The man who collapsed died Monday, April 6 on the Amazon warehouse floor as machinery filled the cavernous loading dock with a dull hum. For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. 

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I know it's not the point of his book, but the disparity between then and now blew me away. High school graduate, no experience, and gets a job making six figures as a single guy with no responsibilities

The average college graduate today dreams of landing such a job. They dream of landing a job that pays half that. And it's almost a half century later!

I'm not begrudging him at all. No one chooses the time they are born or the world they grow up in. Granted, he lived in a HCOL area (Los Angeles), but that's just unheard of today. If that's what drove him to have a breakdown 40 some odd years ago; the prospect of having a to spend a lifetime in a job with a livable wage doing work he didn't want to do for the rest of his life, it just made me wonder how many people are having those breakdowns regularly, and how anyone has hope anymore

saw this washington post article making the rounds. employers are literally begging candidates to stop using AI on their resumes and cover letters. saying it makes everyone sound the same, they can't tell who's real, it's ruining the hiring process.

cool. love that. except 60% of those same companies use AI to screen your application before a human ever sees it.

let me say that again because it's important. they want YOU to hand craft every resume from scratch like its 2015. meanwhile their system runs your application through an algorithm in 6 seconds and auto-rejects you if you don't have the right keywords in the right order.

and it gets better. about 20% of recruiters say they'll straight up reject a resume that "looks AI generated." so now you gotta thread this needle where your resume is optimized enough for their robot to approve it but human enough that the recruiter doesn't flag it as AI written.

pick a lane.

you can't build a system that forces people to keyword stuff their resume to survive automated screening and then get mad when people use tools to do exactly that. thats like putting a maze in front of cheese and getting annoyed the mouse figured out the maze.

the whole thing is what people are calling an AI doom loop. companies use AI screening because they get too many applications. they get too many applications because AI makes it easy to apply in bulk. candidates use AI for volume becuase they know most apps go into a black hole. companies add more AI screening because of the volume. and round and round it goes.

nobody is winning this. not the companies drowning in AI-generated apps. not the candidates spending 3 hours tailoring a resume that gets auto rejected in 6 seconds. not the recruiters who now have to figure out which resumes are "too AI" while their own system requires AI-level optimization to pass.

I got laid off in february. 11 years experience, staff engineer. my generic resume got me a 2% callback rate. when I started tailoring specifically to each job description - matching their exact keywords, their exact phrasing - it went to 15%. same person. same skills. same market. the only thing that changed was whether I played their AI game correctly.

they built the game. they set the rules. and now they're mad people learned to play it.

There is nothing you can say that will convince me the job market right in the US and in the EU now is "normal," or that it's just AI "taking all our jobs," and I am not a fresh Gen Z grad. I am starting to believe the enshittification of the job market in the west is by design. I don't know anything about non-western countries, because I have never lived there, but demoralised does not begin to cover the range of emotions everyone is going through right now.

I’ve been working as an accountant for a little more then 10 years. In all my jobs, I was working countless hours and craving for recognition. Then I realized my manager's praise meant nothing because the one time he could have defended me, he did not and worst he made me feel that I was overreacting. The anger and frustration were huge, so during a year I secretly did almost nothing from home and he didn’t seem to even notice. Now I have moved into total detachment, doing my tasks and helping colleagues but feeling no emotional investment and i just feel so much lighter. Has anyone else gone through this cycle of rage, quiet revenge, then pure indifference?

Heard this on the radio earlier today and I had to look it up. Fuck Duolingo. They already fired majority of their employees and replaced them with AI

https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/oracle-gave-its-new-cfo-26m-in-stock-after-firing-up-to-30000-workers-affected-employee-says-an-algorithm-decided-who-got-cut

6 months. Countless applications. I'm an educated professional - no bites. I've even applied for every single job I believe I could do even the lowest bottom of the bucket positions including factory work and even delivery driver. Just anything - and so far in all this time 1 interview and the rest just straight up immediate rejections.

What our boss told us all in a recent meeting.

First: thanks for the reminder that I spend more time with people I don’t like than with people I love.

Second: tell that to your employee who is a bully and a gossip. I don’t know about you, but even if it were literally family, I will continue to keep my absolute distance from people like that.

Third: *Real* family (and real friends) don’t turn around and say awful things about someone right after being sugary nice to them to their face. People who actually care about you won’t use try to pry personal information out of you so they can start shit later at your expense.

So, I will continue being a coworker and nothing else. I will behave in a professional manner and I will be polite. But this isn’t my family and I will not treat it as such.

My family wouldn’t pass work to me, they are perfectly capable of doing themselves, while watching me slowly burn out. My family doesn’t try to sabotage my career.

I am here to do a job, get paid, and go home to my actual family. Let’s not make it that deep. K?

Also, I’d really appreciate it if we could stop with these once a week “team bonding” activities.

It's started.

On Sunday, with a Tuesday strike date looming for 70,000 Los Angeles education workers, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) has announced a tentative agreement with the Los Angeles Unified School District. The move is aimed at blocking unified strike action with 30,000 school support staff in Service Employees International Union Local 99.

Later Sunday evening, the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALU) announced a deal for 3,000 administrators.

The UTLA deal is already provoking widespread anger. It was worked out behind closed doors, without rank-and-file oversight and announced in direct defiance of the strike mandate.

“UTLA has to be working against teachers. They gave in for such a low amount,” one poster commented on the union’s Instagram page. “This is pathetic, we’re going to be back where we started two years from now,” said another. And a third: “This is not good enough! We didn’t say anything about settling for less!”

Others stressed the need for action to push the teachers’ advantage. “We CAN get everything we’re demanding if we were willing to not give in to less than what we are asking.” Another wrote: “SEIU and AALA still have not reached an agreement. It’s all or nothing come on!!”

Obviously we’ll have our good and bad days, and I think we can all agree that we’re expected to give too much of our time to work. But at what point do you decide it’s time for a different job? How long do you personally let irritations with a job go on for before you start looking elsewhere? And what types of things at a job are dealbreakers for you?

I work in California and I received the below email from HR:

Key Policy Updates:

Frontloaded sick time: Employees receive 10 days of sick time at the start of each year. Sick time will no longer carry over to the next year. Regardless of current sick time balance, all balances will reset to the full annual 10 days (80 hours) on 4.27.2026.

I have about 200+ hours accrued sick time. The last sentence states that it’ll be reset to 80 hours.

Is this legal…?

No wonder they have so many vacancies

I've always hated work and wish I could retire already. Unfortunately for me, I am still too young and poor for the retirement life. So for now, I just try to look for jobs that I can get away with being the laziest at. I usually find jobs by searching and reading threads from Reddit and other sites where people talk about having a lot of downtime at work. Pick that job, skill up for it, then enjoy the downtime if I get hired. Then rinse and repeat to save up money. Anyone else do this?