How does your executive introduce you in a group setting? Mine has been introducing me to donors/colleagues in the field as his colleague, while I don’t mind introducing myself as his assistant. I feel respected by him:)
I filled out a survey about my manager and gave low reviews. Even though it was confidential and anonymous there are only three people reporting to him. We all gave low reviews in the multiple choice survey. Now, I’m getting asked questions about my thoughts on work and if I’m happy. Which I have never been asked before. I think everyone in leadership saw the results. Did I ruin my career in corporate because I answered honestly? It seems like it’s frowned upon to be honest or anything but positive at work.
Every Sunday evening several on my team start a Teams conversation about how it’s Sunday night, how awful it is that tomorrow is Monday, and bringing up everything that could be horrible starting tomorrow (Monday). Seems ridiculous that me but our management does nothing to stop it. Like we don’t know tomorrow is Monday. Why not just enjoy the remainder of the weekend. Does this happen in other corporate jobs too?
Hi
'My Friend' is in an unique situation and we are desperately seeking advice.
This is a throwaway account.
Background:
Complication:
Now this is eating them inside. They really want the Level 7 role as that is their dream job and would indicate a significant career progress. This is affecting their morale in the current role, since their manager is not supportive of a promotion
Requesting advice please:
Any guidance here will be greatly appreciated
We are in Ontario Canada.
They are sure the current manager wont support, what are their options?
Three years ago I trained this guy. Genuinely trained him, covered for him when he messed up. Good guy, I liked him.
He messaged me on LinkedIn yesterday. He's a senior manager now at a company I'd kill to work at, and he was completely lovely about it. Said he'd always appreciated me, that they're hiring, that he'd be happy to refer me if I wanted. No ego, no weirdness. And I've been a wreck about it ever since, which I hate, because it says more about me than him.
Here's the part that's actually eating me though. I clicked into his profile and his whole career reads like a story. Clear line, every move makes sense, you can see exactly what he's about. Then i looked at mine and it's just… a list of jobs. I've worked hard for eight years and I could not tell you what the through-line is or what I'm building toward. That's the real difference between us, not talent.
I've started replying to his message four times and deleted it every time. I don't even know what I'd say I want, because I don't know what I'm good at anymore beyond “reliable, works hard."
So how do you get out of this? The heads-down, keep-grinding, suddenly-eight-years-gone thing. For the people who actually turned it around, what did it take to get a handle on what you bring, instead of just working hard and hoping someone notices?
Is it typical for your employer to require you to pay for your business travel expenses upfront and only reimburse you after the travel happens? It sounds like it will be like a month and a half before I get reimbursed. I can afford it, but I'm surprised this is how it works. I thought they would pay for it with a company card or at least reimburse me on my next check.
They also asked me to work the day in the office on the final day (Wednesday) and try to book the return flight for Wednesday evening instead of Thursday morning for cost reasons. So they want us to work a full day in the office on Wednesday, then rush to the airport with probably no time to eat and get home at like 1AM? Getting a flight in the middle of the day on Wednesday or Thursday morning sounds reasonable. I'm not happy about the idea of spending 18 hours straight between working and traveling for work.
So I usually scroll instagram reels at work when I have downtime. Usually, it will be just some memes or something related to current event. However, the ocassional thirst traps will show up. The thing is, I usually just swipe past it immediately but sometimes curiosity takes hold and I hover too long over it. I just realized now anyone who walked behind me could have caught me looking at this stuff. Anyone here have the same issue with doomscrolling at work? Deleting Instagram immediately after I realized this
I have been with my company for the past 4.5 years, and until September 2025, things were going well. I genuinely enjoyed my work, my team, and the environment. That changed when I decided to promote one of my team members based on merit.
This team member had consistently demonstrated the capability, knowledge, and leadership needed for the role. Both my manager and I believed he was ready. However, because he had less tenure than others in the batch, several team members felt they deserved the opportunity instead. That's when the politics started.
Some team members accused me of favouring him, even though my decision was based entirely on performance. Before this incident, my manager had never questioned how I worked. We had worked together for four years, and he knew my work ethic, integrity, and how seriously I took my responsibilities.
But once complaints were raised against me, everything changed.
Instead of hearing my side, he accepted what the majority had to say. The trust we had built over the years seemed to disappear overnight. He started making comments about my job security and began treating me differently.
When the complaints were first mentioned, I asked if I could see exactly what had been written about me. My manager told me there were written complaints but said that if I insisted on seeing them, HR would have to get involved and it could negatively affect my performance rating. He also assured me that as long as I didn't pursue it further, the complaints would not affect my appraisal. I trusted him and let it go.
Later, during my appraisal, my rating was marked down anyway. There wasn't even an appraisal discussion. I had no opportunity to understand the reasoning or explain my side. Looking back, I honestly regret trusting my manager.
Around the same time, the team member I had recommended for promotion and I became aware that some people were actively trying to stop his promotion. When I brought this to my manager's attention, he dismissed it, saying that nobody was trying to stop the promotion.
What hurts the most is that my manager knows these people. He has worked directly with all of them and has personally seen the difference in performance between them and the person I recommended. Before all of this happened, he himself wanted to promote this employee and had even suggested that a few of the lower performers should eventually be moved out of the team. That's why his complete change after the complaints has been so difficult for me to understand.
He later expected me to promote one of the employees who had complained against me. I explained that promoting her wouldn't really help either the team or me. She still required constant guidance, and I would have to double-check almost everything she did. Instead of reducing my workload, it would increase it. In the end, not only was the deserving employee's promotion stopped, but my own promotion was put on hold as well.
One incident still stays with me. During our office party, after receiving an award for continuous excellent work, I overheard my manager talking to HR about my demotion. A few days later, while we were working in the office, he casually said, "I need to remove either you or that girl—whoever is the easier target" when the other team members from other teams were just beside us.
That broke me.
After years of putting work before myself, giving extra hours whenever needed, and trying to do the right thing, hearing those words from someone who had worked with me for years was incredibly painful.
What surprises me most is how much this experience has affected me. In over four years with the company, I had never cried at work. Not once. But after the complaints, being portrayed so negatively, and not even being given the opportunity to explain my side, I completely broke down. I even cried in front of my manager, something I never imagined I would do.
I don't cry easily, and I've never used my emotions to gain sympathy. But when people I trusted and genuinely cared about turned against me, it became too much to hold in. What hurt even more was my manager's response. He didn't say anything directly, but his expressions made me feel as though my feelings didn't matter and that I should simply accept it and move on.
Instead of discussing the concerns with me or helping me understand what had changed, he simply started telling me to do things that I had already been doing all along. At that point, I accepted it like a defeated warrior because I felt there was nothing more I could say that would change his mind.
The employee who had openly spoken against me during the office party—telling both old and new colleagues how incompetent I supposedly was—is now suddenly being unusually kind and friendly towards me again. Around the same time, she was also telling people that she would be getting promoted soon.
Over the past several months, I've found myself living in survival mode. I can't focus on my work the way I used to because the politics consume my mind. Even small mistakes scare me now because I'm constantly wondering what action might be taken against me. I live with an ongoing fear of losing my job, despite knowing that people around me have made far more serious mistakes than I ever have.
I hate working like this.
I've reached a point where I no longer feel motivated to give the extra effort I once did. Instead, I'm trying to focus on what I can control. I'm pursuing professional certifications, preparing myself for better opportunities, and trying to seek recommendations and guidance from my senior manager and director to support my professional growth. They are aware that things haven't been going well, and at least my senior manager knows much more about what has actually happened. I'm also planning to have an honest conversation with him.
I genuinely hoped to stay with this company for much longer because the culture I joined was very different from what it has become today.
I know office politics exist everywhere, and I know this won't be the last difficult situation I'll face in my career. I genuinely want to learn how experienced leaders handle situations like these professionally without allowing them to consume them emotionally.
For those of you who have managed teams or led organisations:
Is there something I could have handled differently?
How would you deal with a situation like this while still remaining professional?
How do you protect both your reputation and your mental well-being when you've lost your manager's trust, whether fairly or unfairly?
I'm genuinely open to hearing honest feedback, even if it's difficult to hear. I want to learn and become a better leader from this experience.
Hi people so I work with 100+ people and I am in the management team. So I had couple of people also at the management who were complaining to me about this one person at the management "being fake", "sneaky" "hard to work with" etc. (Which i find it also like this therefore my talks with this person mostly "hi how are you?" and bye. So recently I heard this person were throwing a party at their place and saw the people who were complaining about them also were there and it made my stomach upside down. Like I don't get it if I don't like a person, I don't want to see them outside of work or spend my time with them, and I don't get it why do people do that? Maybe I just need an advice how to survive this fakeness or just wanted to yap about it, but anyways thank you for reading so far.
I’m interviewing with a company and it’s going really well. Hiring manager is pushing me through the process very quickly and it’s a great opportunity (I know could still get rejected at any moment but I want to be prepared). This job requires “about 20% travel”, that’s not a problem I love traveling but I have a 7 month old baby and the example of travel given was “for example we’re going to spend next week all together in Dallas”.
I worry about spending weeks away from my baby and husband. He is a retail manager and sometimes works late nights, and my MiL is 40 mins away and she would probably be able to help but that’s a lot on her. Other option could be a nanny I guess. My husband is saying I should wait to see if I get an offer but he’s also saying it’s not sounding like it is a job that will work for us as a young family.
I’ve been interviewing for months and this is the furthest I’ve gotten in the process so far (have two interviews left with stakeholders in other departments) and I’m really excited about the opportunity and has a lot of future potential.
My current job was not supportive during my pregnancy and when I came back to work my job changed, and everything I liked working on is shifted away. I think I’m supposed to be unhappy and looking for another job, so not supportive postpartum either.
All of this to say can I negotiate travel in my offer? If it was like 1 week a year or something while my baby is young that’s one thing but traveling multiple times a year for days and days will be hard on my family. Any advice?
ETA: travel was not listed in the job description. It came up as I was asking questions in the interview with hiring manager and she gave that example.
5 years ago today, I signed a deal for my (then) employer that lost my company millions of dollars.
I was running marketplace at SeatGeek. The deal was a multi-year partnerships with the Wells Fargo Center.
Everyone at the company told me not to sign it. I signed it anyway.
Wells Fargo Center (now Xfinity Mobile Arena) was one of the biggest venues in the country for concerts and events. I was sure it would work.
Then the Flyers started playing.
Year 1:
46 losses out of 82 games. They set a franchise record with a 13-game winless streak. The arena was empty. The events they were booking weren't any better. Third tier shows and boxing matches nobody had heard of. We lost over a million.
Year 2:
Finished 7th in their own division. 29th out of 32 teams in goals scored. UBS Arena opened in New York and was blamed for pulling concerts away from Philadelphia. Still couldn't make the playoffs. We lost over a million again.
Year 3:
Thought we could turn it around. The Flyers held a playoff spot for 4 months. Then they went 0-6 in their last 8 games and collapsed out of contention. Another million plus gone.
We were still profitable due to customer acquisition, and we had the stickiest product in ticketing. We made up for it over the long haul. But cash out the door looked bad. And I never heard the end of it.
When we signed the deal the Flyers sent me a custom jersey. SeatGeek on the front, number 21 on the back. Now I look back on it as the jersey that cost me somewhere around $4M in cash.
Hey folks , I’m a third year audio engineer student and a top tier arts school , but I want to know if it’d possible to work in the media department of any company with a audio engineering degree. I’d be graduating in 2028 and I’d be 24, so I don’t really want to restart and do another four year program. If anybody help or give me guidance on how I could make my goal a reality, it’d be greatly appreciated.
At a F500 company. Mass RTO was announced after many of us have moved following COVID remote work. The CTO promises last quarter there would never be a full RTO plan but now it has happened. I don't think I am going to stick around to do the full RTO, but the job market sucks. I'm thinking I would be considered as having quit rather than laid off and wouldn't get severance. In my mind they terminated the thousands of remote roles and are opening significantly less "local" roles, so it's effectively a layoff. But I think the semantics would let them avoid any severance. Thoughts?
And run away and leave it all behind and become a game show host. The only issue is that I have a terrible memory, so I’d probably forget what the games are, how they work, or which one we were on, but other than that I really think I could do it.
I’ve been at a job in tech sales for around 18 months and looking to move on due to a bad manager. What‘s the best way to answer why are you looking to move companies if you’re doing well there? Also, I keep getting stuck trying to explain how I build pipeline for the month. I know how to do it, but explaining gets me rambling every time. What’s the best way to summarise this?
I need advice on how to deal with a coworker.
Im new at this company and am very eager to learn as much as I can from the worker there.
At the end of the month, it’s all hands on deck. This specific coworker is a manager for a different department but he gets paid hourly. He keeps making comments about how salary folks have the privilege to work from home ( I have to work on the production floor as an engineer so I’m confused on that comment), how he has to come in early, how it’s always hot in his department. I went there to drop off some components one time and he was fussing about me wearing a jacket saying that he was offended that I came back there with it on.
I don’t know what kind of drama there is between people there and I say this because he flipped off my manager one time on my first day while I was getting shown around.
I don’t know if this is how he warms up to people or if he just likes to bitch at people not in his area. I want to talk to my manager about because I have a family to feed and I need to get work done without have to deal with this behavior. I’ve had conversations with him about products and information on history of things in the company and he’s a decent person, but I don’t want this to be an ongoing thing. It’s like he’s trying to make me feel guilty for having my position.
My coworker, who sits directly next to me, is genuinely lovely. On a personal level, she’s kind, thoughtful, and has always been nice to me. Unfortunately, at work she’s incredibly disorganised. She forgets almost everything, and when I’ve suggested writing things down or finding a system to help her remember, she brushes it off by saying, “I’m too old to remember all that.” She also told me her child took the notebook with all her notes, so there was nothing she could do.
Our job is heavily data-entry based, where accuracy and attention to detail are essential. Unfortunately, those are areas she really struggles with.
Every day, she asks me constant questions, many of which she could answer herself with a quick search or by taking a moment to think. After a solid week of nonstop interruptions, one question finally pushed me over the edge: “How do I BCC someone in an email again?” I snapped. I told her I really didn’t have time for those kinds of questions anymore and that she needed to pull herself together.
At the end of the week, we had our performance reviews and, although everyone expected it, our manager gave her some very direct feedback. Now I’m feeling conflicted. She is a genuinely kind person, but her performance is seriously affecting my own work and my mental health.
I’m off for two days, and I can’t stop thinking about how she must be feeling. Was I too harsh? Do I stand by what I said to maintain a boundary, or do I apologise for the way I reacted? I honestly don’t know what the right thing to do is because I really can’t keep working like this.