• ebolapie@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Oh, I could bitch about this for hours. Minimum wage starting, but cross-train and we’ll bump your pay by a dollar for every role you’re certified in! Will we ever schedule your certification? Hell no! Contribute to our Continuous Improvement program to get bonuses! Do we ever actually process CI tickets to completion? lol no get fucked buddy, anyway you’re staying late tonight because the VP just sold another 100 units we don’t even have the parts for yet and we’ve scheduled delivery for Sunday.

    Ahem. Anyway, I think we’re coming at this from different perspectives and our experiences with the job market differ accordingly. You’ve got a network and an impressive CV, and my skills are harder (for me, at least) to express on paper and I’m more or less disposable. So whereas they try to sell stuff that may or may not be a good deal to you as “the opportunity of a lifetime” they use the same gilding to try to get me to huff paint for 12 hours a day. I’m not sure where I was going with this but thank you for listening.

    edit: realizing now that this post amounts to me complaining about my lot in life but I wanna clarify that I respect most career professionals and I do recognize that you guys work hard too.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      I’m more or less disposable

      Hey buddy. If they’re hiring, you’re not disposable. Managers come in a variety of flavors. Sometimes you get Peppermint Stupid. But also know your labor is worth more than their salary and without you their bills don’t get paid.

      There’s power in a union. But even on your own, you can exert a surprising amount of leverage by finding your niche, establishing your criticality, and then setting boundaries on when you’re going to work. When other workers see you getting “special treatment”, and when you encourage them to stick up for themselves in turn, you can change the culture of an office through collective stubbornness. Or, at the very least, you can get an obnoxious assistant/middle manager shit-canned for failing to meet their own numbers.

      But yeah, professionalization adds a lot more (corporately perceived) value to your resume. Once the business has handcuffed itself to college degrees and years experience, the employees discover a lot more freedom.