u/Status-Quantity-3556

I feel like no matter how much experience you have, salaries stop at 65 to 85k and don't go beyond that. Bills are going up, grocery prices are getting worse, insurance is rising, but pay feels like it's stuck at the same level people were earning in 2011 or even before that.

A lot of people seem to have either accepted this situation or gotten tired of fighting it. Employers always say they can't pay more, but somehow everything else gets more expensive every month.

As a man in my late thirties, I honestly don't see how my family is supposed to be able to buy a decent house or improve financially without a much higher income. It's not even that we want to live a luxurious life. We're just trying to be able to live a normal life without feeling like we're falling behind all the time.

Every few months something goes up by 10 or 25 percent, but wages barely move. Rent, food, repairs, utilities, everything. I'm talking more about wages outside huge cities or expensive states. I'm in the Southeast.

I've been sending out applications consistently for a while now, and so many job postings labeled "entry-level" ask for 3-6 years of experience, a large set of software skills, extra certifications, and interviews where you basically have to be flawless.

When did entry-level start meaning "you must have already done this job before"? Is anyone else going through the same thing right now?

I work as an engineer in a very technical and heavily regulated field at a huge company. There are endless forms, workflows, procedures, rules, requirements, and approvals, all just to get some tiny thing done. No one really understands how all this crap connects together, because everyone is trapped in their own small part of the process. If you want information from anyone, you have to ask insanely specific questions, and that requires background and knowledge that I, as someone who started 7 months ago, simply don't have.

So naturally you'd assume that when I joined, there was some kind of real training, right? No. I was basically thrown straight into the deep end because my lead is a huge fan of the idea of "on-the-job training" and "learning by doing." Which effectively means: I'm not going to explain anything, figure it out yourself. Every project turns into me banging my head against the same wall, trying to piece together tiny hints from people about what I'm supposed to do next, because A) I don't even know what I'm supposed to ask and B) no one understands the whole system anyway, so everyone gives a slightly different answer based on the little corner they're responsible for.

You can easily have 30 people involved in a single project, and 90% of them completely ignore emails. The "experts" and the people who supposedly have the authority to make decisions answer with vague, noncommittal answers to the point that I often end up more confused than I was before I asked. Half the time I feel like everyone is terrified of saying anything clear and specific in writing.

I've had almost no training on how to deal with this bureaucratic maze. My lead is very close to useless, and if I manage to get 45 minutes from him in a week for detailed questions, that's a good week. The company doesn't give formal training on how to do the actual work, but of course they have endless mandatory modules about "quality systems" and "process excellence," so broad and general and theoretical that I couldn't tell you how any of it applies to my day-to-day work.

Every place I've worked has been some version of this same thing, just with different badges and acronyms. It makes the work much harder than it should be for literally everyone, and I'm so tired of pretending this is a normal way to run a workplace.

I work PRN at a hospital. I started looking for something else because the new semester is about to start. When I was hired, the shift was supposed to be during the day, but lately they've only been giving me night shifts, and I can't work overnight shifts and then go to lectures. So I accepted another job that's closer to me, has normal hours because they close at night, and pays much more.

a few weeks ago, I sent my resignation through their employee portal. It was supposed to go to all the managers above me. Then today, my supervisor called me, left a voicemail, and sent me a text around 7:45 in the morning. I was asleep and it woke me up. She said they had only just seen it and rejected it because they assumed I must have sent it by mistake.

I told her it wasn't a mistake, I resigned. I said that because that was literally the last shift I worked, and I'm not on the schedule again. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm done. She told me that's not valid and that it doesn't work that way.

But it literally does work that way? I know I submitted it only 15 days before my next shift, but I'm starting my new job before then and I'm not going in. And also, the attitude and the whole thing about them "rejecting" my resignation isn't exactly making me want to help them out here.

My anxiety is really high right now. I just want to curl up and cry because I swear I didn't do anything wrong.

I'm in a very stressful situation and need to see this from the perspective of people who aren't emotionally involved in it. I've been working at my current tech company for 8 years. My performance here has been good, and I've always been one of the strongest people at work, but the culture is exhausting, there are difficult personalities to deal with, and this place has a known pattern of draining people and pushing them into burnout without paying them what they deserve.

For a long time, they kept telling me there was a path ahead for me to reach a director-level role, but nothing concrete ever happened. When I asked for a fair raise at the beginning of April, they told me the budget wasn't there. That was pretty much the push I needed, so I started interviewing, and in the end I got an excellent offer from a competing company.

I accepted the new offer and submitted my resignation. Then suddenly, my current company came back to me with a very large counteroffer that's higher than the new job offer, along with a written career roadmap showing the roles they say I'll move into and the salary increases tied to each step. Honestly, I was mentally checked out and ready for a clean start somewhere else, but now I've started second-guessing everything because the money isn't insignificant.

And this is the part that's confusing me. If it had been a small raise, I would have left easily. But the number is big enough to make me stop and think, even though I know all the reasons that made me want to leave in the first place. For the past few nights, I haven't been able to sleep and I've been thinking about it, and I feel completely stuck between the safe and familiar choice and the chance to start over somewhere else.

What would you do if you were in my place? I can share the actual salary numbers if that would make the advice easier. Thanks to anyone who read all of this.

After a lot of thinking and reviewing the situation carefully, this is what I came to. The counteroffer feels like just a manipulation, not a real solution. I was underpaid, and honestly, I feel like they took advantage of me. It's time for me to leave and move on somewhere else. I'm not going to put myself in a toxic situation again, so I'll seriously reconsider the offer I received from the other company, and will try to apply all the tips mentioned in this post to be a perfect candidate for them.