u/Ausartak93

I’ve noticed every time I start thinking “everyone here is incompetent,” it usually says more about my mindset than theirs. Not always, but enough times that I stopped trusting that feeling automatically.

When I know a domain well, I get impatient fast. I skip explanations, assume people should already see what I see, and quietly decide half the room is clueless.

But when I’m the new one? Suddenly I’m careful, polite, asking questions every five minutes because I know I’m missing context.

That realization was uncomfortable.

A while back I started treating the “I’m surrounded by idiots” feeling like a warning sign instead of a conclusion. Usually it means one of two things: either the incentives around me are terrible, or I’ve gotten too comfortable and stopped checking my own blind spots.

I went through this whole self-audit phase where I started writing down predictions before meetings just to see how often I was actually right. Humbling experience.

I also kept random notes in Notion, ChatGPT, and even went back through a Coached personality assessment I’d done before because it weirdly called out how fast I default to overconfidence when I feel competent in a room. Didn’t fix anything, but it gave me language for patterns I kept repeating.

The annoying part is that when I force myself into situations where I’m learning again, I stop feeling intellectually superior pretty quickly. Which probably means it’s good for me.

Been lurking MBA/career pivot posts for a while because I’m applying this year, and I keep noticing people talk about pivots like the MBA is some magical memory wipe for your old career. I used to think that too, but honestly the bigger issue is whether your pivot makes any sense to the recruiter staring at your resume for 30 seconds.

There’s a huge difference between “I already kind of do this work” and “I woke up one day and decided I want private equity.”

Some pivots are pretty believable. Engineer to product. Audit to FP&A. Teacher to HR or L&D. You can usually point to overlap and say “I’ve already been doing parts of this, just under a different title.”

Then there are the school-powered pivots where the MBA brand does a lot of the lifting. Back-office finance to IB from a strong feeder. Regional consulting to MBB. The pipeline matters a ton there, but people still underestimate how much recruiters want a clean story. If your whole pitch is basically “I want prestige and money,” they can smell it immediately.

The roughest category is the full identity-change pivot. Musician to PE. Nonprofit ops to VC. Teacher to quant. Not impossible, but people on Reddit act like the MBA alone magically wipes your old background clean. It doesn’t.

When I was figuring this stuff out for myself, I had to sit down and be honest about whether my “pivot” was actually supported by anything real. I dumped my experience into a giant messy doc, compared it to job descriptions, and tried to figure out what patterns kept showing up.

Weirdly, tools like ChatGPT and the Coached career test helped a bit because they forced me to stop describing myself with vague prestige words and actually look at the kind of work I naturally leaned toward.

The thing nobody tells you is that a lot of successful pivots are really just rebrands of work you were already doing. People love dramatic before/after stories, but most career changes I’ve seen were way messier and more incremental than that.

The biggest reality check for me was realizing that “interested in finance/consulting/product” means basically nothing without proof. Side projects, internships, independent work, even small stuff counts way more than endless podcast listening and MBA essays full of buzzwords.

Walked out of an interview feeling amazing. Answers were smooth, STAR stories were polished, no awkward pauses. I was already mentally replaying the “this went great” moment on the drive home.

Then I got the feedback: “Your answers felt too rehearsed.”

That honestly stung more than a rejection.

Looking back, the interviewers kept trying to pull me into the messy parts of the stories. Stuff like “what went wrong?” or “what would you do differently?” And I kept giving these super cleaned-up answers where everything magically worked out. No bad calls, no conflict, no moments where I had to scramble and fix something.

At one point during prep I had my resume open in Google Docs, messed around with phrasing in Resumeworded a bit, tightened up my bullets, all that. But the problem wasn’t the resume. It was that I sounded like I was performing a version of myself instead of talking like a normal person.

After that, I started prepping stories differently. I make sure every answer has at least one screw-up or rough moment in it. Maybe I misunderstood a requirement, picked the wrong approach at first, or handled a stakeholder conversation badly. Then I talk about what changed after that.

Interviews got way less stressful after that because I stopped trying to sound flawless. Weirdly, the conversations started feeling more real too.

Now when someone asks a follow-up, I’m not panicking trying to protect some perfect version of the story. I can just answer it honestly.

I’m a couple years into Big 4 now and I’ve realized the actual work stresses me out way less than the constant feeling that the expectations are invisible until you somehow fail them.

One manager tells you “great ownership.” Another asks why you didn’t magically predict some issue nobody mentioned once. Half the feedback felt like horoscope readings. I started wondering if I was actually bad at my job or just losing my mind.

At one point I got so frustrated I started keeping notes every day about what parts of work made me feel good vs what made me want to log off and disappear. The pattern got embarrassing fast. I actually liked difficult problem-solving when there was a real outcome attached to it. I didn’t even mind long hours if I owned something properly.

But the second my job became “coordinate between 7 people who refuse to read emails” or “fix slide formatting at 11pm because a partner suddenly cares about alignment,” I felt dead inside.

I ended up dumping all the notes into Notion and randomly did a career assessment (Coached) during that phase because I was trying to figure out if I hated consulting entirely or just the specific kind of work I kept getting stuck with. Weirdly enough it helped me notice I care way more about autonomy and ownership than prestige, even though Big 4 trains you to obsess over prestige constantly.

That realization honestly changed how I started looking at teams and exits. Before that I kept treating all dissatisfaction like a personal failure instead of maybe.. the work itself just sucked for me.

Last year I hit a point where I was completely burned out on EA work and honestly started wondering if I just picked the wrong career.

I’d had 3 EA jobs in 4 years. All looked good on paper. All made me miserable for totally different reasons.

One was nonstop calendar/email triage across multiple time zones. Another turned into office manager + culture committee + party planner. The last one slowly became “person responsible for every random problem nobody else wanted.”

Same title, completely different lives.

The problem was my resume basically screamed “I can handle anything,” which apparently translates to “great, let’s dump everything on this person.”

Before I touched my resume, I sat down and got really honest with myself about what kind of EA work I actually like.

Big realization: I do NOT want to support 4-5 execs. I kept telling myself I “should” be able to handle that because a lot of senior EAs do. Truth is, I’m happiest supporting one main person deeply and maybe one light secondary.

I also realized there’s certain chaos I weirdly enjoy and certain chaos that drains the life out of me. Big events? Fine. Last-minute travel changes? Annoying but manageable. Constant calendar firefighting for indecisive execs? I start mentally checking out after a few months.

I did a bunch of journaling during this and even messed around with the coached career test just because I was trying to figure out if I actually hated EA work or just hated the environments I kept ending up in.

Another thing I had to admit: just because I’m good at something doesn’t mean I want it in my next role. I’m apparently very good at becoming the unofficial HR/conflict person. I never want to do that again.

Once I figured all that out, rewriting my resume got way easier. I stopped trying to sound impressive to everybody and started trying to attract a very specific kind of role instead.

Still kinda wild how broad the “EA” title is though. Two jobs can sound identical online and feel completely different once you’re actually in them.

So I finally hit the point where consulting looked good on paper, but I felt this massive, hollow weight like I was just living someone else's life. I had good reviews and a comp bump, but I was dying inside because I kept expecting the job to be meaningful when it just isn't.

I used to try to fix the emptiness by tweaking everything except the actual lack of purpose, moving from team to team, but it felt like rearranging furniture in a place I didn't really want to live.

Things only shifted when I stopped pretending the firm’s values were my own and admitted that I was using this job just as a vehicle to fund my actual life. Taking a career test called coached really helped me figure out how to put words to what I was feeling and spot the patterns in what drained me versus what actually kept me engaged.

Now I draw a hard line on my boundaries and put my real idealism into things outside the office, like teaching and pro bono work. I'm still doing margin cases, but I'm just way less miserable now that's stopped demanding the job perform duties it was never built for.

How do you all handle the lack of meaning in this line of work?

I actually liked my job. The pay was solid and the work was cool.. until I got moved next to "Mark" and everything went to hell.

The guy talks over everyone, screams across the office instead of Slacking, and literally hijacks my client calls on speakerphone to give wrong info while I’m sitting right there. He’d correct me in front of clients for things we’d already agreed on, then smirk and tell me to "get it right the first time" when I tried to talk to him privately.

I went to my manager and HR, but it was a total brick wall. My boss told me we just had "different communication styles" and to build more rapport, while HR said they couldn't just rearrange seating every time someone had a "personality conflict."

Meanwhile, Mark is out here imitating my voice on calls and reading my drafts out loud. When a client finally complained about the mixed messages, my manager actually blamed ME for getting flustered and making Mark feel like he had to "step in." That was the moment I realized this wasn't a coworker problem. It was a leadership choice.

I spent my last three months there quietly job hunting, trying to figure out how to frame that absolute circus into something that actually sounded professional. Spent a lot of time cleaning up my bullets and running them through resumeworded to make sure the focus was on my actual results rather than the toxic environment I was escaping. I didn't write it like a victim of a bad desk assignment. I sounded like a high-performer again.

When I finally turned in my notice, my manager had the nerve to act surprised and asked if it was just about "that little conflict with Mark." No. Annoying coworkers are everywhere, but leadership that lets the loudest person bulldoze everyone else is a choice I don't have to live with.

I’m at a new spot now and the silence is unreal. How do I even talk about this situation in interviews without sounding bitter? Still figuring out how much of the truth is too much.