u/Overuse_Injury

So I own part of the content strategy — the blog — on my team, and a coworker is kind of getting in the way. For reference, I think a blog is your company’s chance to introduce itself to readers, and I think it should be pretty high-quality because it’s one of few comms we have with customers/prospects/the internet without requiring them to fill out a form. I think the blog can be a meaningful traffic driver, especially via LLM and SEO, and I think that if the content is good it can get you leads sometimes. Maybe I’m wrong about that.

Before i joined, my company treated it like a dumping ground for things that couldn’t be press releases, half-baked thought leadership, and product updates. I took it over to make it into a higher-quality, strategic effort to communicate with our audience. Now, my coworker has recently discovered Claude. Although the team has laid out guidelines (edit the ai out of your copy if you use it, generate new ideas, stay below 1k words), this guy doesn’t really follow them and I don’t know what to say about it. I know he does it because he talks about it all the time like “who cares, just use Claude.”

My manager handed the blog strategy off to me, it’s clear she doesn’t read it, but this guy and I are the same level. I’m not his boss. But like 1/3 of the content on there is produced by him and I wish he would stop because it’s not helping out my effort. Beyond all this, I work at a big company and it’s hard to get the website people to do anything for the blog either — I have a whole distribution plan to get more people engaged with it, but I need them to prioritize it.

My thought is, why have a blog and spend time writing all this content if there’s no strategy behind it?

What would you do? I either want to tell my manager we need to have a wider marketing talk about what the blog is for and real criteria to post on it or I wanna give it back and say if you don’t care I don’t care. Beyond that, I want to bring up my coworker without sounding like a tattle tale. Open to all thoughts! Thanks!

Hi everyone. I have a home in Austin, TX with what I believe is St. Augustine grass growing. A couple of weekends ago, I removed a rose bush from along the fence and now I have about a 6x4 sq ft patch of unlevel dirt left behind. I know I need to do some general clearing of the are before I start, but I'm wondering what the best approach would be to getting the grass in there before it starts to get too cold. Here's my plan, please point out any issues!

1. Remove all the weeds/foliage from the area.
2. Make a slight mound with existing dirt + some topsoil and let settle with water over 2-3 weeks.
3. Rake the top of the settled soil and add sod to it
4. Water 2-3x/day until it's rooted.

Is this right, generally? Am I in way over my head?

Any help is appreciated!

https://preview.redd.it/xathovzfocih1.jpg?width=4284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cf91b5dd6a2df0b5a4cf01c0122edbd1fbc455d

Alrighty so I’m a mid-career marketer who just got high marks on the mid-year review in a tech job that I’m coming up on a year in. I was hired as a senior specialist, which was the company’s way of getting a manager at a lower salary but I didn’t have direct industry experience, so sure I agreed to it. I’ve been doing manager-level work since I joined though. Most companies have specialists as executors and managers as strategist + executor. I do that. I also just do the job of the manager who had this role before me. They have a policy of generally not promoting before 2 years but I’ve seen exceptions. Now, we’ve just laid off an adjacent team and I’m about to be given a bunch of their work, which is only strategy and minimal execution. Layoffs did not happen because we are struggling to make money, it’s because the company didn’t grow as much as we promised our owners and we needed to make the numbers look good.

So, when I have my mid-year review conversation, I want to bring up that for all this work there should be a pay adjustment. I also did include my (strong) metrics in my half-year review, so we’ll have that for context.

What do you think? Any chance of moving to manager? My boss is well liked and with like half the department gone it feels like we’d still have fewer promotions this year, even if they promoted me.

Also yes I’m applying to other jobs, so no need to include that advice.

Hi! Looking for advice and thoughts. My great aunt passed over the weekend and I found out on Monday. I've always called her "aunt" because I don't have any aunts, uncles or cousins; it's just her. She basically raised me -- she watched us every day from the time we were kids and then she was one of maybe 5-6 people who were there consistently at Christmas all my life.

Losing her is like a major loss to me, but I realize this is a complicated relationship from the outside, because as she's been dying I've been saying "my aunt." And then when she did die I said "my aunt" and now I'm worried when I ask for bereavement I'll have to explain that she's actually my "great aunt" and will be denied bereavement, or even that my manager and coworkers were thinking I've been dishonest. Our policy allows 3 days for "extended" family which is defined as aunts, uncles and cousins. Grandparents aren't even in the policy. What should I do? Do you think they'll deny it? Should I not clarify it and see if they ask if/when I submit the obituary?

It’s everywhere!!! Want a social post? Give me 100% of the assets for promotion and I will put it into Claude so it can come up with a 2-sentence post. It will be full of emojis. Want a deck? Here, I had Claude make you a 2,000 word outline for the deck and I also had it generate a rough draft and tried to hide it by putting it in a template. Want a blog? Here, I had Claude write a 1,300 word blog with no strategy or plan or goal, the audience is all personas, please edit it however you like. An email, you say? Oh, I had Claude write four emails for the same campaign, they all look and sound exactly the same.

The worst part is that nobody who works with me reads a single thing they have AI produce, so they then send it to me and ask me to read it. If you don’t wanna read it, why would I? And by the way, why would anybody who you want to sell this thing to???

It’s lazy, it’s boring, and the stuff it produces is like a dirty window over any actual information. I don’t know what you’re trying to say!!!

Idk guys, I didn’t get into this business to edit other people’s AI-generated crap. I don’t even like editing my own AI-generated crap. It’s worse than editing the worst content from a human being.

This is a rant because I think possibly only other runners can empathize.

I’m a runner who has been injured a few times in the last year or two (some running related, some not) and every time I’m hurt and I mention not being able to run for a bit multiple people (dudes, mostly) politely suggest I take up cycling instead of running. As if I didn’t know about bikes!! As if I was not aware that was a thing you could do!! But unfortunately biking is literally nothing like running except that you do it outside!!!

Of course I know injured runners can cycle. I can basically cycle with a broken foot and I apparently can’t run with so much as a sore big toe. It’s an annoying feature of my chosen hobby. I, an injured runner, am now cycling to maintain fitness. I hate it with every part of my mind body and soul, and I’m only doing it because I think someday I may get to run again, but I’m not like, suddenly gonna see the light and realize I could cycle instead of running and give up on my yearslong hobby out of nowhere unless a doctor tells me to.

It’s like telling a hungry vegetarian they could just eat meat. Certainly! They could! I guess!!

Anyway this is just to say I’m down bad and I just did a bike workout and my hate for a stationary bike has never been stronger. Thank you for your time.

We recently hired an interior designer for $150 an hour. She’s great. Very smart. We had a meeting, talked ideas, she sent us a mood board with a bunch of links. We had some communications, she charged us about $1200 all in. I was suspicious but I don’t know how long all that took to find so I said ok, that’s the cost. After that we had some questions on her board and asked her to come by to talk more about it. She was there for maybe 1.5-2 hours, charged us for 2.5. And charged us for a follow up email where I told her we made a change, because she then had to make the change in the mood board. Now we’re staring at an $800 bill, which feels wrong to me.

My sense is I can’t really tell her how much she worked, or how long it all took her, but I honestly don’t think about $600 of that had any actual value to us. One charge that landed at $200 was just more like “she emailed us once, emailed someone else once, forwarded us the email.”

How should I proceed, cut my losses and pay her or follow up and ask for clarification about how those hours were spent?

Edit: sorry guys turns out designers only work for people for whom money is no object, I guess when I told her my budget and she agreed to work for me I was just being a dumb asshole.

I have had the novablast 4s for a year, really love them, heard the 5s aren’t as good. My shoes have 700+ miles on them and are giving me shin splints. I need just solid daily trainers for road running. I keep my mileage between 3-8 per day, 15-20 per week. What shoes do you love I will pay anything to stop researching!!

(Yes I have visited a running shoe store but one never knows if the shoes that feel good in store will feel good on the road.)

I’ve been in my job for about 8 months now. When I started, I took a pay cut and a roll step-down, and they refused to negotiate. I took it, said fine they’ll see I’m good and we’ll talk about it later. It was a new type of industry but work I knew how to do, so I figured maybe they were skeptical if I could do the job well. I know this won’t lead to a huge raise, but I don’t really need a huge raise, just a good healthy bump. I know at this company that managers have comp conversations in the late summer and make decisions in the fall — so by the time you find out if you got a raise or what your bonus will be, you don’t have a chance to push back really. I’m trying to get out in front of that. My manager and I have never talked about comp since I started, but I’ve made sure we’ve had regular development convos so we can be aligned on whether I’m doing well or if I have room to improve. She has only excellent things to say in those talks.

I’m doing really well, I’m outperforming my role and my colleagues, I’m spearheading big team-wide efforts and I bringing good ideas that I execute on with results. So I know I have a good reason to believe I should earn more in theory, especially knowing what my colleagues make (some have equity and I don’t, for example).

How would you broach this with a manager? I want to be self-aware and say I’m always open to feedback or advice about how to improve, but I also want to be forthcoming that if I’m contributing at the level I think I am, knowing they promote based on time in role and not skills and abilities, I need to know what we can do to make me feel like I’m being compensated for what I actually bring. What would yall do?

I don’t know what to do or say really I just need to vent and maybe hear some helpful advice. We have a room that’s an odd shape — it’s an addition to the home and the previous owners used it as a living room but we don’t like it for that, so we’re making it into an entertainment space. The problem WAS the design. It’s just awkward shaped and hard to find a good layout, so we hired a designer. She’s very disciplined and so am I. She can make a suggestion that’s out of scope, I can say no and we can move on.

The problem is my husband has let his enthusiasm for big changes get the best of him. So now we’re redoing the floor, and we’ve recently added on taking out the shiplap walls and replacing them, which of course led to a $2,500 plumbing problem that is now about to cause a hole in the kitchen floor and has left the water off for two days.

I agreed to all this because I want him to like it too, but I didn’t actually want to do (or pay for) all of this. We’re now going to probably cancel a vacation I was excited about. He’s talking about taking money out of our emergency fund because I don’t personally have enough money in savings to pay for half of all of this anymore. I’m a very financially anxious person.

I’m just so mad and scared this is going to spiral further. I just wanted a place to host people and help make my house more of a home. I just wanted chairs and tables and couches arranged in a way that worked with the room. Now the cost has more than doubled and I wish we hadn’t started at all.

Any advice or experiences that can give me perspective is helpful.

Background: I was hired a level (at least) below what I should have been because I honestly just needed to get out of a toxic job and this one paid ok — lower than my last job but not detrimental. That said, I’ve been performing above expectations and was going to bring up the topic of salary at my 7-month check in (just so my manager knows I want more money when annual comp discussions start basically, nothing serious).

A complicating factor is that I am being recruited for another role. I don’t really want the other job. It would be a good 20% pay bump which would be nice, but it’s a startup and I’m honestly so happy with my WLB here. Plus my manager is pretty good, doesn’t micromanage, there’s not much stress, etc.

I won’t know if I’m gonna get an offer at this startup for a while, certainly after the 7-month chat, but I know the perception tends to be that management thinks you have one foot out the door if you ask for more money with an offer in hand. The difference is I didn’t go looking for a job, I was minding my own business.

This makes me wonder, has anyone successfully used an outside offer to get a little more money and keep their job? Feels like I’m playing with fire given I don’t actually want the other job.

Weddings are as expensive as you make them. This is an elective party that you’re throwing. You get married for like $200 if you really want to.

Maybe throwing your mom’s wedding today would cost double or triple what she paid, but maybe your mom didn’t throw an event with multiple outfit changes, a drone taking videos, and 200 of her closest friends.

It’s crazy to complain that the flowers cost five figures when the truth is that you spent five figures on flowers. It’s wild to say weddings are too expensive these days at the same time that you tell me you booked the midnight taco truck you were hoping for.

Maybe venues start at $10,000 or $20,000 but your friend’s backyard is free. If your hair and makeup cost $500 that’s because you chose someone who charges $500 for hair and makeup.

I see how social norms make it feel like the standard is just really high, but it’s your life and you can do what you want. If a wedding is expensive it’s because you spent a lot on the wedding. The call is coming from inside the house!