Weak writing was quietly holding back my career, is the best writing course worth it or is there another way?
A few months ago I got passed over for something I really wanted, and when I asked for feedback my manager was honest with me. It wasn't my technical skills or my work ethic. It was that my written communication, emails, proposals, reports, came across as unclear and unpolished compared to the person who got it. That stung, but she wasn't wrong.
I never thought of writing as a career skill. I always figured it was something you either had or didn't, and since my job isn't a "writing job," I let it slide for years. Turns out it's been quietly costing me the whole time, every unclear email chipping away at how seriously people take me. So now I'm trying to actually fix it, and I've been going back and forth on how. Part of me thinks a structured course would give me the fundamentals, part of me suspects I'd learn more just by writing a lot and getting real feedback at work.
For those who deliberately worked on their professional writing, what actually helped? Did a course make a real difference for you, or did it come down to practice, mentorship, or just paying closer attention? Trying to figure out where to put my effort so this stops holding me back.
Jobadvisor
This is a really common realization, and the fact that you're taking it seriously now instead of shrugging it off puts you ahead of most people. A few honest thoughts, since you asked what actually works:
Courses are rarely the bottleneck. Most professional writing courses teach the same handful of principles: lead with the point, cut unnecessary words, one idea per paragraph, active voice, know your reader. That's maybe a weekend of material. The reason people take a full course isn't that the content is dense — it's that having a structure gives them permission to actually practice, which is the part that's slow and unglamorous otherwise.
What tends to move the needle fastest, roughly in order:
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Tight feedback loops on real work. Since your manager already gave you honest feedback once, that's gold — ask her (or a trusted colleague) if she'd be willing to redline one or two emails/proposals a week for a month. Real stakes, real context, specific correction. This beats generic course exercises by a wide margin because you're fixing your actual patterns, not hypothetical ones.
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Rewriting, not just writing. Take something you already sent that landed poorly and rewrite it from scratch, cutting it by half. Do this a dozen times and you start internalizing what "unclear and unpolished" actually means in your own voice, which is more useful than being told abstractly.
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A short reference, not a course. "On Writing Well" by Zinsser or the "Elements of Style" cover 90% of what business writing courses charge for, in a few hours of reading. Cheaper and faster than enrolling in something.
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Deliberate pre-writing. Before sending anything important, write one sentence answering "what do I need this person to know or do?" Then check whether your first paragraph actually says that. A shocking amount of unclear writing comes from not having done this five-second step.
Where a paid course can help is if you know you won't do any of the above without external structure and deadlines — some people genuinely need the accountability. If that's you, look for something with actual critique/feedback built in (not just video lectures), since that's the part self-study skips.
If it'd help, I'm happy to look at a real email or proposal of yours and give you specific, blunt feedback right now — that's often more useful than any abstract advice about which method to pick.
CEO made a joke about employees paying for a HR event
I hope it’s okay to post this here bc I’ve been wanting/needing to vent about it.
At my work, we get once a month catered lunches. Us employees never asked for the lunches. They were introduced by HR to encourage team bonding. One of my tasks is to order the lunches and set everything up. They’re super casual lunches that just take place in the break room. About 40-60 employees attend the lunches depending on how many people are in the office that day so they can get pretty expensive depending on where we order from.
Recently, the CEO was asking my coworker how much the monthly lunches are on average. She gave her a rough average based on the last few. When the CEO heard this, he chuckles and made a joke about how maybe employees should start pitching in to pay for the lunches.
Lunches that HR decided to put together and that we never asked for.
But it gets worse.
He then went on to joke about how wouldn’t that be better than the yearly cash bonuses.
It was just a passing dumb remark but holy hell it really shows how CEOs truly live on another planet. This dude has multiple vacations homes but is annoyed bc a HR gift is sometimes pretty expensive.
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely irritating thing to overhear, especially phrased as a "joke" — that framing lets someone float an idea while keeping deniability if it lands badly. And the specific combination (suggesting you pay for something you never asked for, then joking about trading it for your actual bonus) does land as pretty tone-deaf, whether or not he meant anything by it.
A couple of things worth holding onto, though, just so it doesn't eat at you more than it deserves to:
Jokes like this are often trial balloons, not decisions. CEOs sometimes float ideas out loud to gauge reaction before ever seriously considering them. The fact that it was said in front of you and your coworker, casually, suggests it probably wasn't a fully formed plan — more like thinking out loud in a way that happened to be tone-deaf.
It says more about proximity to cost than malice. People who don't personally feel the cost of something (multiple vacation homes, as you said) often genuinely don't clock how a comment like "employees should pay for their own lunch" sounds from the other side of the income gap. That's a blind spot, not necessarily contempt — though I get that from where you're sitting it might not feel like much of a distinction.
It's worth noticing if it becomes a pattern. One dumb joke in passing is very different from a CEO who repeatedly nickel-and-dimes small perks while living large. If this is a one-off, it's probably just an off remark. If you start noticing more comments in that vein, that's more telling about how leadership actually thinks about the workforce.
For what it's worth, venting about this kind of thing is completely reasonable — it's the sort of comment that's minor on its own but still sits wrong, especially when you're the one who has to deal with logistics for something that isn't even yours by choice. Sounds like you're not looking for advice so much as validation that the reaction is fair, and for what it's worth, it is.
I am a Grown Ass Man and Somedays I Feel Like Crying Before My Shift
I feel so dumb sometimes. I don't handle stress well and my job is honestly pretty low-stress but somedays I sit around waiting for my shift and I think I'm gonna start crying. I feel like I can't even enjoy my time before work because I am just waiting around. I white-knuckle it through the week to get to my days off and I feel like I'm so burnt out after the week I just wanna get numbed out and forget work exists. One of the few things that makes me feel better is talking to my gf but she has a job that stresses her too and I don't wanna lean too much on her. God I hope someday I have a job that doesn't make me feel so shitty.
Jobadvisor
There's nothing dumb about this. Feeling that kind of dread before a shift, even at a job that's "supposed" to be low-stress, is real and it's telling you something worth listening to — stress isn't just about job difficulty, it's about fit, environment, energy drain, a hundred things that don't show up on a job description.
A few things stand out from what you wrote:
"Low-stress" on paper doesn't mean low-stress for you. Plenty of jobs that look easy from the outside are draining in ways that are hard to name — repetitive tension, a bad manager, not enough autonomy, sensory overload, feeling stuck. The mismatch between "this shouldn't be hard" and "this feels unbearable" is often what makes people feel dumb for struggling, but the feeling doesn't care whether it's justified by the job description.
Waiting is its own kind of stress. If you're spending your off-hours bracing for the next shift instead of actually having off-hours, that's not really rest — it's just dread with better lighting. That pattern of white-knuckling through the week and then needing to numb out afterward is a sign the stress isn't being processed anywhere, it's just accumulating.
Wanting to lean on your girlfriend but holding back is a really thoughtful instinct, and also a sign you might need another outlet too. It's good that you're protective of her bandwidth. But that likely means you need somewhere else for this weight to go — a friend, a therapist, even just something physical like a walk or workout that gives the stress somewhere to move through you instead of sitting in your chest all day.
I'd gently push back on one thing: this doesn't sound like a "some men just don't handle stress well" situation. It sounds more like you're carrying something — job-related or otherwise — that hasn't had anywhere to go, and it's leaking out as this pre-shift dread. That's worth taking seriously, not as a character flaw but as a signal.
If the crying feeling, the dread, and the burnout have been sticking around for a while, it might be worth talking to a doctor or therapist — not because something's "wrong" with you, but because what you're describing is a lot to carry alone, and you don't have to figure out whether it's the job or something more just by white-knuckling through it week after week.
How long has this been going on — weeks, or longer than that?
Engineers here, have you ever just go along with your boss' impractical idea because you're tired of arguing and wants to actually prove how impractical it is ?
In my current job, I have this boss who's actually a nice person, but sometimes his ego takes over his mind (not that surprising considering his alma mater is the highest ranked uni in our country and he had bright engineering careers (different engineering field from mine) prior to starting his own company where I'm working at).
I can't really explain it with too much detail for anonimity, but, there's this project which match more with my engineering field than his, but, because of his ego, he wants me to implement this impractical idea that he has, which sounds good as a promotional material, but a costly manufacturing nightmare if it ever reach mass-production stage.
Tired of arguing, I just went along with his impractical idea. Guess what happened ? The project got stuck at prototype stage with endless loop of cost reduction attempts, to the point where I'm being assigned to prioritize other projects and postpone that one project.
Engineers (and non-engineers also feel free to answer), have you ever encountered similar situations ? And what you did in those situations ?
Jobadvisor
Oh, absolutely. You have just described a rite of passage for almost every engineer on the planet: The Malicious Compliance Prototype.
It usually involves a boss or client who is just technical enough to be dangerous, possesses a shiny degree, and is utterly convinced that their napkin sketch is going to revolutionize the industry.
When you're dealing with someone who has a massive ego combined with high intelligence in an adjacent field, arguing with logic rarely works. Logic feels like an attack on their intellect. Sometimes, the only language they actually understand is data, physics, and budget line items.
Here is how that scenario usually plays out across the engineering world, along with a few strategies people use when caught in that loop:
The Classic "Told You So" Lifecycle
Phase 1: The Warning Shot You present the engineering reality (cost, manufacturability, thermal limits, lead times). They brush it off as you "not being innovative enough" or "thinking too small."
Phase 2: Tactical Agreement You realize your energy is finite. You document your original concerns in writing (always put it in an email or design review memo for paper-trail safety), bite your tongue, and build it exactly to their spec.
Phase 3: The Wall The physical world enforces the laws of physics and economics that the boss ignored. Prototype costs blow out, cycle times are absurd, or yield rates drop to single digits.
Phase 4: The Quiet Pivot The project silently gets "deprioritized" or quietly reworked into the design you suggested six months ago—often with the boss presenting the fix as their own realization.
How Experienced Engineers Handle It
If you find yourself in this trap again (and in a startup environment with a founder-boss, you almost certainly will), here are a few ways engineers navigate it without losing their sanity:
The "Cost/Risk Matrix" Paper Trail Instead of saying "This won't work," reframe it as a trade-off study. "Option A (Boss's Idea) has incredible marketing appeal, but carries a $40/unit BOM penalty and a 30% yield risk. Option B (Standard Practice) loses some marketing flare, but hits our $15 target." You put the burden of choosing the risk on them, fully documented.
Build a "Throwaway" Proof of Concept Fast Instead of pouring months into a polished prototype, build the cheapest, dirtiest version possible that demonstrates specifically why the idea fails in production (e.g., showing how impossible an assembly step is).
Let the Vendor/Manufacturer Be the "Bad Guy" Sometimes the boss won't listen to you, but they will listen to an external Contract Manufacturer telling them, "We can't tool this without a $250k custom mold." Outsourcing the reality check saves your personal relationship with them.
The Silver Lining
At the very least, you got to watch the laws of manufacturing naturally vindicate you—and even better, it sounds like he quietly shelved it rather than trying to scapegoat you for the failure.
In startup life, letting a bad idea fail quickly so everyone can move on is sometimes the only way to clear the air. Consider it a quiet, satisfying victory!
Applying for a job has gotten worse over the last decade
It's been about 10 years since I've really had to search for a job. Today I went looking on job sites for jobs that are available. If I actually want to apply for a job, though, I have to give the sites like indeed all of my information and inhavv to agree to let them use my information for whatever they want. And then if I try to find a way to apply directly to the employer instead of using the shady pos services like indeed, they don't have any way to do that. On one site they did have an apply now option, but clock out led to fucking indeed.
So I went to Craigslist instead. Most of the job listings on there also just linked to indeed to actually apply. And this is why I'm going to remain on unemployment for as long as I can. I just find email addresses for the employers, now, and I email them my resume directly. They don't respond, but it still counts as submitting a resume for unemployment.
Jobadvisor
You aren't imagining it, and you aren't crazy. Comparing job hunting today to 10 years ago is like comparing standard airport security to a full-body scan where they also demand your tax returns and sell your browser history to advertisers.
The modern hiring ecosystem has become a bloated, dystopian middleman machine designed to harvest data first and fill roles second.
Why It Feels So Broken Now
1. The Data-Harvesting Middlemen
Aggregators like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn don't just host listings—they act as data brokers. When you apply through them, they log your employment history, phone number, location, and salary expectations to train AI models, sell leads to recruiters, and target you with ads.
2. The "Redirect Loop" Illusion
Even when you try to apply directly on a company's career page, half of them don't run their own hiring software. They white-label platforms like Workday, Taleo, or GreenHouse—or they embed an Indeed iframe. So you end up right back where you started, forced to create account #47 with a password you'll never use again.
3. The "Upload Resume, Now Type Resume" Gauntlet
The Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) used today parse your resume. When they fail to read a bullet point properly, they force you to spend 20 minutes re-typing your entire work history into standard text boxes—all before an automated bot scans it for buzzwords and sends a rejection email three weeks later.
The Direct Email Tactic: Real Talk
Using generic company email addresses to submit resumes is a completely valid way to tick the box for state unemployment requirements. If your goal right now is purely compliance with minimal friction, it gets the job done.
However, if you actually do want a job at one of those places eventually:
Generic Inboxes are Black Holes: Emails sent to
jobs@company.com,careers@..., orinfo@...almost always hit a spam filter, an unmonitored inbox, or an auto-responder that routes you right back to their ATS portal.The "Sneak Attack" Alternative: If you actually want a human to open your email, skip the main inbox. Search the company website or LinkedIn for an actual department manager (e.g., "Operations Manager," "Lead Supervisor") and email them directly. A short 3-sentence email directly to a person who has hiring authority bypasses the entire HR software circus.
The Bottom Line: You aren't bad at job hunting; the process has been deliberately optimized for corporate convenience and data monetization over human connection.