That's exactly how I'm feeling right now, after working +20 years for a company that's looking for the cheapest way for them to get rid of me.
You deserve better. There's lots of good info on how to leave a toxic work place, and how to highlight your skills. Don't give those guys another second of your time. I left a tough place that I'd been at for 10 years, and it was the best thing I did for my life.
I don't want to sound like an asshole, but why did you dedicate 20 years to a company? Stuck in a shitty location/education that only gets you employed in a few companies?
I'm nearly at 7 with my employer and I've found the situation to be quite good and I see no sign yet to jump ship. There's still good gigs out there.
I'm sure the person you are responding to had good reason to stick around 20 years. It's possible only recently did the math not work out for them.
There's definitely something to be said about having a job that doesn't suck too bad, pay is ok and raises keep up somewhat (though of course not as much as it would via job hopping), coworkers are alright, commute isn't terrible. And then you wake up one day and realize that 20 years went by.
This is pretty accurate. For my current field I'm tethered to just a handful of locations in the country I could work at. This sounds like it will describe my situation in a decade or two as long as they don't get rid of me before
They're definitely out there. My mom, before she retired, was a very driven career-oriented woman, and was with her last company for a shade under 20 years. She always had head hunters after her (sales manager), but the company took damned good care of her and her team, so she never felt compelled to go anywhere else.
Probably bought a house and the industry he works in doesn't have much competition or his skills doesn't transfer. Also change is hard and they could be starting over. 20 years ago the dream was still in people's eyes and they had pensions still
I grew up hearing about company loyalty. That world does exist anymore but the business world really wants you to believe it does
90 hours a week is just insane. But so is working 40 hours a week tbh. I understand that many people need to work fulltime in order to provide for themselves and their families, but they shouldn't have to. Nobody should have to give up 5 out of 7 days of their life to sustain a moderate quality of life. We (humanity) should be better than that.
give up 5 out of 7 days of their life to sustain a moderate quality of life
Darn tootin’, we need Universal Basic Income!
I will say some people in some industries can give up 40hr/wk of their lives from their laptops at home and sustain a phenomenal quality of life. That should def be a choice available to those who care to make it. (And the privileges necessary to be qualified to work those jobs should be afforded to all, of course.*)
*not sure how this sentiment would survive a truly level global playing field with 8bil equal competitors, but don’t wanna be too domestically biased
It really blows my mind that people get stuck in this "that's the way it should be" mindset.
You know that with more exposure your comment would attract tons of replies about "you're lazy, 40 hours is the minimum you should work! You just want life handed to you for 5 hours of work." Completely ignoring that 40 hours a week was "recently" changed to be the norm and only because the owners realized that the workers need time to buy and use their products so that they can sell more...
There's nothing natural about 40 hours weeks let alone 90...
tbh that's something that always scares me a bit when I make slightly more "political" comments like this. It feels like humans are prone to believing that the way things are right now is how they are meant to be, and that the status quo is the best possible option. As far as I know (and all I really know is what I remember from a couple of sociology books that I skimmed for a paper five years ago), opposition to overwhelming changes is a very human reaction because we tend to like "the same as yesterday with a few minor changes to liven things up a bit," but it still saddens me to see this kind of reaction to ideas that could improve life so drastically. Given how big of a change leaving the 40-hour week behind would be, though, I can see why it causes this kind of reaction.
It's not even like I don't want to work at all. It'd be nice to achieve fully automated gay luxury space communism or whatever, but if humanity ever reaches that point, I'll be long gone. A good work environment where everybody is treated well, hours that align with my life, a commute of no more than half an hour (or work-from-home), seeing a point in my job, and not being poor when I work, say, 20 hours a week are all I really want and need, but that's already a lot (too much?) to ask for in this world. I think some theorists call that "agreeable work," and I feel like that's what we should be striving for.
It’d be nice to achieve fully automated gay luxury space communism or whatever, but if humanity ever reaches that point, I’ll be long gone.
"A society grows great when old men plant gay space trees whose communist shade they know they shall never sit in."
I'd rather die a painful death than work 90 hours. Even 40 hours is worse than the worse thing I've otherwise gone through (life threatening dehydration).
I didn’t that once. Never again. Luckily I still have my family, but also anxiety and depression.
