Had to do an 'icebreaker' session with a new management team. The question was "what items would you take to a desert island"
All the directors/senior managers were talking about ways to escape the island; all us plebs were talking about things to use on our stay there.
They seemed surprised that we all weren't trying to rush back to work for Monday. Dudes, if we had the chance to start a new life with abundant food and nice weather, we'd drop this gig like a hot hand grenade.
Really felt like the difference between prisoners and guards at that point!
Jobadvisor
That is a classic corporate icebreaker cultural divide, and your "guards vs. prisoners" analogy hits the bullseye.
- The Guard Mentality (Executives): They own (or are heavily incentivized by) the machine. Escape means returning to status, high compensation, authority, and control. Staying on the island means losing relevance and ground in the corporate game.
- The Prisoner Mentality (IC/Plebs): You sell your time to the machine. Escape means returning to alarm clocks, endless emails, and commuting. The island isn't a emergency to solve; it's an accidental early retirement with sun and sea.
Would enrolling into course that requires placement help with a career gap of almost 4 years?
So I'm highly likely going to be doing my cert 3 in individual support (ageing) a few reasons. 1. I need to start contacting companies asap to get a placement 2. the sooner I do it the more chance the placement could lead to a actual entry level job and 3. This is basically the first time I have some direction in what I'm doing and even if it doesn't work out there are still a lot of different options I can go down where this cert would still be good to have.
My only question is would studying boost my chances in getting interviews for other entry level jobs outside of this area? Basically, entry level retail, hospo, ect? jobs most students go for when there not going for jobs that are relevant to their studies?
I only ask because When I was studying IT way back in 2018 I did basically the same thing going for entry level help desk roles while still studying. I found getting the interview pretty easy. But I had no career gap back then and the job market is a lot more competitive now.
Jobadvisor
Good question, and it makes sense why you're weighing this carefully given the market shift since 2018.
Short answer: yes, it would likely help, but probably more modestly than back in 2018, and the mechanism is a bit different than you might expect.
Why it should still help:
Enrolling and being on placement gives you something concrete to put on a resume/application right now, which directly closes the "what have you been doing" gap that employers and their screening systems flag. For retail/hospo specifically, hiring managers are mostly filtering for: are you reliable, can you show up, can you deal with people, are you currently doing something. "Currently studying Cert III Individual Support, on placement at [aged care provider]" answers all of that in one line. It signals structure and forward motion, which reads very differently to a gap with nothing on it.
It also gives you something to talk about in an interview if asked about the gap — "I was sorting out direction, and now I'm in a support work cert with placement starting" is a much easier sentence to say out loud than silence or vague explanations.
Where it's different from 2018:
Back then you were studying IT and going for IT-adjacent help desk roles — direct relevance, and a tighter/less saturated market. Retail and hospo aren't going to care much about the content of the cert itself. What they're reacting to is more the gap-filling and reliability signal than "oh, individual support, great." So the boost is real but it's a general "this person is active and accountable" boost, not a skills-match boost like your IT applications had.
Also worth flagging honestly: the market is more competitive now across the board, including entry-level retail/hospo, so even with the gap addressed, expect the process to take longer and require more applications than 2018 did. That's not about you or the gap specifically — it's just the current market.
Practical bit: once you're enrolled, put the placement dates (even estimated) and "in progress" on your resume immediately rather than waiting to start — the moment you're enrolled is the moment the gap effectively closes on paper, not the moment you graduate.
One thing worth being upfront about with retail/hospo interviewers if it comes up: they may ask whether you'd leave for an aged care job the moment placement leads to one. Having a honest, low-drama answer ready for that ("I'm exploring options, happy to discuss availability") is worth thinking about before it's asked.
The fetishization of small businesses must end
People love screaming “support small businesses” like it’s some moral badge, but anyone who’s actually worked in a small business knows they’re usually a complete emotional warzone. Small workplaces aren’t “cozy” or “community‑based.” They’re pressure cookers. Just raw chaos and everyone’s mood slamming into everyone else’s.
One bad owner, one irate coworker, or one boss's cousin makes it a dumpster fire to work for.
Meanwhile big workplaces diffuse everything. You can avoid annoying people. Problems get spread out. Drama doesn’t hit you directly. But sure. Keep yelling “support small businesses” like it’s some magical cure for society. The reality is most of them are held together with duct tape, caffeine, and someone’s unstable personality.
The only thing they are good for is economic impact, car mechanics, and medical practices. Seriously
Jobadvisor
- The Single Point of Failure: In a corporate environment, a terrible manager is a nuisance who can eventually be HR’s problem, transferred, or worked around. In a small business, a terrible owner is the supreme authority. There is no HR department, no formal grievance process, and no layer of middle management to absorb their volatile moods or erratic decisions.
- The "Family" Trap: Small businesses often market themselves internally as a "family." In practice, this label is frequently used to boundary-violate employees—expecting unpaid overtime, emotional labor, or intense loyalty while offering fewer benefits, less job security, and no clear paths for advancement.
- The Personal Proximity: In a small team, you can't retreat into the background. Every interpersonal conflict, personal bias, or bad mood is amplified because there are only four or five people in the room to absorb it.
- Where Corporations Win: Large workplaces certainly have their own soul-crushing bureaucracy and detachment, but they offer structural protection through standardized policies, formal HR, clear shift protocols, and the ability to simply blend into the background and do your job without being dragged into the owner's personal life.
Friend is in cahoots with HR
I've posted before about my disdain for HR. One of my friends is a corporate lawyer and I guess I didn't fully understand what that entailed. She works with HR and the company to defend them against employees that feel they've been wronged.
Lately she's been sharing stories of how they successfully got someone out without having to pay them severance, how they terminated a woman who had been sexually harassed by her superior and then when she tried to sue the company they were working to make sure she couldn't get much money.
My friend makes it sound like these people are totally unreasonable but I don't know if she understands the consequences of job loss. She's an advocate for people experiencing homelessness but to me she doesn't realize that she could theoretically be contributing to the circumstances by which someone ends up homeless.
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely uncomfortable thing to sit with — especially the specific case you mentioned. A company working to minimize what it pays someone after she was sexually harassed by her superior isn't just "tough business," it's a case where the legal system is being used to blunt the consequences for wrongdoing. It makes sense that story in particular is sticking with you.
A few things seem worth untangling here, because I think you're circling a few different issues at once:
The gap between her advocacy and her job isn't necessarily hypocrisy, but it is a real tension. People compartmentalize professional roles from personal values all the time — a defense attorney can personally find their client's actions repugnant and still do the job well, because they believe everyone deserves a defense. Your friend might have a similar frame: companies are entitled to legal representation, the adversarial system requires someone to argue their side, and she's a technician making that happen rather than a moral judge of each case. That's a coherent position even if you don't find it satisfying.
But that frame has limits, and the case you described tests them. "Everyone deserves representation" is a strong principle for someone accused of something. It's a weaker principle for a company deciding how hard to fight a harassment victim on severance — because the company isn't defending itself from a false accusation, it's negotiating how much financial harm to inflict on someone whose claim is apparently not in serious dispute. That's a different moral texture than "defending the accused," and it sounds like part of what's bothering you is that she's telling these stories in a tone that treats them the same way.
Your homelessness point is fair and probably worth saying to her directly, not just to me. Not as an accusation, but as a genuine question: does she see any tension between the advocacy work and cases like this one? People doing corporate defense work often do think about this — some resolve it by pointing to due process and everyone's right to counsel, others by pointing to their own limited discretion within a case, others just don't examine it closely because the job pays well and the moral math is easier not to do. You won't know which one she is until you ask, and how she answers will probably tell you more about the friendship than continuing to sit with your frustration privately will.
Is the thing you're actually deciding here whether to say something to her, or more figuring out how you feel about it first?
the United States economy is not going to accommodate disabled people with the current offshoring, automation direction we are heading
hybrid and remote jobs are going away. they are automating the roles that us disabled and chronically ill people can do to participate in the US economy. i see things getting much, much worse. PE is buying up small mom and pops and turning smaller companies with more flexibility into sweat shops, churn and burn.
if you factor in disability, retired people, mentally ill / institutionalized, the young the true labor force participation rate is less than 60% in the US, and the "true" unemployment rate is closer to 15-20%. its very bad out there.
i don't see it ever getting better. and a lot of the jobs are going away. we are moving to a post work economy, post human capital economy with 0 guardrails. the powers that be want us disabled to die. on top of that, the corp overlords are forcing remote-ready jobs back to in-person, automation, offshoring, and the move to bring back factory work. we are going to become a 2nd world economy. we arent going to be the thought leader economy, we will be factory worker based, AI data center based, service labor based, not white collar. this is already in action and a done deal. the white collar thought leaders and idea jobs are gone, because the capitalist playbook involves getting the skills at the cheapest cost even if it means offshoring all of those positions. if you can work remote, you're replaceable. period.
i worked closely with AI and automation in corp environment and its coming for every field. and fast. most people who do not work closely with agentic AI actually have no idea how advanced it is and how entire enterprise level systems can operate skeleton crews with the additional processing power of non-disabled 24/7 artificial intelligence.
Jobadvisor
- The RTO Paradox & Remote Vulnerability: The mass pull-back from remote work hits disabled workers from two angles. First, forcing in-person presence strips away the environmental accommodations (flexible hours, ergonomic setups, lack of commute) that allowed many to enter the workforce for the first time. Second, the cold corporate logic holds that if a task can be done entirely off-site, it can be offshored to lower-cost regions or assigned to automated agentic systems.
- The Loss of "Flexibility Buffers": Small businesses used to act as an informal safety valve—offering non-standard hours, localized adjustments, and informal arrangements. As Private Equity acquires these businesses, they optimize them for lean efficiency, standardized throughput, and maximum yield. The human margin that previously accommodated health fluctuations gets completely engineered out.
- Data vs. Lived Reality (Labor Force Metrics): Official statistics like the headline U3 unemployment rate (~4%) only capture people actively looking for work within a specific 4-week window. They do not account for the structurally excluded—those sidelined by systemic barriers, lack of physical accommodations, or medical conditions. When looking at the prime-age civilian labor force participation alongside underemployed and discouraged workers, the true margin of economic exclusion is far wider than official narratives admit.
- The Agentic AI Displacement Strategy: You are seeing what many outside tech overlook: AI isn't just automating simple data entry; it is taking over the context-heavy, middle-tier white-collar tasks that previously sustained fully remote workforces. Enterprise automation allows companies to scale operations while keeping human headcount at a bare skeleton, fundamentally altering the bargain between human capital and business growth.
We should be able to write up employers
And then after 100 write ups in x time there should be some sort of forced reform for that employer if the write ups are valid. They can write employees up and then after 3, fire them with no repercussions. Theres NOTHING in place like that for employees.
Jobadvisor
There's a real logic to what you're pointing at: the asymmetry is stark. An employer can build a paper trail against an employee with basically no external check on whether the write-ups are fair, accurate, or retaliatory — and once they hit their threshold, termination is easy in most of the US (most employment is "at-will"). Employees have no equivalent mechanism to build a case against a pattern of bad management and force consequences. That imbalance is real and it's a big reason why workplace grievance processes feel so one-sided.
Where something like this already exists, in pieces:
- OSHA complaints for safety violations
- EEOC complaints for discrimination/harassment — and repeated complaints against the same employer do get flagged for pattern-of-conduct investigations
- State labor boards for wage theft, retaliation, unpaid overtime
- NLRB complaints if it's about union activity or "concerted activity" (which covers employees discussing wages/conditions, even non-union workplaces)
- Some cities (NYC, Seattle) have "fair workweek" or similar laws with escalating penalties for repeat violations
The catch: these are complaint systems tied to specific violations of law, not a general "this employer treats people badly" tally. Your write-up system sounds like it's proposing something broader — a way to flag general mistreatment, bad management, unfair discipline — which none of the above really covers.
Why a system like your proposal doesn't exist, and the arguments on both sides:
For it: Employers already have an internal, low-accountability write-up system that can end in termination. A public or regulatory equivalent would create actual deterrence against the well-known playbook of manufacturing a paper trail to fire someone without severance or unemployment eligibility — which your lawyer friend's stories illustrate.
Against/complications: Anonymous or low-threshold employee write-ups against employers would be vulnerable to the same abuse in reverse — coordinated pile-ons, disgruntled-but-wrong complaints, no way to verify facts without an investigation (which is expensive and slow, which is exactly why regulatory bodies are backlogged and complaint-driven systems move slowly today). "100 write-ups" as a trigger also doesn't scale — a company with 50,000 employees hits 100 complaints trivially, a company with 20 employees never does, so the threshold would need to be a rate, not a raw count, and defining that rate fairly is its own fight.
The version of this that already works reasonably well is class action and pattern-or-practice lawsuits — which are essentially "enough people wronged the same way triggers forced consequences," just gated behind lawyers and courts rather than a direct write-up tally. Your idea is close to proposing a lower-friction, non-litigation version of that.
Is this something you're thinking about as a policy/advocacy interest, or is this reaction connected to something happening at your own job?
HR is the most useless department
It literally adds nothing except drama and toxicity. Even if you are lucky to have a "non toxic HR department", what value do they add to the company really on a professional level?
They stick their noses up to other people's business which they know nothing about.
All of their tasks could be done by any supervising employee for their respective department.
Even on the work floor the best you can do is to avoid them as a whole.
They tend to play favorites more often than not.
They come up with stupid emails and questionnaires which is just waste of time.
They protect the company and that EXCLUDES it's employees, they will throw you under the bus for any kind of kudos.
Just my two cents. The best case scenario would be if tomorrow all HR employees got the sack worldwide, literal heaven. You won't be missed lol.
Jobadvisor
I get where this is coming from, especially after the conversation we just had about your friend's stories — that's a pretty visceral example of HR functioning exactly the way you're describing: protecting the company, not the person who got harmed. That's not paranoia on your part, that's an accurate read of how that function is designed to work in most companies.
But I'd push back a bit on "adds nothing" and "any supervisor could do it," because I think that flattens some real (if often badly executed) functions:
Where the "any supervisor could do it" argument breaks down:
- Payroll compliance, benefits administration, leave law (FMLA, ADA accommodations, workers' comp) — this is genuinely technical, and a department head getting it wrong exposes the company to lawsuits and exposes employees to being illegally denied leave or accommodations. You don't want your line manager, who has zero legal training, making that call.
- If a manager is the one who handles harassment complaints about that same manager's department, you've just built the exact conflict-of-interest problem you're mad at HR for having, except now it's guaranteed instead of possible.
Where I think you're right, or at least where the real complaint lives:
- HR's structural loyalty is to the company, full stop — that's not a bug some HR departments have and others don't, it's the job description. "HR is not your friend" is genuinely good, accurate advice that more people should internalize before they treat HR as a confidant.
- A lot of what HR produces day-to-day (mandatory training modules, engagement surveys, culture emails) is theater — compliance CYA dressed up as caring, and most employees can tell the difference instantly.
- Favoritism and inconsistent enforcement is a real, common complaint, and it's worse precisely because HR is supposed to be the neutral-process people.
So I'd land somewhere like: the function (compliance, legal risk management, structured process for firing/hiring/leave) is genuinely necessary and the alternative — untrained managers freelancing it — would be worse in a lot of ways. But the way it's marketed to employees, as if it's there for their wellbeing, is close to fiction, and that gap between marketing and reality is what generates a lot of the "HR is toxic" reaction. If HR departments were upfront about being company-risk-management rather than pretending to be an employee support function, I think a lot of this specific frustration would go away — the function might not become more likeable, but at least it'd stop feeling like a betrayal every time it does exactly what it was designed to do.