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In my 20s and it is really true that I am ready to work for free just so that I can get some sort of start
Yeah it’s really tough at the start of your career. Low pay, long hours, no vacation, and starvation if you don’t play ball. My advice is don’t allow yourself to feel loyalty for any company or anyone in a higher position than you. They’ll act like they’ll have your back but the moment the calculus says throwing you under the bus is beneficial they won’t hesitate. They won’t give you the raise you deserve, so the only way to get that is to jump ship whenever it’s beneficial for you to.
They don’t owe you anything more than the agreed upon compensation, you don’t owe them anything more than what’s in the job description.
My ambition in my 40s
Don’t. Draw. Attention.
Just keep my head down, quietly complete the minimum acceptable requirements, only submit them when their deadlines are imminent. Aim for the equivalent of a “B” on my performance reviews.
Dress plainly, don’t talk about hobbies or personal life, don’t reflect or amplify drama, never volunteer my opinion.Agent 47, for this corporate mission you should avoid attention. Hide in cozy underperformer stealth mode.
20’s: learn to read the room, if your manager doesn’t move people on merit, don’t do extra shit for them. If you really want to try step one, you’re going to have to bounce around until you find a manager willing to give you what you’re worth.
Apparently I’ve been on my 30’s for my entire 20’s
A place I used to work had to add a rule banning unicycles from the parking lot because of me.
Story mode?
Try a tricycle next time.
Not much of a story. I used to practice riding my uni with another guy I worked with. One of the managers got bent out of shape about it and started a whole crusade. I asked what rule I was breaking since it was such a big deal. No rule about minimum number of wheels was found, so next year they had to make such a rule.
The second half of this post is how I got through highschool. And college. And the military. “I didn’t see anything about it in the handbook/UCMJ” was my motto. And I already realized hard work didn’t pay off, cuz I watched my siblings do that.
There are two ways to get through life. You can conform, which is hard for you but easy for everyone else, or you can find and exploit every loophole you can which is hard for you AND hard for everyone else. I’m not one to make things easy for other people unless its also easier for me, so…
Depends whom you’re making it hard for, I suppose.
It’s often easy to make things harder for those who already have it tough in life and little to no means to improve that. Let’s find more worthy targets in our endeavours.
If you are in a position to be impacted by my “easier for me, harder for you” mentality, you by default aren’t the sort thats struggling in life.
It targets those in some sort of power, those who wish to restrict my life for mo good reason. The sort of people who (think they) can make rules to govern my life.
I challenge you to come up with a time where finding the loopholes makes things worse for people who are also living under the same rules.
God damn if you were working that hard in your 20s that would suck.
Yeah it did
now I’m unemployed and will die before I take a managerial role again
Well yes, but also it’s my hard work in my 20s that put me in a place where I’m paid enough that 50 hour months aren’t catastrophic to my livelihood.
I know i serve for at least 2 examples. First one was as a a security guard, though that was back in my early 20s, on what not to do at work on some seminar. There was a video of me dosing off standing up. In my defense, i have ADHD and it was boring as hell job and it was impossible to make a living wage with normal hours so everyone had to do overtime massively.
Other one is at my current job, as a printing machine operator. It’s rather important to make sure that the active runn in the machine is in correct way, aka facing the machine or the operator, etc. primarily for the next steps in production.
For one specific job i constantly messed it up and printed it the wrong way. Eventually design department did a special picture just for me, with my name on it. On how this certain run must face while in the machine. It had a human figure on it(with my name) the run and machine.
This picture still goes along with that job up to this day, though no one else afterwards hasn’t messed it up in the threat that my name will be replaced by theirs.
Some previous employee’s last name became slang for “a major fuck up” in one of my jobs. I don’t think that’s too uncommon.
We had something kinda similar at my last workplace.
A guy, “Bob”, with the worst attitude you’ll ever come across. Total nightmare. Multiple times on any given day, he’d put down and even threaten people or rat them out to their bosses if some tiny little detail didn’t go the way he liked it. When said bosses reacted indifferently, he’d full on stalk people before and after work to have a go at them. For this and only this purpose, he even drove to a guy’s house several towns over.
At last, he got reprimanded (kinda rare in Europe) and was fired (even more rare) within a few months. And only because that specific company was generally very intolerant of this sort of behavior.
For a long time after this whole ordeal, if somebody displayed a bad attitude at work, we’d say: “Hey, look, he’s pulling a Bob.”
“Be the (cause of) change you want to see in the world”
I love you
Dear young people entering the work force: your extra efforts will be rewarded with extra work. You won’t be paid more or experience progress going this way; you’ll be Sisyphus. If you work enough on networking and making the right friends, you might climb the ladder, but it will be at the expense of wife and kids, if you have those. Only a select few can have it all. Remember to focus on the important things while you can.
I agree. It isn’t an absolute though: you can get employers to train you at their expense, and give you more work in exchange of raises that may not always be worth the effort, but there comes the most important thing that I wasn’t told when I was younger and still seems to be a thing that some dinosaurs think: loyalty for employers only means you don’t actively try to destroy the company, getting a better employer if the previous one won’t pay enough or won’t give you better working conditions is almost always easier than managing to convince a stubborn boss.
And always be a member of a union. If there isn’t one, contact union people near you and they’ll tell you how to do it, even if your boss is great you’re better off in a union (companies can be sold…).
Amen. Like the song says, You can’t always get what you want, you get what you need.
Trying harder only hurts your body more and more, and you rarely see the results you hoped for.
Yeah. The best strategy is to do the average, network, and job hop once every year or so. Focus on your health, friends, and family.
Networking with seniors and managers is more likely to get you decent pay rises than being the most productive member of any team, but job hopping will likely net you far more; including leaving and coming back.
Job hopping is also very easy to explain during an interview.
Why did you leave this job. "I was seeking new opportunities for personal growth and development. The 30% pay raise wasn’t bad either. "
Job hop every year? What kinda jobs are those
Any job in media/VFX within central London, from my experience.
Bold to assume there are any entry level jobs for young people to get into the work force haha
Really does suck though. I’m just about at a point in my career where working hard has somewhat paid off (I’m pretty irreplaceable due to having very specific knowledge about our software and infrastructure). I’m absolutely using that power to ransom my manager into treating the Junior Dev I’m mentoring way better than he would otherwise. I’m actually insisting that he gets his promotion to Regular at least 6 months earlier than is company standard, as well as at least a 12% raise this year. Just because my Junior is great, so I’m giving him way easier access to my domain knowledge which makes him irreplaceable as well. And guess who’s handing in her resignation tomorrow, so the company has to scramble for a replacement 😎
Still, if there’s a time when you can give 110%, it’s when you’re young.
It CAN be good for experience, just don’t expect rewards.
Capitalism is stupid, if I could go back. I would do it differently bcz my health suffered a lot working so much. I should have told them to pound sand.
You either make time or make money. Never both.
I don’t know a single peer who hasn’t got continuous raises pretty much their entire early age mid career. And without crazy changes to life. Maybe not as much as they’d like, but every article one of them has slowly made more.
I myself have gotten raises for just about every single person on my team. I’ve gotten them to correct bad hiring salary and even give someone a 40k bump/correction.
Maybe you just suck and your attitude sucks. Has the thought, that you are the problem ever crossed your mind?
Do the math. Getting a pay increase on par with inflation is not a pay increase, it’s to keep your pay the same on paper. It’s required in many countries, so it’s not due to the employers’ benevolence. Add to that the soaring transport costs to get to the office, the food prices going up, energy prices, interest rates, rent, fuel etc. You’ll hopefully see that most people aren’t getting raises, they’re losing money every year. At the same time, their teams are being downsized or partly outsourced due to the aforementioned price increases, and the ones who are left have to pick up the slack. Corporations and their owners, however, are doing better than ever.
It’s as if there’s people you don’t know who haven’t been getting the raises you’re talking about while they continue to accept bullshit from their jobs while they slowly become unable to leave their apartment due to both financial and mental issues accruing over years.
I hear your experience as well. I know there’s people who aren’t in that boat. I don’t think that invalidates my position though.
Well, yeah. If you don’t get any raise while cost of living keeps inflating, then they’re actually paying you less than they did the previous year. Number can go up while quality of life goes down.
The attitude of: burn yourself out at work hoping for rewards that they stopped giving out decades ago, is the terrible mindset. You had to actively step in to fix an abysmal hiring salary for someone on your team, which your employer wasn’t going to do without being forced. I bet your employer counts that as a raise, so their next one will be a pittance.
I’m the reason a single hardware store in a chain of stores has a specific policy. After they mix a can of paint, they offer the hammer to the customer and ask if they want to seal the lid themselves.
Can you elaborate for us? Did they just not seal it when they handed you paint?
It’s not exciting.
I was a customer. The employee didn’t seal the paint can properly, it spilled, caused damage to other things. I made a huge deal about it, ended up escalating to the owner of the store, got store credit for replacing things.
I had that with coffee and the other things was my balls.
Thankfully that was merely hot coffee, not burning hot. No demand for store credit to replace my balls was made.
I’m thinking they worked for the hardware store and bungled the sealing so catastrophically that the higher ups refuse to take any chances on the risk of such calamities reoccurring.
My 20s were spent in grad school hoping to change the world. My 30s were spent trying to survive.
If you’re too competent you’ll get promoted. Now you have to do all the same stuff you already did plus deal with a bunch of management shit. Literally anything is better than attending meeting after meeting, even work.
I want to always be the reason the angle grinder is missing.
Stealing it, hiding it, or both?
If you live in two countries and one is much cheaper than the other then you can work in the expensive one for higher pay and retire at 35 to 45 in the cheaper one.
That’s the life of so many immigrants in France (and Europe, I expect).
The secret about cheaper countries is they’re often very pleasant to live in if you’re willing to give up some comforts. I don’t have Uber eats but there’s a guy I know with a motorcycle I call and he picks me food from anywhere that’s around.
Dunno who downvoted you, but it’s the truth, lol. Probably half of Balkan works in Central/Western Europe and plenty retire back in their home countries. The unfortunate situation is Balkan cost of living is inching closer and closer to Western Europe while QOL and wages either stagnate or actively worsen.
Eh, I’m surprised it’s only one. They think I write this out of racism, but it’s from experience.
