Covid made many of us see this clearly. Honestly, I thought this change would finally stick and continue.
But companies stayed quiet for a while, and now we're back again to the mode of squeezing people at work until they collapse.
I was at my wit's end after job hunting for almost a year. I felt like I was just throwing applications into the void, especially for jobs I was a perfect fit for on paper. My CV was polished, the cover letter had all the right keywords, and I was following all the conventional advice. Nothing.
Finally, I asked a friend who works as a hiring manager at a startup to look over my documents. Honestly, her feedback was a bit hard to hear. She told me my cover letters were good, but they all ended with the same canned 'looking forward to hearing from you soon.' There was nothing that would catch the eye and make her pause.
She said that what really stands out is any sign that the person made an extra effort beyond just reading the job description. So I started adding one extra line, usually as a P.S. At the very end. Something like: 'P.S. I saw the recent article about your new feature launch, and it made me even more excited about the direction the company is heading.' The whole thing wouldn't take me more than 15 minutes of searching their blog or news section for each application.
I decided to A/B test this. For three weeks, I didn't change anything else. Before this change, my response rate was at most 10% in a good month. After adding the P.S., I sent out 25 applications in the following few weeks and got 11 calls for interviews. Honestly, I couldn't believe it.
A few recruiters even mentioned it on the first call, saying something like, 'Hi, thanks for mentioning that article, that was a great project.' I work in SaaS sales, so maybe this is more effective in my field, but I feel it's a small enough change that it's worth a try if you're constantly getting ghosted. I hope this helps someone.
Have you ever had a bad feeling about a job even before setting foot in the company? That happened to me a few days ago, and I should have listened to my gut. The company's reputation was in the gutter - the reviews on Glassdoor were all red flags, and their rating was around 2.1. They also had a history of paying fines for cutting corners and not complying with regulations. But the salary was really good and the commute was short, so I convinced myself I could help fix things there. Deep down, though, I was worried that just having their name on my CV could be a black mark on my career later on.
The interview started, and it went south right from the beginning. This is roughly what happened:
Interviewer: Tell me about a time you disobeyed a direct order from your manager because you knew it was in the company's best interest.
Me: Sure. In my last job, a manager asked me to track client data on a personal Excel file. I suggested we use our shared Salesforce dashboard instead, because that would create a permanent, accessible record for the whole team and prevent data loss if...
Interviewer: No, that's not what I'm asking. I want an example of a time your manager told you to do something, and you said 'no' and did something else entirely.
Me: It's not my practice to directly refuse to do my work like that. If a manager asked me to do something I had serious reservations about, I would discuss it with them privately. But I've never been in a situation where I was asked to do something explicitly wrong.
Interviewer: Okay. Let's look at it from another angle. Can you tell us about a time you put the company's interests ahead of a colleague's, even if it was ethically questionable?
Me: I always try to find solutions that serve the company without harming my colleagues. I can't recall any time I did something ethically dubious on purpose to a team member.
Interviewer: Alright, one more question. Tell us about a time you bent the rules, or maybe even broke a minor law, because you knew it was the right thing to do for the business.
Me: I have never broken the law, and I wouldn't, regardless of the situation.
Interviewer: Come on, everyone bends the rules a little. We're just looking for an honest story.
Me: Look, I'm going to stop this right here. These questions are completely unacceptable, and I'm withdrawing my candidacy for this position.
After I ended the interview, I regretted not using the ai interview tool recommended by my friend. After I told her what happened in the interview, she told me that it would have given me instant professional answers, get through these silly questions and pass the interview smoothly at the same time 😞
So, the conclusion next time I won't be entering an interview without interviewman tool.
I also discussed the interview with my current manager (my contract is ending, so she knows I'm job hunting), and she was shocked and told me I did 100% the right thing. My colleagues at work were divided. Some were on my side, but the rest thought it was some kind of weird stress test to see if I'd cave under pressure to break the rules, and that the 'correct' answer was to keep refusing. A few of them also said it was unprofessional of me to leave the interview, no matter how bad it was.
Honestly, I don't see how I could have stayed. Am I crazy, or was walking out the only sane choice in that situation?
Used to be real bosses would make sure their employees got paid no matter what, even if that meant the boss didn't take home anything. Nowadays it seems like owners consider companies to be their personal piggybank, and if a menial got paid late, well, too fucking bad.
But nowadays, the situation has become much worse regarding the lack of appreciation and respect for employees' responsibilities. It's very difficult to find a company that values and respects its employees. I have updated my resume and am waiting for an interview next week. During my extensive search, I read about InterviewMan and its usefulness during interviews. I think I will use it during this period to get a job as soon as possible.
Sorry if the formatting is a bit weird, I'm typing this from my phone. A few days ago, my boss made a move, hinting that funds might not be available for the upcoming pay cycle. By the end of that work week, on the very day we were supposed to get paid, I learned that this wasn't the first time he'd done this. Apparently, he'd pulled the "no money" stunt before just to mess with people. I honestly had enough. I clocked out and went straight home - I'm not going to put up with or deal with this nonsense at all.
I arranged a meeting with him to discuss the money owed to me. As we talked, he suggested that I might be happier at a larger company that could give regular salaries. I told him that I genuinely liked the work and the team, and wanted to continue, but the uncertainty about receiving my salary was completely unacceptable. My exact words were something like: "My salary arriving on time is non-negotiable." He said he would think about what I said over the next few days, and now here I am, suddenly unemployed.
Oh my goodness, what will I do without the constant threat of salary instability? It's honestly a very funny situation.
I want to be an author but I have bills and family to take care of. If I had absolutely no financial strain, I’d write short stories and spend my life trying to find Alexander the Great’s missing tomb. Alas, I’ll work a desk job for a living.
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ok so i bombed my own Amazon loop in february and i am still kind of mad about it because it was avoidable. i had been crushing my Zoom mocks for three weeks. like absolutely crushing them. zero lag, suggestions popping up instant, i was riffing alongside the stream and feeling great. then i loaded into the actual loop and it was Chime. and my tool just sat there.
like there was a 4 second gap between the question landing and anything appearing on my screen. dead air. the bar raiser thing where you go silent for four seconds and the interviewer writes you off. i tried to muscle through round 1 and my confidence was already gone by round 2. recruiter ping the next morning. "we will be in touch". you know how that goes.
so a few weeks later i had a second loop on the calendar at a different aws-adjacent shop and i went into full paranoia mode. spent the next two weeks just testing on Chime specifically because i was not going through that again. someone in this sub mentioned they had access to the actual enterprise Chime client which is apparently slightly different from the consumer one in some way that matters for audio routing, so we coordinated dms and ran four different tools through Chime mocks. they fired rapid questions at me for an hour each session. it was honestly miserable lol.
the differences were wild. like one tool literally did not pick up the audio at all on Chime because Chime does some weird virtual audio routing thing that does not behave like Zoom. another one had question detection delayed by like 3 seconds across every single test. one would catch the audio fine but then take forever to start streaming an answer, like youd be sitting there going "uh let me think about that" while it spun up. the last one was the only one that worked. instant audio capture, instant question detection, instant streaming. we did six mock sessions and it never missed.
ran the second loop last month. five rounds back to back, all on Chime. the thing was ahead of me the whole time. behavioral was the hardest because Amazon stacks LP prompts and they all have followups but the streaming kept up with every shift the interviewer threw at me. system design was a notification fan out service and the suggestions were right there before the dude even finished his followup. coding rounds were fine. bar raiser was the longest one, like 50 minutes back and forth, and the tool just stayed instant the whole way through.
the thing that bugs me is nobody talks about this. every reddit post i read going in was about Zoom or about Teams or about which tool has the best stealth on screen share. nobody was saying hey by the way Amazon defaulted to Chime two years ago and most of the helpers in this space have been tuned for Zoom because thats where the mocks and demos are recorded. like the Chime variable was just not on anyones radar in the threads i was reading. four seconds of dead air ended my february loop and i was three weeks out from my second loop trusting all the same Zoom mock results. that is what gets me lol.
so heads up for anyone with an Amazon loop on the calendar. test on actual Chime before loop day. find someone with the client and run rapid mock questions for an hour. see if the streaming actually fires when the audio is coming through Chime audio instead of Zoom audio. if there is any lag or any audio weirdness pick a different one because loop day is not the time to find out. that sub contact saved me here, would not have thought to test specifically on Chime without them flagging that the february tool problem was probably platform specific.
curious if anyone else has run a tool through a real Chime loop. specifically asking because i have heard Capital One and Goldman are moving to Chime too and want to know if the same pattern holds for those.
Damn. I wish I had the free time to do this. I want to do this so bad.
I work at a bank, and my company recently laid off many important people, especially senior staff in tech and regulatory affairs. Now our core systems constantly crash with no clear way to fix them, and all the expertise that was in the company has disappeared, so no one knows how to find answers to complex problems, and everyone is overworked. I sincerely hope that this disaster ultimately comes back to haunt those at the top, because these grand ideas about AI clearly will never materialize, and it's always the poor employees who pay the price. Honestly, I hate what AI is doing to workplaces.
This is my second-to-last day at work - I accepted an offer with another employer. A few of my coworkers are also leaving shortly after me, so our department is literally on the verge of being left with only one person.
Management tried to convince me not to leave and offered me a 12% raise and a $6k bonus. I still said no, because management is really terrible, we're constantly under pressure and carrying more than we can handle, and there are a lot of other issues that have made this place impossible to stay in. Here's where I'm torn: there's one coworker who will be staying. She's already paid less than everyone else, and now she'll be the only person holding down our department in a 280-bed hospital. She said she's planning to ask for more money.
In the counteroffer conversation, the director explicitly told me not to share the compensation offer with anyone. Would you tell her anyway so she has a realistic number to ask for? Or would you respect management's request and stay quiet, even though honestly I feel like they're just trying to keep people from knowing how much she could ask for?
I had another conversation with management yesterday afternoon, and they tried once again to get me to stay because they're in a really bad position, with 4 of us leaving around the same time. We were understaffed the entire time I worked here, and now it's going to get much worse. When I told them I was definitely moving forward with the new role, it was obvious they were very upset. No "thank you for your work," no "good luck," just irritation that I didn't reverse my decision. Pretty much what I expected.
My coworker wants to wait a bit and see if management offers her a raise without her pushing first, but I'm not optimistic at all because they avoid paying more unless they're backed into a corner. I hope she gets the pay bump she deserves, or honestly finds a better place.
Just to be clear, everyone on my team is trying to leave, but none of us wanted leadership to know that right now. We got a new manager about 7 months ago, and his work is really terrible, and that's basically what made all of us start looking for other opportunities.
One of our coworkers got another role, and during his exit interview, he told HR about the manager's poor performance, and also said that the rest of the team are applying for new jobs.
I personally haven't said anything to HR or to anyone at work about the fact that I'm looking for a job, so should I be worried that my coworker said this on his way out? Could there be retaliation from upper management or from my manager? And is this something I should be afraid of?
Could HR investigate or look into the manager's performance based on something said in an exit interview? I work at a large publicly traded company, if that makes a difference in how this kind of situation is handled. Thanks.
AI has really saved our lives. There are many AI tools that can summarize large files, update your CV, and even tools like InterviewMan that help you during interviews.
I'm seriously considering resigning. Before I do that, I was wondering if there's any action I can take in a situation like this? Has anyone else gone through a similar experience and found a way to deal with it?
They just need to get rid of that annoying worker to make the boat lighter that will fix it.
I work in accounting in accounts payable, and a while ago we moved to a different ERP system. We've been working on it for about 18 months, but most of the department is in their late forties/sixties and they're not very quick with new software. I'm younger and generally better at tech-related things.
A big part of my work is dealing with vendor payments for a rebate program, and then I use part of that money to pay customers. I also have to keep an organized record of the invoices we've paid. Up until now, the process was very manual and would usually take me about 3-4 business days, and sometimes more if things were messy.
I found a way within the system that lets me finish the whole thing in about 12 minutes.
Should I tell my manager? Or is this one of those things I'm supposed to quietly keep to myself?
long post incoming, sorry. had two virtual loops crammed into one week and i ended up doing a back to back of shadecoder vs interviewman during prep. dumping notes here because i could barely find anything written about shadecoder anywhere when i was looking, so maybe useful to someone in the same spot.
setup: same machine, same headphones, same Zoom, just different prep blocks. one block i ran shadecoder, next block i flipped to interviewman. tried to keep it apples to apples. mostly worked.
going in i was leaning shadecoder a tiny bit. saw the name in a couple threads. interviewman was the one a friend from college kept dm-ing me about, like every other day, very annoying. so. ran them both.
shadecoder, in my own words, since the public reviews are still pretty thin and i'm not gonna pretend i know stuff i don't:
- it's built around coding, which i thought i would love
- learning curve on the hotkeys was real for me, took a bit
- felt fine on the leetcode style stuff i threw at it during prep
- the screen overlay worked, but i kept second guessing where it was gonna pop up
- on a behavioral warmup my buddy ran on me it kind of just stalled. not its lane, fine
stuff that bugged me, again, just my read:
- the per session feel of it. i was watching the clock more than the actual question, which is the opposite of what i want
- not a lot of public discussion yet so hard to know if i was holding it wrong somehow
- coding only by design, which means i still needed something else for the behavioral and the system design portion of the loop. that's where my head started spinning
then the next prep block i swapped over to interviewman:
- coding answers came in streaming as the buddy was still talking, sounds tiny but it changes how you read along, weirdly
- desktop overlay sat exactly where i parked it, both on my mac and on the windows box my brother lent me
- when i pasted a screenshot of a system design diagram it actually picked up the structure and explained it
- it handled the behavioral mock with STAR style framing
- the system design dry run, which is the part i was most worried about, was fine
- ran a phone screen sim too. same flow, no separate mode, no extra setup
what tipped it for me, honestly, was that i wasn't switching tools mid prep. coding then behavioral then system design then a phone screen, one thing for all of it. and i wasn't doing the mental math on time per session either, which is what i kept catching myself doing with shadecoder, idk why but i did.
both have their place i guess. for a full loop though, where you're bouncing between question types in the same day and your brain is already fried, having one thing that covers all of it was the difference. that and the streaming, which i did not even know would matter to me until i sat with it for a session.
anyone here actually done this same compare on a real loop and not just leetcode prep? curious if my take on shadecoder is off because honestly the reviews you can find right now are pretty sparse.
Hi everyone,
I accepted an offer from a software company, and their HR team has started pressuring me to submit my resignation before the background check is finished because they want me to start as soon as possible. They told me not to worry as long as everything on my resume is accurate.
Honestly, this has made me very uncomfortable. Is it normal for HR to ask for this? Any advice?
In the country where I live, the minimum legal notice period is 5 weeks. This company wants me to start with them in 5 weeks, which means I need to resign this week without the background check having been completed and approved.