u/Pure_Asparagus9827

I love my dad. He raised us on his own and sacrificed a lot of things to make sure my sisters and I had what we needed. When I was little, I used to see him balancing three jobs, seven days a week, for a period that felt like it would never end. He never called out, and very rarely took time for himself. I always respected how hard he worked, but I didn't truly feel the weight of that life until I started working full-time myself.

Recently, I moved to a new place. My dad came over with the car to help me carry boxes, get a few essentials, and have dinner afterward. The day was honestly nice, to a point, until, like every time, the conversation turned toward work. He has this quiet fear that I won't earn enough or that somehow I'll fall behind other people. He doesn't say it directly, but I hear it in the way he asks about everything.

I told him what I thought was good news: my manager is happy with me, I've taken on more responsibilities, and I'm finally going to get a raise. But the most important part was that I'll be switching to a 4-day work week. I've been working 5 days a week for about 8 months. Between settling into a new role, getting my life together and moving, and trying to keep my depression under control, I've been worn down. I told him: "I can't keep going like this forever, and it shouldn't be treated like it's normal."

He looked at me like I had just told him I had 18 hours left to live. Then he immediately said: "Well, it's not like you can just sit around without working."

That sentence hurt more than I expected. I only took three days off to move everything I own, and then I went straight back to work. And my employer is on my side here. They said the schedule I was on wasn't sustainable, and they're moving me to a 36-hour, 4-day setup because that makes more sense for everyone. I'm not dropping out of life. This is a reasonable boundary.

But to him, asking for one extra day to breathe somehow means I'm lazy or "not working." It's exhausting when your burnout is seen as indulgence, because the generation before us was taught to grind themselves down to nothing and call that responsibility. I can be grateful for everything he did for us, and at the same time not want to repeat the same cycle myself.

The last seven times or so this happened, I would stay late and then also go in on a weekend morning to clean it up, without a single extra penny or even a word of thanks. Management treats downtime and unexpected problems like some mythical thing that is impossible to plan for. Their backup plan is simply my time for free. I still remember when I fixed a really annoying issue, and one of the new supervisors nudged the plant manager and basically said: maybe the team deserves recognition for this. The PM made a sour face and said: "This wasn't supposed to happen in the first place." It's hard to stay motivated under "leadership" living in a fantasy.

So I thought about wasting another Saturday because of them and said no. No one was going to get hurt. It was just money. When I came back on Tuesday, everything had gone sideways. Line stoppage, ruined parts, escalations, and people running around everywhere pissed off. And I didn't feel anything.

After that, I stopped reviewing the reports at the end of the week. If some messy issue shows up before the weekend and the automation or the off-shift crew doesn't catch it, then that's that.

edit: some friends advice me to quit ,I will not take this step until i got the right offer and as for now I will never take an extra time for free ,but just in case I read some useful tips for interviews ,good luck for everyone to find green flag work

I'm a tech recruiter, but I spend a decent amount of time on this subreddit because it directly affects my job prospects.
I think a lot of people here don't understand how recruiters work, or what matters in the process. I constantly see posts where someone says they aren't getting interviews, and the replies immediately go to "your resume needs work" or "you need to rewrite it for every role." I've looked at a lot of those resumes, and honestly 96% of them are very good. People here hugely overestimate how much recruiters focus on evaluating resumes. Most of the time I'm not reading the whole thing. I'm scanning for a few details I need.
As a high-volume recruiter at big companies, you simply don't have time to study every resume carefully. You might be reviewing 350+ a week, while also replying to candidates, doing prescreens, sitting in intake calls with hiring managers, chasing feedback, and organizing everything. What recruiters are looking for is very basic: relevant skills, work history, job titles, and the types of companies you've worked at. They are not sitting there judging small formatting choices, refining the wording of bullet points, or spending two minutes interpreting every project. It usually takes less than 25 seconds. It's a numbers game for recruiters because they're trying to get through the pile quickly.
Usually, you're better off spending that time applying to more jobs instead of heavily tailoring every resume for each role. In this market, whether your resume gets seen or not can be a lot more random than people want to admit. I might look at roughly the first 175 applicants on a posting, and after that a lot of people simply applied too late and no one sees them. Applying early often helps more than having a perfectly tailored resume for that specific opening.
Another thing I learned from 11 years in recruiting: don't automatically reject a resume just because it looks like the person didn't spend weeks polishing it. Some of the strongest candidates I found had barely two or three lines under each job, plus their tech stack. A lot of strong engineering talent is a bit cocky about their background, especially if they were at solid companies, and they don't feel like they need to go crazy on the resume. As a recruiter, it's a mistake to ignore those people just because they think editing the resume is pointless or because they seem too cool for it. Being cocky isn't always a bad thing if the person can back it up, and hiring managers know that too.

The company brought us back to the office 4 days a week, and it's seriously killing productivity. And we don't even have fixed desks; they've set up that annoying "hot desk" system where you have to book a spot before you come in. And you can't leave anything behind either because it's not your place. No keyboard, no notebook, no charger, no earbuds, nothing can stay on the desk if you're not sitting at it yourself and working.

If companies are going to force us to go to the office, the least they can do is give us an actual desk and let us keep a few basic things on it. I'm so sick of carrying half my setup back and forth every time I have to go in.

And the open office layout is a whole other problem. Noise all day long, and everyone is crammed together in a way that leaves almost no personal space. No walls, no cubicles, not even the small dividers between people. Just long rows of desks and monitors, and I can't focus in that environment at all. I get way more work done at home on my monitor setup and in a chair that doesn't make my back hate me.

And the dumbest part of all is that I commute to the office just to sit on Google Meet and Teams calls most of the day, because my work is with people in other countries. I could do the exact same work from home without wasting time in traffic and carrying a backpack full of office supplies. I seriously don't know who thinks a setup like this is productive, but companies will keep calling it "collaboration" lol.