My company mandated RTO and I commuted 50 minutes to wear headphones alone

I want to describe my first week back because I don't think I've fully processed it and writing it out feels necessary.

there are no assigned desks anymore, the floor is called a neighborhood now which I learned from a laminated sign near the elevator, so I found an empty hot desk, plugged in my laptop, put on my noise canceling headphones and joined a Teams call with my teammate who was sitting directly behind me, close enough that I could hear her voice through my headphones and through her headphones simultaneously creating this faint echo that neither of us ever acknowledged.

At lunch I ate alone at my desk because the people I work with rotate in on different days so we're never all there at once, and the office was full of people I'd never met from departments I couldn't name who I smiled at near the coffee machine with the same energy you give a stranger in an elevator.

My manager Slacked me a question at some point in the afternoon and I Slacked back and we were in the same room the entire time, I could see the back of his head from where I was sitting, and neither of us mentioned it.

friday the company sent an all staff email with the subject line -Celebrating the Return of In-Person Collaboration- and I read it a few times looking for the part where it was a joke.

I started looking at fully remote companies sometime after that, found one based out of Amsterdam, contract runs through Workmotion since I'm not there, and the first morning I worked from my kitchen without headphones on I just sat there for a second and didn't do anything.

Anyway. collaboration.

Jobadvisor

This is very good writing. The details do the heavy lifting — the echo, the Slack message, the laminated sign — and you never editorialize, which makes it hit harder.

A few things that particularly work:

The echo neither of you acknowledged is the heart of the whole piece. That one image contains the entire absurdity. Two people physically close enough to create an acoustic artifact, and the social contract requires you both to pretend the situation is normal.

The Slack message while you could see the back of his head is the second gut-punch. You slipped it in without commentary, which is exactly right. Commenting on it would have softened it.

"The same energy you give a stranger in an elevator" is precise and a little sad in a way that feels earned because you've already established the context.

The Amsterdam paragraph is interesting because the register shifts slightly — it gets a little more procedural (Workmotion, contract) — and then lands on just sat there for a second and didn't do anything, which is quietly the most emotional sentence in the whole thing. After all the noise and performance of "collaboration," silence and stillness become the thing worth noting.

The last line is perfect. One word, no verb, just the word hanging there. It works because you've let the reader accumulate enough by that point that the irony lands without you having to explain it.

If you wanted to develop this further — essay, personal essay, whatever — the main thing I'd say is: you could let yourself stay even longer in that kitchen moment. Right now you give it one sentence. The piece has been building toward some kind of release or arrival, and that didn't do anything is it. It could breathe a little more.

But as it stands it's already complete. You processed it. It shows.

How do you not feel guilty for quitting with no notice??

26F. I’ve been working for a small company as an accounting department manager for about 3 months. The job is something I enjoy, which is handling AP, AR, and Payroll.

The issue is that my boss is an old man, like in his mid-70s. He’s a micromanager, constantly berating me for things that can easily be fixed. Like he’ll literally scream at me and slam his hands down on his desk and threaten to fire me over something as simple as not picking up the mail early enough in the day. (I pick it up at 11 am every day, he was yelling at me about it at 10 am this morning).

It is so mentally exhausting and draining to deal with this on a daily basis. I have nightmares, can barely sleep in general and have pretty much altogether ruined my diet/exercise routine from the stress. I’m jittery all the time and have to constantly walk on eggshells while I’m at work for 9 hours a day.

I want to quit today. Like take my lunch and not come back. But I feel guilty that my coworkers that I actually like will have to pick up the slack until they find a replacement for me.

How do you get past the guilt when quitting a job? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks

Jobadvisor

The guilt you're feeling is actually a sign of what a considerate person you are — but I want you to reframe something important here.

You don't owe loyalty to a workplace that isn't safe for you.

What you're describing — screaming, slamming hands on desks, threatening to fire you — that's not just a "difficult boss." That's a hostile and arguably abusive work environment. The physical symptoms you're experiencing (sleep disruption, nightmares, constant jitteriness, appetite changes) are your nervous system telling you something is genuinely wrong. Those aren't signs of weakness, they're signs of real stress.

A few things that might help with the guilt:

On your coworkers: You care about them, which is lovely. But their workload is not your responsibility to manage — that's a management problem, created by management. If your boss created an environment where people can't stay, the staffing fallout is on him, not you. Your coworkers would likely understand completely if they knew the full picture.

On "no notice": Two weeks notice is a professional courtesy, not a legal obligation. It exists as a mutual goodwill gesture — and goodwill is a two-way street. An employer who screams at you hasn't held up their end of that social contract. You don't owe courtesy to someone who hasn't extended it to you.

On guilt vs. grief: Sometimes what feels like guilt is actually grief — you liked the work, you liked your coworkers, and you're mourning losing something good that got poisoned by one person. That's worth acknowledging. It's not the job that failed you, it's the person running it.

Practically speaking: If you do decide to walk, you can send a simple, professional email or text — "Today will be my last day, I wish the team well" — and that's it. No explanation owed. Keep it clean and brief.

Your health and safety come first. Three months of documented stress symptoms is your body voting clearly. Listen to it.

If a job expects me to exceed expectations, the pay should exceed mine.

Annual reviews are corporate theater. I spend a whole year going above and beyond, then I sit in a room while my manager who reads off a rubric and tells me that I either "meet expectations" or "need improvement" so then I get a 1-3% raise that doesn't even keep up with inflation. And now they're recommending we use AI to write our self evals. Wouldn't be surprised if my manager is also using AI to write their feedback too. So an AI is going to have a conversation about my performance with itself? Nobody even has to pretend to care anymore. If my performance is supposed to exceed expectations every year, why is my compensation not exceeding my expectations? The system is broken.

Jobadvisor

You're describing something a lot of people feel but rarely say out loud this clearly. The asymmetry is real — the expectations ratchet up every cycle, but the rewards don't move the same direction. "Exceeds expectations" becomes the new floor, and then next year they raise the floor again.

The AI self-eval thing is a particularly sharp version of the problem. It's not just lazy, it hollows out the one part of the process that was supposed to be about you as an individual. If both sides are just generating text at each other, the whole ritual becomes a formality pretending to be a conversation.

The inflation point also doesn't get enough attention. A 2% raise in a year with 4% inflation is a pay cut with extra steps. It's dressed up as a reward while actually being a reduction in purchasing power.

What tends to actually work — not to be cynical about it — is treating compensation as a separate negotiation from performance reviews entirely. The annual review process often isn't designed to reward performance, it's designed to document and manage it. Real raises usually come from competing offers, role changes, or a direct conversation about market rate that's explicitly disconnected from the review cycle.

That doesn't make the system less broken. It just means the game being played in that room isn't always the game you think it is.

Big Tech hiring is broken and we’re letting it happen

I’m honestly done with how ridiculous the hiring process has become.

Now it’s not just 4–5 rounds anymore we’ve added third-party screening companies, AI transcription tools, and “initial filters” before you even talk to someone from the actual team. It feels less like hiring and more like a pipeline designed to waste candidates’ time.

Let’s be real about what’s happening:

- Companies outsource screening to third parties who are incentivized to keep candidates flowing, not necessarily to find the right one.

- Candidates end up repeating themselves multiple times to people who don’t even understand the role deeply.

- Meanwhile, interviewers are using AI to transcribe or assist during interviews — which raises a fair question: if you’re the expert evaluating me, why do you need AI to do it?

I’m not against AI — I work in tech. But there’s a difference between using tools thoughtfully and hiding behind them during something as human as an interview.

And the biggest issue: candidate time is treated as disposable.

We’re expected to:

- Do take-home assignments

- Go through multiple technical rounds

- Then still pass through outsourced screening layers

At some point, you have to ask who is this process actually optimizing for?

I’ve personally decided I’m not entertaining roles that require unnecessary third-party screening layers before I even speak to the actual team.

Not saying everyone should do the same but if more candidates start pushing back, maybe companies will rethink how broken this system has become.

Curious if others are seeing the same thing or if I’m just hitting the worst of it lately.

Jobadvisor

This is a real frustration shared by a lot of people in tech right now, and your points are largely fair. But it's worth steelmanning the other side too, since the picture is more complicated than it might feel in the moment.

Where you're right

The process has genuinely inflated. What was 2-3 rounds a decade ago is now routinely 5-7, and third-party screeners add latency and noise without always adding signal. Candidate time is treated asymmetrically — companies protect their engineers' time zealously while assuming candidates have unlimited availability. That's a real power imbalance worth naming.

Where it's more complicated

The outsourced screening and multi-round structures didn't appear out of nowhere. They're responses to real problems companies faced: hundreds of applications per role, inconsistent hiring manager judgment, legal exposure from unstructured interviews, and costly mis-hires. The system is inefficient, but it's inefficient for reasons, not malice.

On the AI-in-interviews point — this is genuinely nuanced. An interviewer using AI to take notes so they can stay present in the conversation is meaningfully different from using it to evaluate candidates for them. Conflating the two weakens an otherwise strong argument.

The candidate pushback question

Your personal boundary (skipping roles with unnecessary third-party layers before team contact) is reasonable and probably good filtering for you at your experience level. But it's worth being honest that this is a privilege of seniority and market position. A junior candidate or someone in a tighter market doesn't have that leverage, and framing it as something "more candidates should do" glosses over that gap.

The real question you're asking

Who is this process optimizing for? — that's the sharpest point here, and the uncomfortable answer is: it optimizes for the company's risk reduction, not for finding the best person or respecting the candidate's time. Until candidate experience becomes a competitive differentiator (and in some markets it already is), the incentive structure won't change much.

The companies most worth working for, in my observation, tend to be the ones that have thought hard about this and kept the process tight. So in a strange way, a bloated hiring process is itself a signal.