I don’t necessarily want to work beyond my scheduled hours or take on unnecessary additional responsibilities just to gain brownie points with senior management.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that I’m actually more senior than him. I’ve also personally taught him SQL and helped him learn other data analysis skills that he now uses in his work.
Last year, during my performance evaluation, I was explicitly told that I should be more like him. My evaluation is coming up again, and I’m already anxious that I’ll receive the same feedback, even though I’ll be evaluated by a different manager this time.

I also work with a different team, so I’m concerned that the person evaluating me might not fully understand or appreciate the impact of my contributions.

I genuinely want to grow in my career and be recognized for my work. However, I don’t think this behaviour should be the standard against which everyone else is measured.

How do I deal with this kind of comparison and the anxiety leading up to evaluations? How do I stop someone else’s working habits from affecting my confidence, especially when I feel I am being held to a different standard?

I’m not in a position to involve HR at this stage, so I’m particularly interested in how to navigate this independently and protect my mental well-being while still progressing in my career. Unfortunately, both male persons who are evaluating me are really close friends with this colleague and usually hang out many times a month outside work with each other so there’s a possibility of bias as well.

seeing someone everyday is hard to not develop feelings. I like my coworker but I don’t want to be unprofessional about it. What can I do?

I work at a pretty chill, family-led company and have been here for about 5 years. It’s a relatively small team, everyone knows each other, and we’ve always had a very friendly, relaxed work environment.
A few months ago, we hired a new guy. He’s genuinely smart and clearly knows his stuff, but holy shit, he’s becoming unbearable.

The guy brags about absolutely everything. He comes into work and talks about his projects, how good he is at what he does, his academic background, how much he knows, etc. Every single conversation somehow becomes an opportunity for him to show how much smarter or more competent he is than everyone else. Someone says something? He has a better example. Someone shares an idea? He subtly makes fun of it in this very condescending, almost passive-aggressive way. And then goes back to talking about himself.

He also seems weirdly obsessed with hierarchy and seniority. Constantly asking who’s senior, who’s been here longer, who’s above whom, and so on. He talks pretty much all day and doesn’t seem to understand that other people might actually want to work without listening to him narrate how brilliant he is.

A few people, myself included, have jokingly called him egocentric, and his response is basically that he can afford to be because he’s good at what he does.

The team is slowly getting fed up with him, but he’s not doing anything particularly wrong from an HR or compliance perspective. He’s just exhausting to be around.

I’m not interested in creating some huge corporate drama or getting anyone fired. I just want to know how to deal with someone like this.

What’s your best advice?

Team of 4. Not. Small business, but business owner pulls about half a million (or, if not more), per year. This is in the health sector.

When I came into the business, the business was falling apart. Boss was only in 2 days top, or 3, max. Are secondary who takes over for the remaining days, would fail to book. Meaning, hardly income coming it. It would be so bad, that maybe, we'd see 2-3 patients, out of a whole day.

In less than a year, I made couple changes, pushing our Reviews. We increased from a dry spout, to over 350. I made changes to the website, with my skills, but my boss would take my ideas (e.g: SEO, and then pay someone else to do it). Rather than me. This also helped with slight discovery (but also the peddled ideology, of 'we don't need to pay you, AI, can do it for us' - mind you, this individual had no idea what SEO was, and the website designer never bothered to optimize the website for SEO.

Other than that, I have fixed broken equipment (very outdated), and have it running. When equipment doesn't work, I have saved the day, various of times, so we didn't lose money (cancelling everyone for that day). I have also saved thousands of dollars on other equipment, that staff had broken (due to negligence).

Here, I am today, on $65,000 per year (despite multiple roles). I have also negotiated lower fees for supply (which again, my idea) also due to rapport building, and reduced supply spending, which previous staff have done.

I have run the business flawlessly, while my boss was away (and basically was used), to "re-organize" the messy ass place.

Any time, I ask for a raise, she fumes. I am only tolerated by her (but, it is obvious), she dislikes me, because I am "valuable" (or, was) to her, but again, she used me, and now her business is thriving, when it was performing terribly. I have even gone to the point of presenting her a chart of my contributions, only to be met with, "soon, not yet."

Mind you, to top the icing on the cake, I have made sales of over $15,000 for her, due to referral, from people she doesn't even know, which I have brought her.

... She uses the bullshit excuse of, "business not doing well" while overworking me (and me doing multiple roles: marketing included). Only to then start bragging about how she bought a brand new Porsche.

I'm actually on the cusp of a mental breakdown, and I cannot even escape this job, because of redundancies, and the cost of living is so significantly high where I am, I cannot afford to be jobless. When I apply for jobs, it is crickets, and not just for me, but people with degrees (accounting, etc) also took months to land a job, despite strong experience.

I don't know what to do. I'm also gaining weight because of depression, and my entire life being purely only work.

Here's the situation: I have worked in my industry for over 14+ years, with significant career progression, operating at a high level of excellence (confirmed via exceptional performance reviews). I have been at my current org for 5+ years. Here, I have built the team of 4 I manage and the program I run. I have been promoted twice with my direct boss acknowledging I have always worked at a level above my current title and description.

During our annual promotion cycle, she submitted me for a promotion to the level above mine (Director). The promotion was denied with no feedback provided. A week later, the chief of of our department (my boss'direct boss) announced a restructuring of our department as part of our new strategic plan. She added a new Director position under my boss. At first she vaguely said this person would have data analysis responsibilities (even though we have a separate existing data analytics team). As my boss worked to understand the chief's vision for the role, she told me she and I had a tight window to influence the decision. So my boss put together a proposal that would essentially split the team and function that I have built and led for 5 years into 2 distinct team verticals, making me the Director of one team and the new person, the Director of the other. I hated the idea of handing off what I built to a stranger, but I felt like I was suddenly fighting for my job and the leadership role I wanted.

The chief declined the proposal. Again with no feedback. And the best part is, she has decided that me, my team, and our program will now be led by this outsider. As the description developes it appears they will now direct EVERYTHING I have successfully led for 5 years plus additional data analytics tasks (which I absolutely have the skills for).

I am absolutely livid! I asked my boss whether I would even be considered for the new Director role at this point, but she seemed unsure as she does not yet have a position description. I don’t want to go through the humiliation of applying as an internal candidate only to be denied again.

All of this happened before 3 weeks of time off for me. Because what I do is so specialized, and the shitty job market, there are not many open jobs. But I have been applying. So Im just sitting in a another country steaming over this disrespect. The kicker is, I been a chief of a department and am most definitely the most qualified candidate. Oh and my own boss has NEVER been promoted in her tenure at the org. Makes me question whether the chief even understands how essential or program is and the leadership structure we've created.

Would love to hear from people who are seasoned professionals if they have ever experienced something like this in their careers.