Moved across the country for fiancée’s job and she gets fired after one month, how to move forward?
Boy oh boy. What a crazy couple months we have had.
We lived in Virginia, surrounded by friends and family, me a carpenter and her a designer. I had an okay job, she had a pretty mediocre job but was still usually happy going to work. Dual income no kids had us getting by comfortably but the cost of living right outside of DC was high and we weren’t saving very much. Still very fortunate compared to some but felt a sort of stagnation with us moving forward in life so slowly.
She applies for a job in Juneau Alaska, pretty perfect job for her, way better pay, exactly the type of work she had been doing and wanted to do. Soo many red flags with this company she’s getting hired by, they spend hours on FaceTime calls, they do design exercises to see what kind of work she can do, and then they ghost her for like 6 months. Finally they reach back out and say they want to offer her the job.
Really bad timing as it’s peak tourist season in Juneau so it’s hard to make the move, hard to find housing, we tried to negotiate ways to make the transition better, if we could try working remote for a month and see how that goes, delaying the start date until tourism season is over, but they really want her here in person. Okay we pack up all our stuff, sell both of our cars and buy a truck, pack up as much as we can in just the truck and the smallest trailer U-Haul has and throw thousands of dollars worth of things away (we tried to give as much to friends and donate some, but still we lost a lot), we had to early cancellation on our lease which cost us a lot of money too.
They swear up and down in all of the FaceTime calls that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get her up to speed, even if she’s not quite at the level they want (hypothetically) that they would spend months working with her if that’s what it took. She gets here and it’s just immediately more red flags, they had a manager quit at one of their businesses so the head designer (whom she is taking workload off of and would be training her) is taking over and can’t work directly with her very much. I won’t detail but she obviously was working very hard given her circumstances, worked OT every week even though she was salaried, got very little feedback and had to reach out multiple times for any communication at all. After only one month of work she just got fired, they said she’s not where she should be for her position but it’s clear as day they are just shitting the bed trying to run multiple businesses and expand and they’re just bleeding money. As they were firing her they said oh you “should” be doing x y z, this is what I would want but literally 0 feedback the entire month of work, never telling her any expectations or what they would want. She has exchanged more words with neighbors we pass on the street than her boss (despite reaching out constantly).
Sorry for the wall of text but I am just lost. I found a good job so I have steady income but she is completely screwed, it’s a relatively small town there are only so many design jobs. We are out over $10,000 from this move and have absolutely nothing now to show for it. She is crushed, humiliated, and is beating herself up despite the fact that she did absolutely nothing wrong to justify being canned so quickly. She has to tell all her friends and family after this crazy move that she got fired it’s a crime that makes my blood boil and skin crawl. Who even cares about the money we’re losing we’ll find some way to get by but the injustice of these assholes playing with someone else’s life like it doesn’t even matter has just been so demoralizing to us.
I need advice for us and for her. We do like it here in Juneau but again, we only came for her job. I am fortunate that as a carpenter I can likely find work anywhere but if we stay here she is likely going to have to find work in a different career field or try and start her own business which I just don’t think we’re in a position to do. I don’t know what advice or actions I can do to help her in this difficulty and also we can’t even mourn and be sad, we incurred such a large cost to come here with the expectation of her having this income and even though my job pays better, we still need her income so she’s already looking for work but still. Sucks sucks sucks.
Sorry again for wall of text and my lack of eloquence, if anyone gave this a read and has guidance for us it will be much appreciated.
Jobadvisor
- Control the narrative with family: She shouldn't bear the shame of saying she was "fired." The factual truth is that the company suffered severe internal mismanagement, lacked the capacity to onboard her, and eliminated the role. Reframe it immediately: "The company lied about their capacity to train and support the role, experienced upper-management fallout, and pulled the plug."
- Separate self-worth from bad actors: Reassure her that ghosting candidates for 6 months and firing a salaried employee after 30 days without performance reviews or expectations is a operational failure on their end, not a skill deficiency on hers.
- Pause the immediate job panic for 48 hours: Let her grieve the move, the lost possessions, and the injustice without forcing her to apply for jobs tonight. Grief delayed turns into burnout.
- File for Alaska Unemployment immediately: She was let go without cause related to misconduct. Do not let her skip this out of pride. The state UI benefits will cushion the gap while you assess next steps.
- Document everything: Have her write down dates, hours worked, OT logged, and every unresponded email or slack message where she requested feedback. If Alaska labor laws or employment contracts were violated, having this paper trail is crucial.
- Explore remote design roles: Juneau’s local design market may be small, but remote graphic, UX/UI, and production design roles do not depend on local geography. She isn't limited to Juneau employers.
- Leverage local carpentry stability: Your skill set as a carpenter is high-demand infrastructure in Alaska. Since your income is steady, evaluate if your salary covers essential baseline expenses (rent, food, utilities) while she resets.
| Option | Pros | Cons / Action Required |
| Pivot Locally (Short-Term) | Leverages your current housing and job; keeps cash flowing. | She takes a temporary adjacent job (local government, tourism/hospitality management, administrative) while applying for remote design work. |
| Go Remote (Design Field) | Maintains her career trajectory; opens nationwide salary bands without moving again. | High competition; requires dedicated portfolio updates and time to interview. |
| Cut Losses & Relocate Back | Returns to your established support system, lower stress environment. | Costly to move again immediately; requires breaking another lease/finding jobs. |
- Handle the logistical overhead: Take over cooking, household management, and administrative tasks for the next week so her mental bandwidth isn't completely consumed.
- Be her editor and hype-person: Help her retool her resume to highlight remote capabilities, and assist in framing her brief month at this company as short-term consulting or simply omitting it entirely.
I'm being asked to train the person they hired above me for more money. How do I use this to negotiate a promotion without shooting myself in the foot?
I've been at my company for almost 4 years and gradually became the person who knows most of the day-to-day processes in my department.
My manager left a couple months ago and I temporarily picked up a lot of his responsibilities while they searched for a replacement. I wasn't promised the position, but I did tell the director I was interested.
Eventually they hired someone externally. Fine, I was disappointed but figured they wanted someone with more management experience.
Then I found out through the posted salary range that the new guy is making roughly 30% more than me.
His first week started Monday and I've now been asked to train him on basically everything. Our systems, reporting, client processes, who handles what, how we deal with recurring problems, even some procedures I personally created.
He's nice and none of this is his fault, but it's hard not to notice that I'm teaching someone how to do a job that's supposedly above mine.
Yesterday he actually asked me how long he'd need before he could handle things without checking with me, and I genuinely didn't know what to say.
I don't want to be petty or refuse to train him. What I want is to use this as evidence that my current title and compensation don't reflect what I'm actually doing.
Would it be reasonable to ask for a meeting now and say that if I'm trusted to onboard and train the person managing this function, I'd like my own role and salary reviewed?
Or is doing that immediately after they hired someone likely to make me look bitter about not getting the job?
I'm trying to approach this strategically because just quietly doing another level of work for the same salary feels pretty stupid at this point.
Jobadvisor
Your instinct is right, and the timing question has a clear answer: don't ask now, ask soon, and frame it around evidence rather than emotion.
Why "right now" is risky
You're a week into his tenure. If you request a comp review this early, it reads as reactive — like you saw the salary number and immediately escalated. Even if that's part of what happened, you don't want the meeting to be about that. You want it to be about a pattern of responsibility that predates his hire and continues independent of him.
What actually strengthens your case: let the training period generate evidence
Right now you have an assertion ("I do more than my title suggests"). In a few weeks you'll have a record: specifically what you trained him on, which of those things you personally created, and which decisions still route through you. That record is what makes the conversation hard to wave away.
So for the next 3-4 weeks, keep a simple running list — even just notes to yourself — of:
- Processes/procedures you built that didn't exist before you built them
- Client or operational issues that got escalated to you, not him
- Anything where you're clearly the one who understands the "why," not just the "how"
The framing that works
When you do request the meeting, the ask isn't "I'm upset I didn't get the role." It's closer to: "Over the last four years, and especially the last few months covering [manager]'s responsibilities, I've become the person this department runs on operationally. I'm glad to support [new hire]'s onboarding, and doing that has made it even clearer how much of this function depends on institutional knowledge I hold. I'd like to talk about whether my role and compensation reflect that."
Notice what that framing does: it doesn't mention his salary, doesn't mention that you wanted his job, and doesn't sound bitter. It also doesn't ask "why does he make more than me" — that question puts them on the defensive and invites a comparison conversation you don't need to have. You're not arguing for salary parity with him. You're arguing your own case on its own merits, using training him as one data point among several.
One more thing to sit with before that meeting
Decide in advance what you actually want. A title change? A raise to a specific number? A defined "operations lead" type role? Vague dissatisfaction is easy for a director to nod through and forget. A specific ask is something they either say yes to, negotiate on, or give you a real reason for saying no — any of which tells you something useful about where you stand at this company.
That last point matters, because if the answer is a flat no despite the evidence, that's information too — about whether this is a company that will ever pay you for what you're actually doing, versus one where you'll need to leave to get paid for it.
I resigned from a toxic workplace, so why do I feel sad instead of happy?
I had worked for this non profit 2 years prior to rehiring in a different position. The role I got rehired for was a more technical and advanced role. I actually left my old position to obtain the degree and licensure to fulfill the new role. I was really excited to be in the new position. Some leadership had changed, so I was hoping it would be better than the previous employment period. It was not.
I loved the work itself, but we were so short staffed that I never got to do my actual job. I was stuck cleaning most of the day, because it needed done, when I should be doing advanced technical procedures. On top of that, my coworker was bullying me. She would watch me under a microscope looking for any sort of mistake, and I was always terrified to make any sort of mistake or say the wrong thing because I know she would tell all the other departments what an idiot I am. All I would hear from her all day were passive aggressive comments and snide remarks. My management team wasn't of any help, even after I called multiple meetings to try to fix the issues. Three years in my new role and I'm feeling so burnt out and miserable, so I resigned. It was a really hard decision, because the good days were really good, but I can't really remember that last time I actually had a good day at work.
I left because the work environment was toxic and miserable, we could never catch up with our workload because of staffing, and my skills were plateauing. I should be happy and excited for the future, but instead, I've been weepy, sad, and I almost want to beg for my job back, even though I know it wasn't good for me. Why?
Jobadvisor
It makes sense that you feel this way, even though it seems backwards. Leaving something bad doesn't automatically feel good — it just feels like leaving.
A few things are probably tangled together here.
You didn't just lose a job. You lost a role you fought for. You left your old position, got the degree, got the licensure, all to do this specific work. And then you barely got to do it — you were cleaning instead. Grieving that isn't grieving the toxic environment. It's grieving the job you actually wanted, the one that got buried under short-staffing and never showed up the way you pictured it. That's a real loss even though walking away was the right call.
Three years of hypervigilance doesn't turn off the moment you resign. Being watched for mistakes, bracing for snide comments, worrying about what's being said about you in other departments — that's a nervous system running on alert for a very long time. When the external threat disappears suddenly, the alertness doesn't just switch off with it. Sometimes what's left in that gap isn't relief, it's just... everything you were holding, with nowhere left to put it. Weepiness after the fact is common precisely because you don't have to hold it together anymore.
The good days are doing something to your memory right now. You said the good days were really good. When something ends, the mind tends to reach for the best moments first — that's not you being irrational, it's just how memory works under loss. It doesn't mean those good days outweighed what the job actually was, day to day, most days. You already did the harder, more honest accounting when you decided to leave. The wave of "maybe I should beg for my job back" is an emotional pull, not new information.
None of this means you made the wrong call. Wanting your job back and knowing it was bad for you can both be true at the same time. That's not confusion, it's just what it feels like to leave something that had real good in it alongside the harm.
Give yourself permission to actually be off for a bit rather than expecting relief on schedule. If the sadness sticks around and starts crowding out your ability to function, or if it deepens into something heavier, it'd be worth talking to a therapist — not because something is wrong with you, but because three years of that is a lot to process alone.
This is a sensitive topic, so if you're dealing with more than low mood right now, I can help you find support resources.
I resigned from a toxic workplace, so why do I feel sad instead of happy?
I had worked for this non profit 2 years prior to rehiring in a different position. The role I got rehired for was a more technical and advanced role. I actually left my old position to obtain the degree and licensure to fulfill the new role. I was really excited to be in the new position. Some leadership had changed, so I was hoping it would be better than the previous employment period. It was not.
I loved the work itself, but we were so short staffed that I never got to do my actual job. I was stuck cleaning most of the day, because it needed done, when I should be doing advanced technical procedures. On top of that, my coworker was bullying me. She would watch me under a microscope looking for any sort of mistake, and I was always terrified to make any sort of mistake or say the wrong thing because I know she would tell all the other departments what an idiot I am. All I would hear from her all day were passive aggressive comments and snide remarks. My management team wasn't of any help, even after I called multiple meetings to try to fix the issues. Three years in my new role and I'm feeling so burnt out and miserable, so I resigned. It was a really hard decision, because the good days were really good, but I can't really remember that last time I actually had a good day at work.
I left because the work environment was toxic and miserable, we could never catch up with our workload because of staffing, and my skills were plateauing. I should be happy and excited for the future, but instead, I've been weepy, sad, and I almost want to beg for my job back, even though I know it wasn't good for me. Why?
Jobadvisor
You already asked me this one, and I think what I said still holds — but let me actually add something rather than just repeat myself.
The thing worth sitting with a bit more: you frame this as "I should be happy," like there's a correct emotional response you're failing to have. There isn't. Leaving a toxic job doesn't erase what the job cost you — it just stops the costing. The bill for three years of hypervigilance, of a role that never became what you trained for, of being quietly humiliated by a coworker while management did nothing, doesn't get canceled when you resign. It comes due after, when you're finally still enough to feel it. That's what's happening now.
The "beg for my job back" pull is also worth naming honestly: it's not really about that job. It's about the fact that uncertainty is uncomfortable and the job was certain, even when it was bad. Known misery can feel safer than unknown relief, at least for a while. That urge tends to fade as the initial disorientation settles — it's not a signal you made the wrong choice.
If it'd help, I'm glad to think through what's next with you — whether that's how to talk about this gap or this role in future interviews, how to evaluate whether a new workplace has the staffing/culture red flags this one did, or just what to do with your time right now while you let yourself decompress. What would be most useful?
are they gonna think I'm unreliable if I said I like DJing and partying when asked what my hobbies are outside of work?
Happened recently during an interview. NOT a startup but a more established software company. Engineering position. My interviewer's reactions are basically "oh, that's cool" and moved on. I'm a woman in my 20s. I genuinely just like going to parties, making friends, moving my body on the dance floor, and I recently started learning how to DJ.
I gave this answer because I thought it would show that I'm energetic, social, and communicative. Then I realized it might signal that I have higher susceptibility to burnout, lack of discipline, excessive drinking etc.
Am I overthinking this?
Jobadvisor
You're overthinking it. "Oh, that's cool" and moving on is exactly what a neutral-to-positive reaction looks like — interviewers who are quietly recalculating "unreliable" don't usually say "cool," they go a little flat or pivot fast to a work question to steer away from it. Moving on naturally is what happens after literally any normal hobby answer.
A few things worth separating out:
DJing specifically reads as a skill, not a lifestyle flag. Learning to DJ involves gear, practice, timing, reading a crowd — it's closer to "picked up an instrument" than "I go out a lot." If anything it suggests discipline and a learning curve you're pushing through voluntarily, which is a fine thing for an engineer to signal.
"Partying" is doing more work in your head than it did in the room. You know the context — dancing, meeting people, having fun. The interviewer doesn't have your internal footage of what that means; they have a two-second impression, and "she goes out and dances and is learning to DJ" is a pretty unremarkable, even likeable, answer. Nobody's drafting a burnout risk memo off that.
The read you're worried about — undisciplined, burnout-prone, drinks too much — requires several inferential leaps from "likes parties" that most interviewers just don't make in real time, especially when the rest of the interview presumably showed you're competent and articulate. Hobbies questions are typically rapport-building, not character litmus tests. They're checking "is this person a normal human I could get lunch with," not scoring you against a reliability rubric.
The energy you're spending re-litigating this answer would probably serve you better pointed at the parts of the interview that actually determine the outcome — how you talked about your technical experience, whether you asked good questions. If you're this deep in a loop over one small-talk answer, that's more about a broader tendency to replay interviews and hunt for the thing you got wrong than about anything actually wrong with what you said.