u/OkCarrot6914

Before an interview for an operations coordinator position, I spent about 45 minutes ignoring the company's overall score on Glassdoor and reading only reviews from former employees. I focused on the angry ones, especially those who said they wished they had never accepted the offer.

During the first call, the recruiter started describing the culture, and what she said sounded remarkably similar to the complaints. She said it was a place where priorities changed quickly and everyone pitched in with whatever needed to be done. Four low-rated reviews talked about constant last-minute requests and people doing work far outside their roles. It was the same situation, just phrased much more pleasantly.

Since then, I've started treating negative employee reviews like interview notes. They help me prepare specific questions and spot carefully worded phrases that might have another meaning behind them. A few weeks ago, I turned down a job that seemed perfect because review after review mentioned the same department head and the same employee turnover problem. Turning it down felt strange, but at the same time, I was glad I found out before becoming attached to the job.

Does anyone else research companies this way? I'd like to know if there are any complaint sites, forums, or less obvious sources people check before deciding whether an interview is worth it.

For context: I'm on a small IT team in a fairly rural area. There are only 5 of us in IT right now, and that includes the person they brought in to take over my position. I told people at the beginning of the week that I was giving them 3 weeks' notice, and honestly it went better than I expected. People were surprised because I'm planning to more or less start over somewhere about 1,800 miles away. I've already signed an apartment lease, but I still don't have another job guaranteed. I've been applying for jobs, but the local IT market here is weirdly crowded, and there aren't any major cities within about a 90-minute drive.

The coworker who died was one of the main reasons I decided to leave. I had been planning to bring up a lot of issues related to him in the HR exit interview, and now I feel absolutely awful even thinking about that.

On Sunday, he came to work like normal and everything seemed fine. Around early afternoon, he said someone he had eaten with a few days earlier had tested positive for Covid. The next day he was sending messages like normal. Yesterday he was active in our Teams chat while working from home, but things were quiet because almost everyone is winding down before the holiday break, so nobody paid too much attention.

This morning no one had heard from him, so we looked at the sign-in logs in Azure and there was nothing. His Teams still showed him as online, which isn't unusual, but he hadn't said anything in the group, and that made us feel like something was off. He had mentioned before that he might go to a memorial at some point this week, so we weren't too worried yet. I offered to stop by after work to check on him, but my manager said we should wait until tomorrow.

About 3 hours after I got home, my manager called my work phone and then my personal phone. I answered, and she told me they found him dead on the floor. After that, I sent a message to the COO and asked if we could talk in the morning. I told him I needed to talk about what my future with the company looks like.

Part of me still wants to follow through with leaving, because this move has been in progress for a while. Another part of me feels like I'd be abandoning the team at the worst possible time. I know I won't really understand what they're thinking until I talk to them, but I need an outside perspective. My head is a mess and I don't know how to sort out the guilt and shock and everything else.

Hi everyone,

I'm from Portugal and this is a question that's been on my mind for a while. Here, someone earning more than $120k a year (around €105,000) is considered very rare, even for people with strong experience or specialized skills. I've always seen that salary as something you only see in upper management, tech, finance, or in a very specific niche.

But then I find a lot of posts here where people in America talk about salaries above $120k as if they're not that unusual, or even as if they're the natural goal in certain fields. I'm not saying I don't believe it - I'm just trying to understand the realistic picture: how common is it really?

I've spent time in the USA before, so I know Reddit can be a mix of real numbers, flexing, and maybe job ads that make everything look better than reality. But honestly, I'd like to hear people's opinions. In Portugal, if you have a degree from a strong university, a master's, and a good additional profile, that might get you something like $38,000 a year at a Big Four firm.

What percentage of workers in America earn more than $120k a year?

Thanks a lot!

A lot of times when someone says, "I make $120k from this job!" and you look at the details, you find they're usually in the top 2% of that field, sacrificing their nights/weekends/life for work, and they still needed the right timing or connections to get there.

I don't want to spend 5 years training for something, only to find out in the end that the average person in that career is very far from that income.

What careers are out there that can relatively consistently get someone to $120k, if you're good and stick with it for a while? I'm open to pretty much anything right now: trades, energy work, tech, healthcare, finance, whatever.

I felt like it was a big red flag when it happened the first time. That place sent me an offer in the end, but I turned it down because there were a lot of other weird things happening too.

Then in an interview a few days ago, the hiring manager asked me if I still live with my parents. After that, she asked me if I was interviewing at other places, and if I had turned down any offers. I told her yes. She asked me why. I tried to keep my answer general and not too specific, but she kept pressing me on it.

Are they allowed to ask things like this?? It makes me feel uncomfortable every time, but I'm a new grad and this is my first serious job search, so I don't really know what's normal and what isn't.

I feel terribly embarrassed, terrified, and honestly, I feel like I've been broken right now. I'm still sitting in my car in front of the office because I don't know how to go home and look my family in the face.

I'm trying to calm myself down enough to go home and pretend everything is fine tonight, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to do next. My mind is completely scrambled.

If you've been through something like this, please share what you did and how you dealt with it.

When I accepted this job a little over two and a half years ago, it was advertised as a hybrid position: 3 days a week working from home. And honestly, that was one of the main reasons I accepted.

After about 14 months, my manager started making comments that she "wished" she hadn't agreed to my role being hybrid, because I was the only person on the team with that arrangement. She said I should be in the office more for the "team dynamic," and that it was making managing everyone else awkward because they were all asking why they couldn't work from home too.

I continued working from home 3 times a week because, tbh, I didn't see that as my problem to solve.

Shortly after that, my manager told everyone she was moving somewhere about an hour and a half away, but would be staying in the same role. She said she would work from home 5 days a week and only come into the office when needed, and that everyone on the team would get two work-from-home days each week.

My coworkers were happy, of course, because they got remote days they hadn't had before. I was the only one who lost a day. She announced it in a team meeting, so I felt like I was put in an awkward position and didn't say anything. She also didn't speak to me privately beforehand or acknowledge that this was changing the agreement I was hired under, so it felt like it came out of nowhere with no warning.

I've been working and going into the office 3 days a week for a few months now, but I have a performance review coming up and I want to bring it up. I want to get my third WFH day back.

Am I overstepping? How would you bring it up without seeming petty? And is the review the right time for me to talk about this? I know I probably should have said something when it happened, but I'm a people pleaser and honestly froze because I wasn't expecting it.

Is this all there is? Wake up, work, get worn down, and repeat. Ever since I got into this new line of work 3 years ago, I feel like my real life ended and I'm just maintaining a functioning body. No time, no space, no energy, no excitement, and no real feeling that I'm alive. Forcing myself to show up and keep going again and again has pushed me into a level of depression I didn't even know existed. I feel like I'm standing on the edge, waiting for anything to shove me so I fall.

The messed-up part is that almost everyone around me keeps telling me to keep going and endure it. That this is called stability. And that this misery is what maturity and responsibility look like. Maybe misery isn't just a side effect of the whole thing. Maybe it's an essential part of it.

I guess I'm asking how people deal with the empty, repetitive grind of work without completely falling apart. Or maybe I just needed to say this somewhere. I don't know anymore. I feel like this office has emptied me out from the inside.