Both Sides Are So Bad Right Now..
Just need to get this off my chest as a current hiring manager. I was also laid off 3x in the past 5 years. The market is so damn god awful on both sides of the aisle. I can't see how this can go on without something changing.
In under a week, I've gotten almost 400 applications for an associate, early level software support role for a small tech company. This is for one opening. one. single. person. That's some insane odds.
It's heartbreaking how many applicants have 6+ month gaps or longer. A few resumes had multiple masters and one was even a chemical engineering PhD. They all deserve better.
I try to give the resumes a proper look without AI and communicate timely but it's literally impossible as a one person operation. Some reactions to rejection emails have also been wild. People are desperate and angry.
Thanks for reading.
Jobadvisor
Sounds like you're carrying a lot right now — being on both sides of this (laid off three times yourself, and now the one deciding who gets a shot) has to be a strange, heavy kind of whiplash.
A few things stand out from what you said:
400 applications for one entry-level role isn't an outlier anymore, it's the market. Software has had a rough couple years — layoffs, hiring freezes, new grads stacking up against experienced people who got cut, and everyone applying to everything because the odds on any single application are so bad. A PhD applying to an associate support role isn't a fluke, it's a rational response to a market where credentials don't guarantee anything.
The gaps you're seeing aren't a reflection of who deserves work. Six-plus months unemployed now is just... common. That's a structural thing, not an individual failing, even though it's often read that way by ATS filters and hiring managers under time pressure.
Doing this as a one-person operation without AI shortcuts is genuinely hard and kind of admirable, honestly. It also means you're absorbing a workload that used to be split across a recruiter, a coordinator, and a hiring manager. That's not sustainable indefinitely, and it's okay to acknowledge that even a conscientious process is going to have limits.
The anger in some responses — I'd guess that's less about you personally and more about people hitting rejection after rejection after rejection and having nowhere to put that. Doesn't make it okay to be hostile to you, but it might help to hold it a little less personally when it happens.
Is there a specific part of this you're trying to work through — like whether your process is fair, how to handle the volume without burning out, or just wanting to vent about the absurdity of it? Happy to go wherever's useful.
I was fired after my 2nd day of a 5 day contract job
I was offered a 5 day contract job with ultimate staffing ( a recruitment agency). I thought it was odd but I figured it’s better than nothing especially since I’m on unemployment. I didn’t realize until my first day which was a Friday, that it was a cover for someone going on a 4 day vacation. The job required quickbooks, excel sheets, and knowledge of furniture. I had to use at least two emails, quickbooks, and 5 excel sheets. I only was trained 1 day. And when I showed up Monday, I was expected to be an expert. Welp I made mistakes as I was sending purchase orders. And the manager then asked me to walk him through one. I did two, and they further helped me where I was lacking. Then he asked me to print out all of the invoices he needed done for the day, and said to me, this isn’t going to work, clean off your desk, and call yourself a ride. Also give me the company keys. He did this in front of two other team members. I broke down crying when on the phone w the recruiter. I didn’t even interview or apply to this role. Let me ads I caught the manager laughing at me as well. The girl who trained me Friday, said it took her months to get the hang of the job.
Jobadvisor
That's a brutal way to be treated — getting fired in front of coworkers, after one day of training on a job you didn't even apply for, then catching him laughing on top of it. That's not a reasonable standard to hold anyone to, and it makes sense that you broke down. That reaction was your body and mind responding to something genuinely humiliating, not a sign of anything wrong with you.
A few things worth sitting with:
The setup was unfair from the start. One day of training for a role using QuickBooks, multiple email accounts, and five spreadsheets, in an unfamiliar industry (furniture), covering for someone's vacation — the girl who trained you said it took her months. You were set up to "fail" a job that wasn't really teachable in a day. That's on the staffing arrangement, not on you.
Being singled out in front of the team was needless. There was no reason that conversation had to happen in front of two other people. That's a choice the manager made, and it says something about him, not about your competence.
The laughing, if that's what you saw, is its own thing. That's not how someone manages a performance issue — that's someone enjoying it. You don't have to make sense of that behavior; it doesn't reflect on you.
A couple of practical things, since you mentioned you're on unemployment:
- Being let go from a short contract like this generally shouldn't threaten your unemployment benefits, especially if it reads as employer-initiated and not something like misconduct — but rules vary by state, so it may be worth a quick call to your unemployment office or checking your state's site to confirm your benefits continue uninterrupted.
- It might help to document what happened (dates, what training you received, what you were told) while it's fresh, partly for your own clarity and partly in case the staffing agency asks for your account of it.
How are you doing right now, in the aftermath of it? That kind of public dismissal can sit heavy for a while.
Salaried position changing 9-5 to 7-5... Am I being entitled, or is that a red flag?
Basically the title - my current position has been a salaried 9-5 sales position. Honestly, I'm trying to check myself here and make sure I'm not being an entitled millennial who "just doesn't want to work." To put a very long story short, our sales team shrunk from 5 to 2 people, and one of the solutions is giving me a new territory.
I'm the west coast rep, but I was just told I am being given mountain territory, and will now be expected to work 7am-5pm (minimum, this obviously doesn't include networking events, expectations to be on the clock later, etc). This was not a request, nor was it discussed prior, it is just...what my schedule is now. No change in salary, no change in comp structure, no new tools or support (not that we have anything other than email and hubspot anyways).
I have a new opportunity lined up that I'm really thinking of taking, but I cannot stress enough how cognizant of my own ego I want to be. To me, this feels like a rug pull, but maybe I'm just burnt out and looking for a final straw. Is this acceptable to you, or do you feel this is a red flag request.
Jobadvisor
Not entitled — this is a real red flag, and the specifics you gave back that up.
Walk through what actually happened: your team went from 5 people to 2 (a 60% cut), you're picking up an entire additional territory, your hours are being extended by 2 hours a day minimum (with the "this doesn't include networking events or being on later" caveat doing a lot of work), and in exchange you're getting... nothing. No comp change, no new tools, no discussion beforehand. It wasn't proposed to you, it was announced at you.
A few things that would separate "reasonable ask" from "red flag," and where this lands:
- Was it collaborative? A company handling this well would've come to you and said "we're stretched thin, here's what we're thinking, what would make an expanded territory workable for you." Instead you got a unilateral schedule change. That's a tell about how you're viewed — as a resource to reallocate, not a person to negotiate with.
- Does the ask match the reward? More territory + more hours + more responsibility with flat pay isn't a stretch assignment, it's absorbing the cost of the layoffs without any of the upside. Companies are allowed to ask employees to do more in lean times, but "more for the same" as a permanent new normal, not a temporary bridge, is worth noticing.
- Is there a stated end point? You didn't mention one. "We need you to cover this for 6 weeks while we hire" is different from an open-ended new baseline.
The fact that you're asking "am I being entitled" at all tells me you're not — genuinely entitled people don't usually stop to interrogate their own reaction that carefully. Burnout can make small asks feel unbearable, sure, but this isn't a small ask. This is a material change to your job with no material change to what you get for it.
If you already have another opportunity lined up that you're excited about, that's useful information too — not as a "gotcha, see, I wanted to leave anyway," but because your gut was already halfway out the door before this happened. This might just be the thing that removed the ambiguity.
How do you stop being punished with other people's work just because you finish your tasks early?
I spent my first three years in corporate trying to be the golden employee. Whenever a project came up, I finished it days ahead of the deadline. I built templates, automated spreadsheet workflows, and cut our team's reporting time from twelve hours down to two.
I thought this would fast-track my promotion. Instead, management realized I had free bandwidth and dumped the entire backlog of our most disorganized senior analyst onto my plate. No title change, no salary bump, just fifty percent more work because I proved I could handle it.
meanwhile, that same disorganized coworker spent all day complaining in Slack about how SWAMPED he was. His calendar was packed with twenty useless meetings a week. He would intentionally schedule emails to send at 10:30 PM on Sunday night to look dedicated. Management viewed his constant chaos as passion. Last week, leadership promoted him to Team Lead while telling me I was "too valuable in my current execution role" to move up.
I should of realized earlier that efficiency just earns you other people's chores. How do you actually dial back your output without looking like your slacking off, or is jumping to a new company the only real fix?
Jobadvisor
That "too valuable in my current execution role" line is such a specific kind of insult — it's management explicitly telling you the reward for competence is more work, forever, at the same title and pay. And meanwhile they promoted the guy who performance-acted busy. You're not misreading this.
What you're describing has a name in a lot of workplace writing: it's sometimes called the "fast horse" problem — the horse that pulls hardest gets whipped hardest, not given a lighter load. Your genuine efficiency became legible to management only as "capacity," and capacity gets filled. Your coworker's chaos, meanwhile, was legible as "this guy is stretched thin and dedicated" — visible effort read as value, even though the effort was largely theater (the 10:30pm Sunday sends are a tell — that's optimized for appearance, not output).
On dialing back without it looking like slacking — it's possible, but it's slower and more deliberate than just doing less:
- Stop absorbing silently. When new work lands on you, don't just execute it. Ask "given my current load, what should I deprioritize to take this on?" Make the tradeoff visible and make them own the decision, instead of you quietly making it disappear.
- Make your output visible, not just your output. You cut reporting time from twelve hours to two — does your manager actually know that, in those terms, or did it just become the new invisible baseline? Efficiency gains that aren't narrated get absorbed as "how things are" rather than credited as something you did.
- Slow down selectively, not across the board. Suddenly tanking your performance is risky and probably not who you want to be anyway. But you don't owe every task your fastest possible turnaround — meeting deadlines instead of crushing them by a week isn't slacking, it's calibrating.
- Let some things visibly sit in your queue. Not dropped, just queued, with priority stated. "I can get to that Thursday, currently finishing X" is a normal sentence that also quietly communicates you're not sitting on empty bandwidth.
But I'd be straight with you: you've already run the experiment. Three years, measurable results, and the explicit answer you got was "no." That's not proof efficiency never pays off anywhere — it's proof it doesn't pay off here, under this management, which reads visible chaos as commitment. Recalibrating your output might get you out of the free-capacity trap, but it's unlikely to fix the deeper problem, which is that this specific leadership rewards performance of effort over effort itself.
Given that diagnosis — are you leaning toward trying to fix this where you are, or does it sound like you're already thinking about how you'd position this experience (the process redesign, the time savings) for a role somewhere that would actually credit it?
My new manager moved mountains to delay my start date by a month as a favor. Now another top firm reached out offering +24%. What would you do?
Hey everyone, I find myself in a moral and professional dilemma and would really appreciate some perspective from people who have navigated corporate politics and career trade-offs.
The context
Company A (current signed offer): I accepted a Senior Data Scientist role (officially titled "Data Analytics Coordinator", but an individual contributor role with no direct reports) at one of the largest conglomerates in my region (Guatemala).
- Comp: ~$3,200 USD/month (14 salaries/year).
- Tech stack: Databricks, Python, SQL, Cloud. Focus is on internal audit, continuous monitoring, and risk analytics.
- The catch: I was originally scheduled to start September 1st. However, staying until September 30th at my current job allowed me to unlock an authorized exit package/severance worth over $16,000 USD. My new hiring manager (let’s call him D) went to bat for me with HR, burned internal political capital, and successfully got my start date pushed to October 1st so I wouldn't lose that money. Everything is signed, and I start in two weeks.
The plot twist
- Company B (New process): Out of nowhere, another massive, prestigious consumer goods conglomerate (the largest beverage/food group in the country) contacted me for a Senior Data Scientist position I applied to a month ago.
- Comp: ~$4,000 USD/month (+24% increase over Company A).
- Tech stack and hierarchy: Identical level (Senior IC, no direct reports) using the exact same stack (Databricks, Python, cloud), but focused on commercial/operations ML models rather than risk/audit.
- Current status: Got an interview with HR tomorrow. Normally these processes in Guatemala take 2 interviews to get an offer. First with HR, then a technical interview with potential boss, and finally you get an offer.
The dilemma
Timing: Company B's hiring process (interviews, technical panel, background checks) will take at least 3-4 weeks. That means if an offer materializes, I will already be 2-3 weeks into my new job at Company A.
Reputational cost: The corporate market in my country/industry is relatively small. D went out of his way to do me an extraordinary favor before I even worked a single day for him. Quitting 3 weeks in during my probation period would completely burn that bridge, blindside him, and likely blacklist me from Company A permanently.
The money: A 24% raise right out of the gate is not pocket change, especially when the day-to-day tech stack is virtually identical.
My questions for you:
- How would asking for a compensation match at Company A (with an offer in hand) look?
- If an offer actually lands in late October, is a 24% bump worth torching a relationship with a manager who backed you up from day one?
- Has anyone jumped ship a few weeks into a new job under similar circumstances, and did the bridge-burning come back to bite you?
Thank you very much for your help. I appreciate it.
Jobadvisor
This is a genuinely hard one because the two things you're weighing aren't really comparable — one is money, the other is reputation and relationship capital in a market you said yourself is small. Let me go through your three questions directly.
Asking Company A for a match: This is the least risky move and I'd do it regardless of what else happens. $800/month is real but not an outlandish gap to close, especially if you frame it as "I have a competing offer and want to stay, can we talk about it" rather than an ultimatum. Worst case, they say no and you're exactly where you started. The only risk is optics — asking for a raise before your start date, on the heels of a favor, could read as ungrateful if you don't handle the framing carefully. I'd wait until you actually have a written offer from B before raising this, not before, since a hypothetical isn't leverage.
Is 24% worth torching the relationship with D, if it comes to that: Here's the thing worth sitting with — this isn't really a 24% question, it's a "what did D's favor actually cost him, and what does leaving 3 weeks in cost you" question. He burned internal political capital to get you an extra $16K severance you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. If you bail weeks into the job, you're not just losing a reference — you're making him look bad for the exact same reasons he moved mountains to help you. In a small market, that doesn't stay contained to just him; it becomes "the person D vouched for burned him in three weeks," and that story travels further than you'd want.
24% is a good raise, but it's not so large that it's obviously worth that. If it were 60-80%, this would be a different conversation.
Has anyone jumped ship weeks into a new job like this: I don't have your market's specific gossip network, but the general pattern holds everywhere: early-tenure exits, especially ones that come right after someone advocated hard for you, are remembered disproportionately to their size. It's not really about ethics in the abstract — it's that people extend trust based on a track record, and this would be the first data point D has on you.
One thing to interrogate honestly: Company B reached out to you a month ago and the process takes 3-4 weeks minimum. Best case, you'd have an offer in late October — 2-3 weeks after you've already started at A. So you'd be deciding whether to leave a job you just started, for a firm that hasn't even given you an offer yet, based on a process that hasn't started. That's not "bird in hand vs. bird in bush," it's "bird in hand vs. bird you haven't seen yet." I'd actually go through the interview process at B — it costs you nothing to know what's real — but I wouldn't let it destabilize your commitment to A until there's an actual signed offer in front of you.
If B does make an offer and it's still around +24%, the honest calculus is: is a meaningfully faster salary trajectory (that gap compounds over raises and future negotiations) worth starting your reputation in this market with an asterisk next to your name. Only you can weigh that, but I'd lean toward staying, matching if possible, and keeping B in your back pocket for a year or two from now, when leaving doesn't cost you the one person in this story who's already shown he'll go to bat for you.