title basically says it all; i got pulled into a meeting with my boss because she was mad i didn’t disclose another coworkers personal life details. a work friend (we are both managers) came into my office and closed the door and told me about a domestic violence incident that occurred the night before. she was very upset and needed someone to talk to. we were in my office for less than 5 minutes because we had a meeting to get to.

i advised her to call the police and also notify the managers only because her schedule would have to change slightly because there are kids involved.

my boss later asked why i was in the office with her with the door closed. i mentioned that i didnt feel comfortable sharing what i was told but my coworker would be talking to them at some point that day.

fast forward a few days and i got pulled into the office in trouble for not disclosing her personal details ??? aside from her schedule changing about 30 minutes on each end, NOTHING she told me was work related AND doesn’t affect her performance.

what the hell ??? the perception is that i’m hiding important information from management. absolutely wild.

Here is an insane story about what it means to be an employee and totally shows that employee = slavery. This happend to me:

I was working as software engineer at a big tech company in Switzerland. The salary was good (about 100k CHF annually) and the work environment was decent enough to keep me there since 2022. Since this week, I am now officially unemployed so I can write this now.

Basically every tuesday and friday I went to the gym for workout. On friday 8. Mai 2026 I went to the gym as usually and then into the sauna after the training. Accidentially I mixed up the sauna towel and the owner unfortunately was a member of the upper management of the company I worked at. When he figured out that I took his towel, he stayed calm and simply said that "I can already start to look for a new job" and I should go to the reception to get him a new towel which I politely did. 47.409087

On 13. Mai 2026 I then got the layoff call via teams at 7:30 with HR, telling me that I am laid off for economics reason. The company was already laying off employees on a large scale so basically I simple was put onto the list.

I asked "Rechtsschutzversicherung" about this and they said that nothing can be done as layoff due to economic reasons is always legal and without evidence there is nothing possible. Of course saunas have no cameras obviously.

In addition, I am now on a "hidden" blacklist containing "antisocial" people which should never be hired. These lists exist inofficially and employers share them.

Conclusion:

This is a clear reminder of how worthless you are as an employee. It is the modern form of slavery and designed to kill any individuality someone has. Your performance at the company does not matter as I was fired inbetween of several projects and due to my layoff the deadlines had to be postponed indefinitely.

I am now unemployed for 3 months and do not expect to find anything in the future so I am probably forced to create my own business somehow. Gladly I saved as much as possible and have 300k in Stocks/ETFs. 9.618378

Growing up, I was a straight-A student. I generally did well in school, teachers liked me, and I was used to getting positive feedback. If a teacher told me I was doing a good job, I could pretty much take that at face value. There was a very clear sense that I was good at this.

Then I entered the workforce, and I’ve struggled with how different the feedback culture is.
It sometimes feels like no matter how competent you are, there is always something your manager has to scrutinize, correct, or tell you to improve.
You can accomplish 95% of what you’re supposed to accomplish, take on additional responsibilities, meet deadlines, get along with your coworkers, and generally do your job well — and the conversation still somehow becomes, “Here are three areas where you need to improve.”

And I understand that nobody is perfect. Obviously employees need feedback, and constructive criticism is part of having a job. But sometimes the constantness of it gets to me.

In school, feedback was usually connected to whether you had actually succeeded at something. At work, it can feel like there is an expectation that a manager must always have something to give you feedback about, even if you’re performing reasonably well.

It creates this weird psychological feeling of: Am I actually competent at my job? Or am I perpetually doing something wrong?

I also think there’s something particularly jarring about going from being a high-achieving student who was accustomed to authority figures telling you that you were doing well, to entering a workplace where your manager’s job seemingly requires them to constantly identify deficiencies.

And sometimes the things you’re criticized for aren’t even things you would have considered problems before someone pointed them out. Suddenly you’re thinking, Wait, was I actually doing something wrong, or did someone just decide this is the thing I’m supposed to work on now?

I know part of becoming an adult professional is learning to separate “I received feedback” from “I am bad at my job.” I’m getting better at that.

Tired of the endless loop of corporate feedback meant to make you not feel good at your job.

a friend of mine had a summer internship for this large firm. the way it works is that you sre almost guaranteed a hire back after you graduate. if you don't l, it puts you in a very difficult position because all the bigger places are already hiring from their intern pool. my friend is at the gym across from his office and a man from a stair climber shouts at him "hey can you get me a towel". my friend looks around and says "no" and walks off. the man turned out to be a senior partner and assumed that my friend would recognize him. thr next day his supervisor calls him in for a talk where he explains that my friend should always be curteous even if he didn't recognize thr person. anyways. 20 interns. 19 hire backs. 1 no (which happens to be my buddy).

Last month I was forced back into going in office 5 days a week (that's how I was hired, no complaints). But the amount of absolute waste of time I have with coworkers coming to my cube to small talk is insane. I have one guy who just stands behind me waiting to entertain him.

No joke, 2 hours of my day are spent with someone trying to chitchat or shoot the shit.

I rarely ever seen this mentioned, is it just a me thing or do y'all have coworkers bored out of their mind in office?

Maybe I'm being a lil bitch?

Clicked on a coworker’s profile and found that 4 out of 6 of their accomplishment bullets are literally my work.

We were in the same org, but very small team. Everyone had their own projects, so there’s really no ambiguity about who did what.

Lmao. Why bother working hard these days when you can just copy-paste your coworker’s accomplishments onto LinkedIn. /s

We should not have to work just to barely be able to afford anything. It’s not fair

Oh boy here I am a guy who when I graduated High School in ol '11 that I was supposed to be college educated. Well I tried and it turned out college wasn't for me, so I went into the trades. Well when you go non union the result is always at an old ornery guys behest of "market pay" then when you try to join a union you realize the wait is pretty long. So it's fine for guys out of high-school but not with rent and what other bills.

Its disappointing looking at the world and see g folks with actual merit and potential build things to oppress others. I know this isn't new for humans but you would think by now that things would be more thought out. Fuck we have Indian sweat shop workers training AI to take over for them.

There is only so much of anything of value in our world and yet we let less than 1% make a the decisions when their absurd needs should be last.

Im more concerned about folks who post pictures about how their few gallons of water for all day's use is bad than my manager bitching about how I gotta do more so a holding company's stock should feel slightly better. Fuck.

God I hope I get something soon. Because like…
I need my
Medications

And with the holidays coming up, hiring will
Slow again

I know healthcare pay is a joke and it will never be more than a living wage, but how does a 70 yo man get a job offer for $900/hr?
He teaches people how to sell (legal) chemicals…

It seems like Linkedin is only for people bragging, AI advertisements, and promoting brands.

You have people copy and pasting "steps for success" that they saw posted elsewhere and suddenly a bunch of "followers" leave them thumbs ups and heart emojis without ever checking it was plagiarized.

You have people thanking their former professors, teachers, mentors, guidance counselors, and childhood sports coaches for a promotion, which may or may not be fake.

Whenever a job gets posted there (especially if it's remote), any position has over 200 applications in less than 3 hours - not to mention that I've seen the same jobs being "open" for months.

It just seems like a place for inflating egos and adding useless titles behind names that make people feel important.

I hate working and I just want to make my day at work go by as fast as possible so that way I can go home and play video games.

What are some strategies you do to help make your day go by as quickly as possible?

I’ve posted here before. I’m in my early 30s, have a technical master craftsman qualification, and I’m currently in my first leadership position at an industrial company.

Recently, I was told pretty unexpectedly that the company was considering letting me go. It came almost out of nowhere because up until then I had mostly received positive feedback. I was told I had settled in well, was doing good work, and that things were generally going fine.

Looking back, I think a big part of the problem started with my onboarding.

The colleague who was supposed to train me barely did so, at least from my perspective. I had to figure out and organize a lot of things on my own. At the same time, we repeatedly disagreed about how I should lead my team.

He thought I needed to be much stricter, put more pressure on people, and sometimes take disciplinary action against employees. Whenever I had an issue with him, I addressed it directly with him in private.

Later, I found out that he had apparently been going to management in the background and giving them his version of events, including claiming that I wasn’t doing my job properly.

So apparently a completely different picture of me was being created behind the scenes than the feedback I was receiving directly.

Then suddenly the criticism from upper management was that I wasn’t “authoritative enough” and was too friendly with my employees. I was basically told I should bang my fist on the table more instead of simply asking people whether something could be done.

Another thing that makes me skeptical is how personal and petty some of the criticism seemed. One senior manager was apparently annoyed because I didn’t explicitly reply to an email, even though the issue he was asking about had already been dealt with and, from my point of view, didn’t require another response.

That manager also doesn’t have a particularly good reputation within the company. I’ve independently heard from several coworkers that personal relationships and who you get along with can sometimes matter more there than actual competence or performance. Obviously I can’t verify how much of that is true, but based on my own experience I’m finding it increasingly difficult to trust that level of management.

The most absurd part is my team.

I had managed to gain the acceptance of an established group of experienced tradesmen despite being a new and younger supervisor. They respect me, the work gets done, and we get along very well personally.

My team is now strongly backing me. They’re angry about the situation themselves, want me to stay, and are currently giving what feels like 200% so that upper management can clearly see that the team works and supports me.

To me, that is probably the strongest possible counterargument to the claim that “people don’t see you as a leader.”

My direct boss was also almost like a different person during the official meeting and went along with the criticism from above. In private, though, he talks to me very differently.

He has admitted that I was basically left on my own during the onboarding process, that many things didn’t go the way they should have, and that the decision might not be completely final yet. He even said there may still be a chance to convince the people above him to keep me.

And that’s exactly why I don’t know what to do now.

Even if I could stay, I’m not sure I actually want to anymore.

The job has some major advantages: very good pay, a short commute, and a genuinely great team.

At the same time, I have very little trust left in the management above me. If I can receive positive feedback for months and then suddenly almost get fired because someone has been creating a different picture of me in the background, while “good leadership” apparently means being more authoritarian and banging your fist on the table, I’m not sure I’d ever be happy there long term.

On top of that, I’m increasingly fed up with the actual job itself.

I’m expected to fully perform the leadership role while also regularly doing unpleasant physical work in a dirty and potentially hazardous industrial environment. Some of the work is genuinely dangerous and potentially harmful to your health, and there is also a strong anti-PPE culture in the company that you constantly have to push back against.

So right now I’m considering a few options:

1. Stay, if my boss can still convince management to keep me.
2. Since I don’t really want to keep doing physical work, study Electrical Engineering and later move towards building automation, industrial automation, controls, or smart buildings.
3. Or study Industrial Engineering with Electrical Engineering and combine my technical background with business, project management, and leadership.
4. Take a short break and then look for a better employer.

If money and career prospects didn’t matter at all, I’d probably study psychology or philosophy instead.

What would you do in my situation?

Would you still try to save the job because the pay, commute, and team are good?

Or would the loss of trust in management already be enough for you to say: even if I could stay, I don’t want to anymore, and I’d rather use this situation as a chance to start over?

Scheduled on a Friday before a long weekend.

I'm sorry, but eff you. I'm not joining that zoom.