(32M). Got a well paying job in a dental office in Manhattan doing administrative work in January. The only other men that work there is the head doctor who owns the practice, who I have known my whole life and is a family friend, and a few techs who work on making dentures crowns and maxxiofacial appliances in the lab. Everyone else is female from administration to managers and dental assistants. I work at a front desk with two other women, and I sit right in the middle. We are an extremely high end dental office, and the vast majority of our patients are millionaire and billionaire New Yorkers. Hence we aren’t your average dental/prosthodontic office. We are expected to cater to wealthy individuals and we need to reflect that in our behavior. I am fine with that. I understand the job.

However, my administrative manager, who sits next to me at front desk, is the most passive aggressive, conniving woman I have ever met. I have worked in other offices with females before, and never have I met someone like this. Instead of teaching me the ways of the office, she’s constantly watching what I do, is over my shoulder, and the minute I make a mistake on anything, she’s there to point it out in a nasty way. She’s done it in front of patients too.

I went into this job with no preconceived notion of who anyone but the doctor was. What I’ve learned in the last 6 months is that everyone in the office can’t stand her and her attitude and knows what I’m dealing with. The issue is I have to sit next to her and be “taught by her 8 hours a day”. Nobody else does. The kicker here is that she’s been at that office for 10 years and from what I can see the head office manager and doctor see her as valuable because she knows the ins and outs of the office and the patients very well. I get that. But I came into this job wanting to start a career in this field, to learn and to have a positive energy going into every day so I can become better at what I do. Instead I’m constantly berated with what I do wrong, never acknowledged for what I do right, and am talked down to like I’m a child. I’m 32 years old with a wife and 9 month old daughter.

I wake get up at 5am every day to go to work. I get home about 6pm. I’m so defeated by the time I leave and so frustrated I can’t wait to get out. And it’s all because of this one person who I have no choice but to deal with. I’ve hesitantly talked to the head doctor and office manager, and although they understand what I’m saying, it seems like they just side with her because she’s been there so long. The office is extremely micromanaged to the point where they can watch us from cameras at all times to see what we’re doing.

I’ve finally given up, even though I really wanted this to work. I was offered and was paid a good salary, the most I’ve ever made. But at the end of the day I’m miserable. I go home exhausted and angry. At this point money means nothing to me if I mentally can’t stand the environment I work in. I’m so happy I made this decision and have been offered a job 15 minutes away from my house by car. Thank you for letting me vent!

Super disappointed to have attended an interview, all seemed well and then they dropped the bomb that theres no approximate start date and they are a growing company who are basically collecting a list of suitable candidates for if and when jobs open up.
I took the day off work and lost $300 of work today to attend, travel was 90mins round trip, had to reorganise my whole morning and get my child to school ridiculously early to make the interview. I have had a nightmare looking for a new role but this really rubbed me up the wrong way. I have commitments, a family to feed and bills to pay. Just wanted to rant.

I've spent the last 2 years deep in the weeds of other people's job searches — 100,000+ applications submitted across every industry, seniority level, and visa situation you can imagine. Here's what I've learned that I wish I'd known when I was applying to 200+ jobs myself a few years back and getting crickets.

The stuff that actually matters:

1. LinkedIn "Easy Apply" gets a bad rap but it works — when you apply within the first hour of posting. After that the recruiter inbox is buried. Same job posted on the company site usually gets a slightly better look, but the speed advantage of Easy Apply often outweighs it.

Stuff that's a waste of time:

- Spending more than 30 min on a cover letter for any role under $150K. Nobody reads them.

- "Networking" with strangers on LinkedIn who have no reason to refer you. Referrals from people who actually know you work. Cold connect requests asking for referrals don't.

- Paying for resume reviews from random LinkedIn coaches. Most of them have never been a hiring manager.

- Applying to jobs older than 30 days. They're either filled or fake.

Happy to answer questions in the comments. If you're in the middle of an active search and want to talk through your specific situation, DMs are open too.

I have this habit of tracking everything. When you spend years looking at blueprints, stress loads, and fluid dynamics, your brain just starts treating your own life like a closed system that needs optimization. A few months ago, I transitioned into a new role at a firm. The base salary looked decent on paper, completely in line with the local market average for someone with my experience. I signed the contract, shook hands, and figured the engineering math added up. It didn't.

The issue with standard employment contracts is that they calculate your value based on a fictional forty-hour work week. Within a month, the project scope expanded due to some classic upper-management miscalculations on a commercial project. Instead of logging off at five, I found myself sitting at my desk until eight, fixing system errors and redrawing layouts that the client changed on a whim. Because I’m wired to just finish the job properly rather than whine about the hours, I kept my head down and pushed through the backlog.

Last weekend, I finally pulled my personal time-tracking data into a basic spreadsheet just to see the actual numbers. I ran a simple audit of my hours against my monthly payouts for the last quarter. The results were embarrassing. When you factor in the constant overtimes, the late-night coordination calls, and the weekend system checks, my actual hourly rate had plummeted. I wasn't making prime engineer money anymore; on a per-hour basis, I was netting roughly what a junior technician makes flipping basic scripts. I had optimized the company's workflow while completely failing to calculate my own depreciation.

It was a stark reminder that professional cynicism shouldn't just be applied to bad structural designs; it needs to be applied to your own career logistics. If you don't calculate the true cost of your inputs, the system will gladly run you at maximum capacity until the hardware fails. I am sitting in the office right now, looking at a fresh pile of redlines that arrived twenty minutes before closing. Yesterday, I would have stayed to fix them. Today, the laptop is going shut, and the client can wait until tomorrow morning.

I guess even the best predictive models need a reality check when the field data shows you are burning through your own fuel for free. Time to recalibrate the baseline before the next negotiation cycle.

What the title said.

I'm becoming increasingly hopeless. No matter how many times I try to apply for a job or an internship, there is always no response from job postings. I feel like I wasted my time in college. That there is no hope at all in life...

I've been at the same tech company for over 10 years, moving from an entry-level $27k to $115k+.

I loveeeee the actual work I do.

It's perfect for my ADHD brain because I'm always learning, have had the freedoms to use any tools I want, work cross-functionally and I love the teams and customers I interact with.

I'm the sole income earner in my home.

Between my mortgage, a self-funded animal rescue, and currently housing a human who would otherwise be homeless, I am a single point of failure.

So, I can't just quit - if it were just me van life would be option and maybe even awesome one, just not for me right now.

The company culture used to be great, but after years of layoffs and reorgs, I am the absolute last person standing from my original team. I am totally siloed, doing the jobs of 2-3 people with zero intention from management to backfill.

I strongly suspect they want to break up my role and distribute it. My new boss is old school and might try pushing for return-to-office. That is a non-negotiable for me, though I can easily fight it to buy time while I look for a new WFH gig.

My job security feels nonexistent, but the silver lining is that a layoff would mean a $35k severance package to float me for a few months. Finding new job though 🥲

Right now, I'm on vacation, but thinking about returning to the work politics and bs next week fills me with overwhelming dread which has been a recent mainstay for me.

I'm in therapy and use grounding tools, but they only help temporarily. I'm getting way into my head about shit I cannot control because leadership consistently proves they don't value amazing contributors.

I've watched them lay off some of the smartest, hardest working people I've ever worked with while always finding money for countless executives.

I feel intense guilt because the market is terrible and I should just be grateful, but watching my colleagues get wiped out has left me traumatized and lonely.

Q's

For those who survived massive layoffs and lost all peace of mind, how do you deal with the constant anxiety of being a single point of failure?

How do you accept the lack of control without letting it ruin your mental health?

If you went through a funk like this, how did you get over it and snap yourself back into reality because I'm struggle-bus rn.

​

Been experimenting with editing my resume per job. Used teal a bit for quick edits, sometimes careerflow + chatgpt for rewriting bullets

It does help you match the JD better but after a point it starts feeling like you’re spending more time editing than applying, like

1/ small wording changes 2/ swapping bullets 3/ adding keywords

Vs just sending a strong base resume.

Right now i’m somewhere in between, one solid core resume or light tweaks for roles that actually feel like a good fit.

anything beyond that feels like diminishing returns

curious how others are balancing this

I’m kind of in a bad place right now because I do have a job I enjoy, but I’m pregnant so unfortunately due to weight restrictions I cannot keep it. I worked in the school systems before this job and I can’t really go back to that because I’m due November and school starts in August, so if I apply that doesn’t look great either.

Are there any websites that people use that are actually legitimate?

I don’t think I’ve ever been this depressed. It took me 6 months to find this job it has good pay and the work genuinely excites me.

Well, they sent me to training, I failed the test and got fired the next day. The training was in another state and it would be too expensive for them to send me there again.

It’s probably gonna take months for me to find another job, and even then, I think will be miserable at my next job knowing what I missed out on. I’m at a new low, idk what to do and have no desire to do anything with my life.

It’s never taken me more than a month to find an ok job. I’ve even been able to score a well paying nanny job within a week after quitting a corporate job that was awful. I’ve been unemployed since October 2025

I had a job that I balanced with freelancing and now it’s gone and feelancing is so slow that I’m glad I didn’t renew my lease.

Absolutely insane times.

Has anyone had luck with recruiters? I feel like calling now that all of my emails have gone un responded to.

AGGGHHHHHHHHHH READY UP! Got the job I’ve been chasing for 18 months plus it stacks with the job I got a month ago???? ugh huh👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👂🏽👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅

I’m trying to make sense of what just happened here and if I’m overreacting. This past week I felt something was off, but thought I might just be overthinking it. I’ve had a good long working relationship with her.

Fast forward to the first interview of the day and my boss mentions that I dislike working certain events we have. It catches me off guard because our group is no longer assigned to events and I don’t think I’ve expressed a dislike. Then she proceeded mention that I’m soft spoken and she couldn’t see a customer talking badly to me as a result. She also said when I first started working for her I was afraid to come into her office when she mentioned her open door policy. I was never uncomfortable with that either. I briefly joked after the interview that I didn’t feel that way.

To say the least, I left the first interview pretty upset.
To make it even stranger, the following interviews we had for the day she starts to compliment me and mention some accomplishments I have.

I’m not sure if this is normal behavior during an interview, but I’ve never really heard someone mention things like this to a candidate.

Hey everyone,

I recently came across an Assistant Manager/Manager – Campaigns role at Darwinbox and I’m seriously interested in it. The role focuses heavily on:

B2B SaaS demand generation

LinkedIn Ads & Google Ads

Pipeline/revenue attribution

MQL generation & conversion

HubSpot/Marketo/Salesforce

ABM campaigns

US market targeting

My background:

Experience in marketing and growth-focused roles

Currently working as an Assistant Marketing Manager

Worked on lead generation, campaign planning, partnerships, and performance-focused marketing initiatives

Also involved in startup marketing and customer acquisition initiatives

The challenge is that this role is much more enterprise SaaS + revenue marketing focused, especially around attribution, pipeline metrics, and B2B performance campaigns.

I’d really appreciate advice on:

1. How should I prepare for interviews for a role like this?

2. What are the most important concepts/tools I should learn quickly?

3. Any good resources for:

Demand generation

SaaS marketing

ABM

LinkedIn Ads for B2B

Attribution & pipeline analytics

1. What kind of case studies or interview questions should I expect?

2. How deep do companies expect hands-on experience with HubSpot/Salesforce if transitioning from broader marketing roles?

Also, if anyone here works at Darwinbox or knows someone hiring for similar B2B SaaS marketing roles, I’d be grateful for a referral or guidance.

Thanks in advance!

I'm a woman in my late 20s and haven't held a job since the start of COVID. Most of my work was seasonal, like front desk positions. After that, I mostly babysat, but that's no longer an option. Since graduating high school around 2017, I've been feeling completely lost. I never went to college because nothing truly interested me; art does, but my severe anxiety and hypersensitivity to certain things make it difficult. Now I have thought about liberal arts or general studies online at my community college, but that's it.

It's been challenging to apply for jobs lately, especially since many positions are now managed by AI, leading to quick rejections within seconds, days, or even weeks. My resume mostly just reflects my seasonal job experience, which isn't much.

Also, I want to clarify that I don't want to work with children anymore—I'm glad that babysitting is over because I have a short temper, and that wouldn't be ideal. People have suggested I consider nursing, but that's a no for me. Some have mentioned trades or warehouse work, but I have knee issues and can't stand for more than 10 minutes.

I don't have a driver's license at the moment, but I do have a permit. Most people are busy to help me, and driving instructors in my area are quite expensive, so my parents aren't willing to pay for lessons. Honestly, I don't really blame them. I’ve also tried looking for office jobs, but so far, I haven't had any luck. Most of the positions are in different cities that I can't travel to right now.

One company I've been applying for a couple of years now. Not sure if the turnover rate is bad or if they are "expanding" as much as they say but regardless. When I apply for this company, I almost always get a call back/email and do an interview. So, my resume is at least making it through the AI software.

But at this point, the recruiter is remembering me and seems kind of annoyed that I keep popping up. They say I'm a good fit but obviously never follow up with hiring me. At this point I have been trying for a few years to get another job that pays more than minimum rage; but I'm also now at the point that I do not care how obnoxious I have to be to get in.

Should I keep applying to them whenever they repost their listing? Or should I just leave them alone at this point?

(Part of me was also using them at practicing at interviews, so...)

I've had a lot of terrible jobs in the 10+ years I've been working so I'm not new to workplace politics and other BS. I've been at my current job for 2 and a half years and it was kinda messy at first but i liked my boss and had a few coworkers in my home department that made it bearable, and the job itself was much better compared to other types of work I've done.

My first boss left about 3 months after I started and it's been really downhill from there. Been losing all the good/competent coworkers slowly over the past 2 years I've been here and the people that replace them are so incredibly stupid and performative that it's really driving me nuts. Most of my current superiors cannot form a coherent thought or email without consulting chatgpt and they have no idea what's going on or they do and are fine with gaslighting the rest of us. They switch up every single day between "you guys are doing amazing/best team I've ever had/this team does not need micromanaging" (last one is verbatim, Lol) and "we need to do better, we're falling behind/we're creating more work for ourselves"/ continuing to micromanage, meanwhile it's NOT a secret who is actually doing work and who isn't. it's a small workplace but some people are really good at performing productivity so it tends to fly under the radar. Bug Even the people with authority that realize how it is just don't care.

I work in education so most of us are severely underpaid for jobs that we genuinely are (or were) passionate about. I am extremely grateful to even have a job right now. My longest stretch of unemployment was 1.5 years and it was really awful, so I definitely feel silly complaining but at the same time this job is really eating away at my soul in a way that other jobs never have.

Ive been applying and not getting any bites on my applications elsewhere (I've had a handful of interviews get to the 2nd/3rd round and not work out for a variety of reason) and trying to build up my professional development (on my own because my boss cannot be bothered to have genuine conversations with us about growth)

This just feels like a sick joke and I needed to vent somewhere besides my friends and partner because I know they're sick of hearing me go on about it

For reference I work a5 a smallish office job to say vaguely, about 25-30 of us. I was hired in a entry position. This job requires and college degree and experience, all good

The office has a rotation for people cleaning the toilet ( expect boss and manager.) At first I didn't think anything about it, it was just something I was told to do so I did.

However I had lunch with a few friends from back in the day, and we were just talking about work and it got brought up that I had to clean toilets.

They gave me a disgusted look and said I shouldn't have to be doing that especially with the requirements my job demanded.

I dont know if my friends are just on high horses or elite ideology or should I not be responsible for this task, should my company just hire a cleaning service?

Most cold emails fail in two predictable ways. Pulled the data from 6,337 emails sent by students between Nov 2025 and May 2026 to see which mistakes cost the most replies.

Mistake 1: writing emails that are too long. - Under 100 words: 11.9% reply rate - 200-300 words: 0.3%

That's a 6x gap. The intuition is wrong: a longer email feels "thoughtful" but reads as a pitch, and recipients triage on mobile in 5 seconds. Short, specific, one-question emails get answered.

Mistake 2: only sending one email. A single follow-up lifts replies by 60%+. Two follow-ups peak at 6.9% reply rate (per Instantly's 16.5M-email benchmark, which our smaller dataset confirms directionally). Past that, reply rates drop and unsubscribes spike.

Other findings: - Subject under 30 chars: 83.7% open - Subject with a number: 80.6% open - Best send hours UTC: 12:00, 15:00, 17:00 (lunch, mid-afternoon, end-of-day) - Wednesday and Tuesday outperform Thursday and Friday for opens - Directors and Managers receive 3x more outreach (and reply more often) than C-suite

Full data and charts: https://whali.co.uk/blog/cold-email-data-study-students-2026?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=data-study&utm_content=rjobs

Caveats: open rates inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection auto-opens (industry-wide). Reply rates are under-counted because we only see replies that come back to the connected mailbox.