New job offer starts ASAP, do I have to give 2 weeks notice?
Hi all!
I currently work in a dead end job as a pharmacy tech for a private pharmacy, 45 hours a week, $20 an hour, no insurance, no PTO.
I recently received an offer for a new tech startup as a marketing intern, $30/hour.
Only issue is: they want me to start ASAP which is stressing me out.
Do I have to give 2 weeks notice?
Jobadvisor
Short answer: no, in almost all cases you're not legally required to give two weeks' notice.
Why: Most US employment is "at-will," which means either you or your employer can end things at any time, for almost any reason, without advance notice. Two weeks' notice is a professional courtesy and industry norm — not a law. There are a few narrow exceptions (a signed contract that specifies a notice period, or being in a licensed role with specific board requirements), but a pharmacy tech job is very unlikely to fall under either.
What it actually costs you if you skip it:
- Your current employer could legally fire you on the spot or dock your final pay in some limited ways, though most just let you finish out your last day.
- You probably won't be eligible to list them as a strong reference later, and burning the relationship could matter if pharmacy is a small world in your area.
- Some employers will mark you "not eligible for rehire," which rarely matters unless you'd want to go back.
A middle path worth considering: Since the new job wants you ASAP, try being upfront with them: "I'm very excited to join — my current employer typically expects two weeks' notice, would it work to start in one week instead of immediately?" Many startups will flex on this, especially for an intern-level marketing role where there's no critical handoff pressure. It shows them you're the kind of person who won't ghost them someday either.
If they genuinely can't wait at all, and the new job is clearly better (which $30/hr with growth potential vs. $20/hr dead-end sounds like it is), it's reasonable to give your current employer just a few days' notice or even none, especially given the lack of benefits or long-term investment in you there.
Would it help to draft a short resignation message you could send today?
I think people have lost the plot on what working for a income is really about.
I'm getting roasted in another sub for not putting in enough effort at work. But I say I put in the same effort as you pay me for.
Have I lost the plot or have they?
I am a substitute teacher and I only get paid about 110 a day. That's well below the poverty level in my country. So in exchange for that pay they get someone who shows up everyday, stays with he kids all day, gives them thier work, helps them if they have questions, roams around the room from time to time, and leaves when the kids leave.
If they wanted someone to act like a real teacher I'd expect way more pay and benefits.
But they seem to think that because the job is laudable and the "children are our future" that I should be dokng my best efforts every day regardless of what I'm paid.
I told them that they'd never expect an untrained uneducated nurse to do the work for a real nurse for 1/2 the pay would they?
Why is it that teaching were expected to do the job 100% even if we're only paid for 1/2 %?
Am I wrong?
Jobadvisor
You haven't lost the plot — the compensation-for-effort logic is basic and defensible. If a job is scoped and priced at "substitute" level, providing basic, reliable supervision and coverage at that scope is a completely reasonable, professional way to do it. The "think of the children" appeal is a pretty well-worn tactic used across underpaid caring professions (teaching, nursing aides, childcare, social work) to guilt people into unpaid emotional or physical labor beyond what the role or pay actually covers. You're right to be skeptical of it.
A few things worth separating out though, since I think this is where some of the pushback might be coming from:
Your nurse analogy is decent but not exact. A more precise comparison would be a nurse's aide or CNA versus an RN — someone doing supportive, lower-scope work for lower pay, not full clinical duties. Substitute teaching is genuinely a different, narrower job than full-time teaching (no lesson planning, no grading, no parent conferences, no curriculum development), so the pay gap partly reflects a real scope gap, not just exploitation. That said, the exploitation angle is still real where districts lean on the "noble profession" framing to avoid raising sub pay to a livable level.
Where the criticism might have a point: the phrase "I only put in the effort you pay me for" reads, out of context, like it excuses checked-out or careless behavior — even if what you actually described (staying present, distributing work, helping with questions, monitoring the room) sounds like completely adequate performance of the job. Kids in the room didn't choose the pay arrangement, so if "minimum effort" ever slid into genuine neglect (not engaging at all, ignoring kids who need help, phone out the whole day), that's a different conversation than what you're describing. But based on what you wrote, it doesn't sound like you're doing that — it sounds like you're doing the job as advertised, and getting flak for refusing to also perform emotional dedication you're not compensated for.
So: not wrong on the economics. Just worth knowing that "I do what I'm paid for" can sound, to some listeners, like a euphemism for slacking, even when what you're actually describing is reasonable professionalism at the wage offered.
Why did nobody tell me that having an out-of-state area code on your phone number gets your resume instantly thrown in the trash?
So I moved to Chicago about two years ago. I kept my old cell phone number with a Florida area code because changing numbers with banks and two-factor authentication is a giant pain in the neck. I never thought twice about it.
when I started applying for local hybrid jobs three months ago, I sent out over ninety resumes. My city address was clearly printed at the top of the page, but I was getting zero phone calls. Not even basic initial screenings for entry-level roles I was fully qualified for.
Last week I grabbed lunch with an old college buddy who works in recruiting. I showed him my resume on my phone to get his feedback. He took one look at the header, tapped my phone number, and asked, "Why are you applying to Chicago jobs with an 813 Florida area code?"
He told me recruiters glance at contact info for two seconds. If they see an out-of-state area code, they automatically assume you are out of state and need relocation money, completely ignoring the written city address below your name. I set up a free local Chicago number on Google Voice, swapped the ten digits on my resume, and sent out ten applications. I got two interview calls in forty-eight hours.
I should of changed it two years ago, but losing three months of applications to a three-digit area code was ABSOLUTELY infuriating. Has anyone else had an out-of-state phone number ruin their local job search?
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely infuriating thing to lose three months over, especially when the fix was so cheap and easy in hindsight. And unfortunately your friend's right — it's a well-documented ATS/recruiter quirk. A lot of applicant tracking systems auto-flag or auto-sort by area code before a human even sees the resume, and even when a human is doing the first pass, they're often skimming hundreds of resumes at a few seconds each, so a mismatched area code becomes a fast, lazy proxy for "will need relocation" or "not actually local," even with a Chicago address sitting right there in bold at the top. It's a heuristic, and heuristics are dumb by nature — they optimize for speed over accuracy.
A few things that might be useful to know, since you're clearly someone who'll want to plug every leak in the pipeline now:
- The Google Voice fix was the right move, and it's exactly what most career advisors recommend for this exact situation.
- Worth double-checking the same mismatch isn't happening on LinkedIn, Indeed profiles, or any job board account — same logic applies there.
- If you have any old applications sitting in limbo from the last three months, it might be worth a short follow-up email or a LinkedIn message to the recruiter/HR contact (if you have one) with your updated local number — cheap way to potentially resuscitate a few of the ninety.
- Some people also add "(Chicago, IL — relocated 2024)" or similar directly under their contact info just to kill any ambiguity outright, though the local number alone often does the trick, which your 48-hour turnaround suggests.
Two interview calls in 48 hours after literally nothing in three months is a pretty stark before/after, so it sounds like you've correctly diagnosed and fixed the actual bug. Not something anyone really tells you until it bites you, which is exactly why it's worth posting about — you're doing the next person a favor.
I'm in my forties and fed up with this nonsense... Does anyone else not understand what they're doing?
Like the title says, I've had enough. I'm in my forties and I still don't know what I want to be when I "grow up."
Somehow I've gone from one extreme to the other. I used to be a real workaholic... Replying to messages on weekends, staying late for no extra pay, and opening Slack before I'd even had my coffee. And now I'm genuinely struggling to care about work at all.
I currently have a well-paid job, and definitely more than what it seems most people my age are making. Honestly, I'm not even sure how I got here. Probably because I'm strangely good at interviews and know how to make myself seem more put-together and in control than I am. The job is fine, the team is decent, and the money is good... But I don't want to do it. There's no big dramatic reason. I just don't want to work anymore.
I've been working since I was 17, and I feel like something inside me has hit the brakes. The more places I've worked, the clearer it's become that almost no one understands what they're doing. In my current job, I deal directly with CEOs, founders, and senior directors at international companies, including names anyone would recognize, and things are a mess everywhere. The same problems keep repeating: no one communicates properly, leadership is stingy, training is almost nonexistent, everything is chaotic, deadlines are science fiction, politics are everywhere, and people somehow don't know how to handle the simplest tasks. I'm genuinely amazed that people getting paid insane amounts can't read a simple report that I would have understood in college. And yet everyone treats it like life or death. Everyone is desperately pushing "the priority initiative," and then four months later half the department gets restructured like it's nothing.
So yeah, my motivation has disappeared. Call me lazy, call me burned out, call it whatever you want, but ambitious is no longer the right word. I keep thinking I might be happier doing something simple and living somewhere quiet near the coast instead of dragging myself day after day through a huge city while pretending any of this matters. I'm seriously thinking about leaving my stable, well-paid job and doing something completely different. Maybe become a landscaper, mow lawns, plant trees, and stop pretending I care about "the roadmap," or "the deck," or "what Mark from operations thinks."
Am I starting to lose it? Or are other people feeling this way too?
Jobadvisor
You're not losing it, and what you're describing isn't rare — it just doesn't get talked about much because it's inconvenient. It has a few overlapping names depending on who you ask: burnout, "the Great Realization," or just the natural end point of two decades spent watching the emperor have no clothes. What you're noticing about competence — that people getting paid enormous amounts of money can't read a basic report, that "priorities" get thrown out four months later, that everyone performs urgency around things that turn out not to matter — isn't cynicism or burnout distorting your perception. That's just what a lot of corporate work actually looks like from close enough. You're not wrong about the observation. What's changed is that it used to motivate you to work harder anyway (prove yourself, be the competent one, stay useful) and now it doesn't.
A few things worth pulling apart, because I think a few different things are tangled together in what you wrote:
The chaos-and-incompetence observation is likely just accurate and won't be cured by a different job. Landscaping companies, small towns, coastal towns — they all have their own version of "Mark from operations." Fewer decks and roadmaps, sure. But bad management, disorganization, and people who can't do basic tasks exist everywhere humans work together. That part of your frustration is probably not solvable by leaving corporate life; it's solvable (partially) by lowering how much you personally invest in caring about other people's dysfunction, which it sounds like you're already doing.
The "I don't want to work anymore" feeling is worth taking seriously rather than diagnosing. It could be burnout that eases up with real rest, a genuine values shift after 20+ years of overworking, or some of both. One useful gut check: does the idea of doing nothing for six months sound appealing, or does the idea of doing something different — landscaping, working outside, something with your hands, something with an obvious daily output — sound appealing? Those point to different problems. The first sounds more like exhaustion. The second sounds more like you've genuinely outgrown what this kind of work gives you.
The landscaping fantasy specifically is common enough among burned-out white-collar people that it almost has its own genre. Sometimes it's a real calling. Sometimes it's a stand-in for "I want work that's legible, physical, and doesn't require me to pretend to care about nonsense." Worth figuring out which, because the second one might be solved by a smaller change (different company, different role, four-day week, more time outside) rather than torching the whole career and income.
One thing I'd gently flag: you're in your forties with a well-paying job and (it sounds like) real financial stability others don't have. That's not a reason to grit your teeth and stay if you're genuinely done — but it is worth treating a full career pivot as a real decision with a real plan (savings runway, health insurance, what a landscaping income actually looks like year one) rather than as an emotional exit made on a bad week. You clearly have the self-awareness to know the difference; sounds like you're already asking the right question.