How long it lasts. Year after year after year. No end in sight. No summer, winter or spring breaks. One vacation a year and a few sick days.
American? 🫤🫂
Office politics. I was a 4.0 student who was given an award by the faculty as best computer science student two years in a row. Despite being talented, extra hard working and driven, I had no idea how to play the game and my career stalled almost immediately. I watched others with weaker skills get promotions and raises because they knew the right people and served on the right committees. Being slightly autistic, I never realized the rules of the game. I quit after 8 years and started my own business, went back as a contractor getting 4x the pay, and it was awesome. There should be a class for people called “sucking up to management and gaming performance reviews.”
Yep, it is mostly apparent in big companies I would say. I could go on and on, but basically your work is so disconnected from the final output that what end up actually “mattering” is a bunch of made-up bullshit. Putting in quality work and improving your product/service does not benefit most of the people you interact with directly, unless of course you’re working on the popular thing that will get people promoted.
Anyways, I also left the corporate world to start my own business. Life is so much easier when all you need to care about is the quality of your work and not political points. I like my hard work to rewards me, and not just some guy spending his days in meetings claiming credit for “his” “initiatives”. Some of those folks would never survive a job that isn’t a mega corp paying them to improv all day in meetings.
Workplace bullies.
Worst thing is when you don’t even realise when its happening to you. My manager did and moved me to another team after a few months…
I now work elsewhere with much kinder and nicer people in a much smaller team 😁👍 but sadly the previous bullying has affected my life quite a bit, as well as how I interact with my partner.
Office politics and networking.
How crappy leadership destroys culture and employee’s mental health.
I basically double majored in international affairs and economics but ultimately became a software engineer. I actually think both my courses of study were valuable. I’m basically self-taught as a developer (though I had mentors) and other than Comp Sci or Physics, there’s probably no other majors I’d pick as a base.
For international relations, it’s just always good to know about diplomacy and history. We had courses where we studied successful negotiations. The military history wasn’t so useful but there’s way more history made without guns than with them.
Econ is a good default major for a lot of fields. You learn to make statistical models and there’s strong math requirements with more of a focus on practical math than theoretical. (There’s even a little coding involved.) There’s classes on how businesses are run at a high level. Behavioral econ is helpful in small, but important ways (like designing little user interface nudges and prompts).
If I could redesign college, I’d make everyone in STEM majors do a minor in one of the humanities (and vise versa). We’d all be better off.
How often my patience is tested by corporate platitudes and meaningless work.
The high level of sheer incompetence at all levels, but especially in management. I’m lucky to work with competent folks directly, but the sheer amount of work created by stupidity outside of my department is soul-crushing. I can present definitive proof of systemic failures all day long, and no one is interested in doing a damned thing if the people or departments in question are politically powerful within the organization. Neither I nor my immediate colleagues are perfect, but we acknowledge our failures and try to create solutions. So many others, though, seem so invested in the status quo beyond all reason.
Douchebaggery and ultra elites.
Corporate “motivational” nonsense. Leave the woodpile higher, write everything in pencil, drink your most expensive wine first. Some companies base - quite literally - everything on these nonsense blurbs.
That, and the way many [past] jobs tried to cover up the lack of compensation opportunities and bumps by things like basketball courts, restaurants on “campus” (sigh), goat yoga… I can’t feed my family with a basketball court at the office. I guess I could feed them a yoga goat but I surmise it would be frowned upon.
Thank goodness for WFH. Never going back.
Drink the expensive/good stuff first is generally good, though. I’ll appreciate the good stuff more while I’m still sober/buzzed, and once I’m drunk the cheap stuff is easier to drink.
All the meetings that either have no relation to your job or could’ve just been an email or text conversation.
Employment.
Tight deadlines. In college, we were given 2 weeks to complete projects. Of course that time also took up other assignments from other classes but it was manageable. In a real job, sometimes we need to get something done TODAY, or even 3 hours from right now.
Shitty management.
Being treated like shit.
