u/Guilty-Signature7053

I've spent a little over two decades in corporate tech - currently at Oracle, and before that in scaleups and consultancies - and I've learned that the people who advance aren't always the smartest or the strongest technically. The ones who succeed are often the ones who understood a few uncomfortable truths before everyone else.

Forget romantic empathy. You need practical empathy. Put yourself in people's shoes not to absorb their feelings, but to understand their priorities, motivations, and emotional temperature.

Big companies are absurd because everyone is playing from a slightly different angle. Once you can see that, you can *actually* work with people instead of wasting your energy fighting ghosts.

Protect your mental health too, because corporate environments can grind you down if you give them full access to you. You need a good amount of detachment. Corporate jobs are weird. You'll hear nonsense from people who somehow have authority. If you treat every strange meeting, comment, or decision as something personal and important to you, you'll burn out. Build optionality - a hobby, freelance work, volunteering, anything that reminds you that your identity is bigger than this organization you don't control.

Map your stakeholders. Understand who has influence and build your positioning around that. Yes, you need to make the right people comfortable; that's part of the job. And the weird thing is, they often aren't your direct manager. With constant reshuffles, the person who needs to know your name might be four levels above you or sitting in a neighboring org. Your best protection against becoming invisible is being visible outside your immediate team.

Practice "cooperative contrarianism." People who always say yes usually don't build real influence, and neither do people who oppose everything just for the sake of opposition. The useful middle ground is evidence-based pushback while still remaining someone people don't dread working with.

Don't attach all your self-worth to a corporate role.
It's normal for these places to be weird, full of politics, and sometimes absurd, so learning to laugh at that is not optional.

And as a licensed therapist too, I see both sides: the career mechanics and the psychological cost. The people who last and grow usually do both: they play the game consciously, and they protect their mental health as if it matters.

Any one of these points could be a thread on its own, but this is more or less the compass I keep coming back to. I hope it's useful.

My husband and I closed on our first house. I emailed everyone well in advance and said I would need a few days off for the closing and the move. Apparently the big boss had a problem with that, and honestly, he had already been targeting me before then. About 10 days before the closing date, he fired me by email.

Now, a large part of my department has left because the way he fired me left everyone with a very bad feeling. I hear from my former coworkers that my name comes up a lot and that they may want to bring me back.

I haven't had much luck finding another job, and honestly, I do need the money to some extent. But I won't go back unless there are clear written conditions.

First, I will not stay silent again about any harassment from the manager, because I've dealt with that before. Second, I will need the job to be either hybrid or fully remote, and I know that's possible because he has allowed other people to do that. Third, I will need a sign-on bonus or some kind of back pay, because the first paycheck takes about 5 weeks to come through, and I can't go that whole time without any income. Fourth, I have to be paid at least 28 an hour. At first, he convinced me to take 19, and then we agreed on 22, even though the job posting said the range was 22 to 32 an hour. Fifth, I want everything confirmed in writing before I even consider going back there.

This guy is frankly a narcissistic asshole. He tried to pressure me to come to work when I had COVID, and he also gave me random unsolicited medical advice, as if he were my doctor or something.

I'm basically trying to figure out the smartest way to handle this. As soon as I tell my former coworker that they can confirm I'm interested, I know I'll get a call from the manager, and I don't want to go into that call without being prepared.

update: I'm no longer interested in continuing in this shit. After thinking a lot, I told myself I deserve something better. I saw a post about cold emailing to get a job and it worked with many people in few days, sounds interesting. Has anyone tried it before?

The situation is exactly as the title says. I was suddenly laid off in late April after the company was sold to an investment group. But luckily, I tried the cold emailing method mentioned in this post, and got a new offer at a remote job that pays better.

This morning I got a message from the company that fired me saying they need my help to remove my admin access from the software the company uses.

Am I required to answer to them at all? Or is it reasonable to tell them I won't do that unless they pay me for my time?

In the end, I took the advice here and replied that I could help, and asked them to send the details by email, and I also wrote the hourly rate that I thought was appropriate.