Don’t get attached to your coworkers. They’re all being fake nice
I left my previous job a year ago. My last day I was crying and hugging the people I thought I was close to.
Promises of brunch, hanging out, keeping in touch.
Almost none of them have actually followed up. The one coworker who told me through tears we should get brunch has never even attempted to arrange anything and the last time I texted to try to arrange something, she left me on read. But she did text me last night asking for a favor, so of course, priorities are in order.
So, just don’t be like me and remember these people are just being nice bc they’re being paid to be. Do your job and go home. Don’t get attached to people at your job. It will only cause you pain.
At my current job, I’ve made a strong effort to keep myself at a civil arms length from everyone so I don’t get hurt again. I am overly trusting and attach to people far too easily.
Jobadvisor
That stings in a very specific way — not just being dropped, but being dropped by someone who cried with you and then had no trouble texting when she needed something. That combination is the part that sticks.
But I'd push back gently on the lesson you're taking from it. What happened wasn't "coworkers are fake" — it's that workplace friendships, like most friendships, take real effort to survive a context change, and most people (not just coworkers, most people generally) are bad at that. Someone can genuinely enjoy you at work, mean it in the moment when they say "let's get brunch," and then just... not do the work of maintaining it once the daily proximity that created the friendship is gone. That's not fake nice. That's relationship laziness, which is incredibly common and not really about you.
The favor-text thing is a separate issue, though — that's not passivity, that's someone treating you as available when it serves her and not otherwise. That one's fair to be angry about, and you don't owe her a favor back.
Here's the thing about "civil arms length" as a policy: it doesn't actually protect you from this. It just guarantees you feel that low-grade isolation every day instead of feeling one sharp letdown occasionally. You're paying a constant cost to avoid a possible future cost. And you already know you're someone who attaches easily and cares — that's not a flaw to engineer around, it's just a fact about you that means some attachments won't pan out. The fix for that isn't fewer attachments, it's better calibration: staying open, but noticing earlier when someone's warmth doesn't have follow-through behind it, rather than assuming closeness equals a lifelong bond.
You're allowed to be guarded with this specific person. You don't have to generalize it into a rule for every person at every future job.
My company put our sick days on a leaderboard and now people are coming in sick to “win”
Our office rolled out this new “reliability challenge” a few weeks ago.
There's literally a screen in the break area showing every department and how many unscheduled absences they've had that month. Green if you're doing well, yellow if you're getting close, red if your department has the most.
The department with the fewest absences at the end of the month gets an extra half day off.
At first everyone laughed about it but now people are actually taking it seriously because nobody wants to be the person who turns their department yellow.
One woman came in coughing like crazy last week and kept saying she didn't want to cost us the half day. Imagine..
So instead of just giving people an extra half day off, they somehow invented a system where people feel guilty for using the sick time they already have.
I already hated working here before this and stuff like this just makes me care even less. I probably spend a couple hours of most shifts doing absolutely nothing at this point. I'll finish what I actually need to do and then sit there scrolling, taking long bathroom breaks or staring at my screen because I have zero motivation to give this place anything extra.
They basically found a way to make coworkers pressure each other without management having to say anything, then probably wonder why nobody gives a shit about the job anymore.
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely bad system, and you've correctly identified exactly why: it converts a health decision into a social one. Sick time is supposed to be a private, individual calculation about whether you're well enough to work. This turns it into "will my coworkers resent me," and once that's the calculation people are making, someone coughing through a shift instead of going home becomes the predictable outcome, not a rare one. That's not a side effect of the program — it's basically what leaderboards do, whether it's absences or sales or anything else you can rank people on.
It's also a cheap move in the specific sense you named: instead of spending money to make attendance better (better staffing so one absence doesn't wreck everyone else's day, actual flexibility, addressing whatever's making people miss work), they built a shame mechanism that costs nothing and outsources the enforcement to peer pressure. Management gets to stay hands-off while everyone else does the work of policing each other.
On the checked-out thing — that tracks, and I don't think it's really about the leaderboard specifically. It sounds more like the leaderboard was the moment you stopped giving benefit of the doubt to a place that had probably already been eroding your goodwill for a while. Coasting through a shift you're not motivated for isn't a moral failing, but I'd flag one thing: if you're at "few hours of doing nothing most shifts," that's a place where either something needs to change (new role, new job, a real conversation about workload) or you're going to end up resenting the job and feeling kind of bad about your own performance, which is a worse combination than either one alone.
Is the coasting a temporary "I'm mad about this policy" thing, or has it been building for a while now?
You couldn't make it up - here we go again
So, I returned to work after my 3-month suspension, all charges of gross misconduct dropped, but with an official warning on my record due to my perceived misconduct at slagging the company off (they couldn’t drop it completely, they’re trying to save face).
A month later, last Monday afternoon, my new line manager (the old one who decided that these charges were valid and determined which were gross misconduct had been promoted sideways), asks me to join him upstairs. I knew straight away that something was up as a few hours earlier the parent company HR lady had walked through the office and greeted us all.
Sure enough, she was waiting for us in the meeting room and informed me that I was on the ‘at risk of redundancy’ list, and that there may be options for me and my ongoing employment.
No, that was all bullshit, and within moments all ‘options’ had vanished, and she wanted to talk to me ‘without prejudice’ i.e., off the record, and offered me either redundancy (of which I’d get nothing as we’ve only been with the parent company 11 months) or a settlement agreement – basically another month’s salary on top of the one they’d owe me in lieu of notice (I’m currently home on gardening leave).
After much pressure last week I found a solicitor (which they insisted I needed by law), and now I’m waiting to actually receive the agreement. Pretty sure it will have all sorts of bullshit clauses in it, especially about keeping my mouth shut, but that won’t come cheap.
I guess they really do want shot of me…
Jobadvisor
That's a pretty transparent sequence when you lay it out like that — suspend you over "gross misconduct" tied to criticizing the company, drop the charges but keep a warning on file to save face, let a month go by, and then the very manager who validated the original charges is the one walking you into a redundancy conversation that turns out not to be a real redundancy at all. "At risk" list with options, then no options, then an off-the-record settlement offer, all in one meeting. That's not a coincidence of timing, that's a plan they walked into the room with.
The "without prejudice" framing is worth being clear-eyed about: it protects them from you using the conversation as evidence later, it doesn't protect you from anything. And needing a solicitor "by law" for a settlement agreement to be valid is real — but it's also convenient for them, because it puts a cost and a time pressure on you right when you're least equipped to absorb either.
A few things worth having straight before that agreement lands:
- The 11-month point matters less than you might think for the actual question of why this is happening. Under two years' service in the UK generally means no unfair dismissal claim on ordinary grounds — but if any part of this connects to you having raised concerns about the company (whistleblowing-adjacent) or the earlier disciplinary being unsound, those can be different legal territory, with different time-limit protections. That's exactly the kind of thing to put directly to your solicitor rather than assume away.
- The settlement figure they floated first is rarely the real ceiling. It's an opening number aimed at someone who hasn't had advice yet.
- The non-disclosure/non-disparagement clauses are standard, but "standard" doesn't mean fair — your solicitor can push back on scope, and typically your employer pays a contribution toward your legal fees for exactly this negotiation, which is worth confirming is being offered.
Do you have a sense yet of whether your solicitor thinks there's real leverage here, or are you still waiting to see the actual document?
Recruiters sending one scheduling link to twenty people at once needs to stop
I got an email yesterday afternoon from a recruiter saying they reviewed my application, loved my background, and wanted to set up a thirty-minute screening call. Standard stuff. They included a Calendly link and told me to pick whatever time slot worked best this week.
The email came in at 2:14 PM. I was in the middle of a work meeting, so I opened the link at 2:22 PM. Eight minutes later. Every single slot across Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday was already grayed out and completely unavailable.
i emailed the recruiter right away thinking it was a technical glitch with their calendar integration.
She wrote back two hours later saying they had filled all their interview spots for the week and would reach out if a slot opened up. They did not just send that link to me. They blasted it to twenty applicants simultaneously and turned scheduling a basic phone screen into a Ticketmaster drop. If you are not staring at your inbox ready to pounce within ninety seconds, you get dropped from the hiring pipeline entirely.
Its treating qualified candidates like contestants on a cheap game show rather then professionals with actual jobs.
How did hiring become this DISRESPECTFUL?
Jobadvisor
The Ticketmaster comparison is exactly right, and it exposes what's actually broken about it: that model makes sense when the product is genuinely scarce and everyone's competing for the same limited thing on equal footing. Applying it to job interviews is absurd because the "slots" aren't scarce at all — the recruiter could open more, extend the window, or just... not blast one link to twenty people. They manufactured the scarcity and then let it filter candidates by something that has nothing to do with the job: who happened to be phone-in-hand at 2:14 on a Tuesday.
You got penalized for being in a work meeting. At your current job. Doing the thing a reasonable employer would want you doing. There's a bitter irony in a hiring process where being a diligent, currently-employed professional is the exact behavior that costs you the opportunity.
Why it's gotten this way, as best I can tell: it's mostly volume and tooling, not a considered choice. Calendly-style links are free and frictionless for the recruiter's side, so when a role gets a flood of applicants, blasting one link is the path of least resistance — even though anyone who thought about it for ten seconds would see it turns into exactly what happened to you. It's not malice, it's just nobody on their end absorbing the cost of the bad experience, so there's no pressure to fix it. You absorb the cost, not them.
Two things worth knowing, not to talk you out of being annoyed, but for calibrating what to do next:
- This particular company's process is a real signal, and not a great one. If scheduling a screening call is this chaotic and candidate-blind, that's usually a preview of how disorganized the rest of the process — and possibly the internal culture — will be.
- It's genuinely not about you or your qualifications. You didn't lose the slot because you were a weaker candidate; you lost it because of an inbox-refresh contest that has zero correlation with fit for the role. Worth remembering when the sting starts to feel like a verdict on you rather than on their process.
If a slot opens up, are you inclined to still take it, or has this soured you on the company itself?
Reaching the point where you would take literally any job
Has anyone gotten so desperate that they'd be willing to take absolutely any job at this point? A job you know you'd absolutely hate? A job that pays minimum wage? A job that would expose you to hazards? A job with very part time hours? A job where'd you have to commute for hours? A job where half your salary would be eaten up in travel expenses? A job in a field that has nothing to do with your skill set or what you went to school for? A job where all the employees drop like flies? A job where you got a very bad vibe from the person interviewing you? A job that would be incredibly stressful and would make your life a living hell? I feel like i'm getting to that point.
Jobadvisor
It sounds like you're exhausted and running low on options — that's a rough place to be, and "I'd take literally anything at this point" isn't dramatic, it's a real stage a lot of job searches hit.
Yes, plenty of people get there. It's common enough that career counselors have a name for it — "scarcity mindset" job searching. Long unemployment stretches, dwindling savings, bills piling up... it wears down the part of you that filters for "good fit" and leaves just "will this make the immediate crisis stop." That's not a character flaw, it's just what financial pressure does to decision-making.
A few honest thoughts, not to talk you out of your feelings, but because some of the things on your list matter more than others:
Some of what you listed is just unpleasant — minimum wage, boring, outside your field, long commute, part-time. Those are "this will be hard and probably temporary" problems. People survive those and often use them as a bridge to something better. Not fun, but not dangerous.
A few things on your list are different in kind — genuine hazards, and a workplace where "employees drop like flies" (that's usually code for unsafe conditions, abusive management, or both) are worth staying alert to even when you're desperate. Desperation is exactly when bad employers count on people not asking questions. That doesn't mean turn work down — it means if you take something like that, go in with eyes open: know what protections exist, don't ignore your gut if something is actively unsafe, and treat it as a stopgap, not a life sentence.
The "bad vibe from the interviewer" one — trust that some, but don't over-trust it either. Interview nerves (yours or theirs) can look like a bad vibe when it's really just an awkward conversation. If you can, it's fine to hold that as one data point rather than a dealbreaker.
Can I ask where you're at right now — is this more "I'm scared this is coming" or "I'm actually there and about to take something rough"?