We all know that it's hard to get a job right now, and these hiring managers are sharing the exact reasons why they rejected certain candidates. 

Nailing a job interview is very difficult, even if you spend hours practicing and know all the right things to say. Sometimes you're super confident going into the interview, but when you don't know the answer to an important question, it makes you self-conscious for the rest of the questions. Some of the best advice I've seen is to try and view the whole thing as a conversation instead of an interrogation. Sure, there are lots of questions being thrown at you, but you can also ask questions of the interviewer to assess the company culture and make sure it's the right fit for you. 

Now, as these hiring managers will tell you, there are some candidates who get immediately flagged as a "no." For example, if you're dressed in a very inappropriate manner, like wearing a shirt with a swear word on it to the interview, there's just no chance you're getting through to round #2. If you whine about how you hate waking up early, or complain about your chosen career path, that'll make the interviewer crumple your resume and toss it in the trash. And those are just some mild examples! Keep reading and have a laugh at all of the ways that job seekers are failing their interviews in hilariously shortsighted ways.  

Overworked employees will have their OOO auto-reply in effect for the rest of 2025. December is in full swing, which means that most workers have mentally clocked out, tasted the turkey, and are already planning for next year's productivity goals. Don't count on that holiday bonus coming through just yet, because management has proven they're unreliable. But with an imminent end-of-the-year pizza party on the calendar, year-end reviews, and Q4 goals breathing down your neck, what's there to motivate you to keep going? PTO. 

Soon, your average week will be short and delightful, proving that we can get an entire week's worth of work done in only a matter of hours. Managers will pull out their hair and employees will call out sick, while bosses lounge in their Arizona timeshares next to the golf course. All is right in the world, and before you know it, we'll be moving on to the new year with a renewed sense of hating our jobs. 

Until then, hang in there, fellow worker! Shareholder value must be generated, and we're the only ones who can come to the rescue!

When it comes to management, difficult decisions need to be made constantly. Even when you have just started! Take this new manager of an IT team who started just a few months ago. He had an okay tech, pretty mediocre, but he's worked there several years, so whatever. However, he was already in change mode which tends to happen when companies are making moves and hire a new manager. So when this tech started ranting about flat earth and preaching "flat earther" stuff during the office lunch, he had a decision to make. He was already on the hunt to hire new techs, so he decided to let this one go. Was this a smart move? It's being debated in the comments. 

On one hand, he was ranting like a crazy person about a belief that has been disproven over and over again, even by people in its own society. This makes this employee a liability because what if he brings this kind of talk to the customer? You could not only lose a client, but also your reputation! On the other hand, employees are allowed to believe whatever they want and a lunch setting can be pretty laid back when it comes to conversation subjects. Maybe a warning would have sufficed, instead of being immediately fired. What would you do?

This employee was not going to work overtime… ever.

It's hard not to respect this guy for standing his ground despite earning a reputation for never going above and beyond. That's because he refused to give into the common expectations that workers will rewarded with promotions and benefits down the line if they worked late for no pay. This author was not about that, and we're honestly here for it.

Sure, we were all likely taught that going the extra mile is how you get awarded with a greater paycheck, but it's mentalities like these that can lead to even more toxic workplace environments than we already have. If we as employees all establish the precedent that our work during standard hours should be judged for future promotions, we just might force bosses to stop expecting more from us with little reward.

Kudos to this guy for taking his new nickname and the reputation that comes attached to it in stride. Let's be real. This guy probably finishes his work early all the time and just sits there for the last 30 minutes of each work day waiting to be released. Frankly, he should be praised for not leaving early!

It's finally the season of The Germ™, and that means office spaces are going to be riddled with sneezing, coughing, hacking, yacking—you name it. No sound is exempt from the season of sicknesses, and even more so when you have colleagues with a bunch of allergies and only five feet of distance in their respective cubicles.

It's one thing to request a bit more space between a coughing colleague and yourself, but it's another to break out the can of Lysol you keep at your desk and go beast mode, generously spraying harsh chemicals on a coworker.

Now, most workplaces don't think to add a small clause in the employee handbook that states you cannot spray cleaning chemicals on others during working hours. Even still, you'd think this would be common knowledge and a basic instinct. The colleague in the story below clearly has no moral qualms with spraying Lysol on an employee who is not sick, but has allergies. Which, if you didn't know, are not contagious. The chemicals actually make them, and probably others in the office choke up a lung even more than before. Scroll to read.

I swear, some of these stories make me question the ability of some people to even remotely grasp how civilization works. This is one of those stories, because it turns out some people treat bakeries like confessionals. Like enough persistence can turn policy into pastries. 

One woman walks into a cookie shop and immediately begins her tragic quest for a chocolate chip croissant cookie, a flavor that, at least this week, lives only in memory. The employee gently explains that only red velvet croissant cookies are available. The woman reacts like someone offered kale instead of oxygen. Suddenly, it's not about dessert anymore; it's about justice.  

She calls her husband to confirm the crisis, as if his cookie preference might sway the laws of inventory. When that fails, she escalates. She asks for the manager by name, like she's summoning a patron saint of exceptions. Another manager emerges, calm but struggling on the inside, explaining they don't have the ingredients, or the permission, or the will to create a rogue batch of baked goods. The woman pushes on, bargaining like a hostage negotiator who demands control of the oven. 

Family relationships can be complicated… but apparently, these days, "complicated" can mean calling the police on your own brother, his wife, and kids for trespassing into your yard and using your swimming pool without permission. Actually, not 'without permission'…with your explicit refusal of their recurring summer-time requests. Yet, this brother seems to think it was his only option…

When the police arrived and asked for some clarity regarding the story, the father explained that his brother had invited them over and 'must have forgotten!' Triggering his brother to pull out the camera footage of their whole family climbing the fence for direct pool-access…The homeowner didn't necessarily really want anyone to get arrested, but simply scare them with a trespassing warning! They ignored his demand to stay away from his swimming pool while he was out, and they disregarded his private property without a care in the world…But is involving the law the best way to teach your family a lesson? We're not so sure…

I don't think being financially taken advantage of by their own son was on this sweet couple's Bingo card…At least not until this man exposed his brother's sneaky saving tendencies…These parents have two sons: one who is financially stable (six-figures-stable to be precise) and another, younger son who claims to be "struggling" to make ends meet. So, as any caring parent who's recently come into some family money, they offer to pay their younger son's rent in New York City. Nothing luxurious, but still a very generous offer…

However, the more his older brother sits with this information, the more he struggles to shake the feeling that their unhesitant contribution just isn't fair. He's never needed help, or even asked for it, but for some reason, he still thought that having them pay his adult brother's rent just didn't sit right with him…and it seems as though he was correct for trusting his intuition…Because, after speaking with his young brother, he discovered that he had saved tens of thousands of dollars from their parents 'apartment funding' without anyone's knowledge of his deceitful piggy bank! 

How many times have you had to deal with people who refused to listen to your professional advice, even though you clearly know what you are talking about?

If your answer is not 'all the time', then we would love for you to tell us your secrets, because it happens daily for us. We all have fields we excel at, things that we know, that we understand better than most people. But do these experts guarantee that people listen to us? Unfortunately, not.

The heavy machinery operator in the story below is an expert in their field; they know their way around heavy machinery. However, when they tried to warn a truck driver that he was trying to load too much material onto his truck, this driver refused to listen to the sage advice and demanded the operator load exactly what he wanted.

So, the operator complies, which sometimes is the best way to prove just how right you were in the first place.

Old farmer named Buck earns his peace the hard way and defends it with dry precision. One morning, while sorting through metal scraps in an old barn, he hears a loud throat-clear behind him. Turning around, he meets a man on horseback, dressed like arrogance incarnate, demanding to use Buck's fields to store his horses. No introduction, no request, just pure entitlement on legs, both human and equine. Buck, too old for drama and too clever for confrontation, calmly points him to the next field over and even accepts a payment for it.  

What Buck never mentions is that the next field isn't his. It belongs to someone else entirely, someone who will no doubt notice a horse invasion before noon. A few days later, the shouting begins. The entitled horseman returns, furious over having paid to use land that never belonged to Buck. The family watches through the window as Buck continues eating breakfast, not a care in the world, letting the sound of the man's outrage blend nicely with the morning birds. 

This server knew all too well that her now former manager did not know what he had till she was gone.

Not every worker can say with certainty that they are the glue that holds the operational structure of their workplace environment together. Some folks are too insecure to know their value, while others unfortunately probably no deep down when they are not essential. However, most folks who have endured layoffs due to budget costs, regardless of whether or not they survived those layoffs, know that the people who made those "difficult decisions" have no idea what they are talking about.

That's because the vast majority of those decisions are made by folks who do not have their noses to the ground regarding who is actually essential. Again, some people out there know they are not essential. For whatever reason, those are probably not the people who get let go. Instead, it's always the people who know how to get the job done without drawing too much attention to themselves. They're too focused on the work to make a show of it, and yet, it seems that making a show of it in front of incompetent management is what helps people to keep their jobs.

This server was unceremoniously let go prior to the Thanksgiving holiday. Then, when the holiday happened, everything fell apart without her. Now, she has to figure out if she wants to go back and save the day, or if she's happier without this lousy manager.

This micromanagement has gotten totally out of hand at this major company, and people are guessing that employees won't tolerate this kind of treatment for long. 

It's a tough balance to strike, I get it. As a boss, you need to monitor your employees in order to ensure that they're putting in their hours and submitting solid work. That is literally your job to do so. However, no one agrees on exactly the best way to do it. If you over-manage your employees, they grow hostile and unhappy. If you don't check in with them enough, they think that their bosses don't care about their work, and they might slack off. Finding a middle ground is key, and it's the sign of a strong management team. 

You need to be able to trust your workers to hand over their deliverables, while also cutting them some slack for things like wanting to go home early for the day or needing extra time to work on a project before submitting it. You're supervising humans, not robots, so there's no need to treat them like unfeeling drones.

This mega-corporation is reportedly shopping some new rules as their employees return to work, and it's shocking how intense these new surveillance methods are. It seems like they'll be punished for being away from their desks for too long — and also for being away from their bosses and coworkers! That's all very intense, and I wouldn't be surprised if employees start walking out the door instead of being micromanaged to the extreme. Who wants to work in an office where every little move you make is subject to scrutiny from all the higher-ups? It's just too intense, and this company would be wise to scale back those efforts. 

This job candidate was repeatedly disrespected by his potential employer, as if it were some great honor to be underpaid and overworked.

Of course, it's worth noting that there are plenty of individuals who would be thrilled to receive a salary offer of $65,000 annually. Still, after three decades of experience in a field where this guy should have been offered at least twice that amount, it's safe to say that this was a paltry offer.

Unfortunately, it doesn't exactly end there. This manager was so focused on how great he was that he also managed to reveal his unrealistic expectations for the position, seemingly on purpose. Apparently, employees were expected to work 10 hours a day despite the fact that their salaries contractually reflected an 8 hour work day. That meant that the candidate was expected to work an extra 10 hours each week, unpaid. That's 520 hours a year. 

The most amusing part of it all is that this manager didn't bat an eye as he was delivering this information. His hubris seemed to cloud his judgment as well as any semblance of realistic expectations for employees these days. Keep scrolling below for the full story and to find out how the author responded to this offer in the end.

This 22-year-old future medical student finally earns her dream acceptance letter, only to face an unexpected opponent: her boyfriend. For two years, the relationship seemed supportive enough until an opportunity arrived with a stethoscope. The boyfriend begins to unravel, framing her achievement as abandonment, insisting she defer and reapply locally for his comfort. He argues geography over ambition, feelings over facts, love over logic. She explains the stakes, the lost years, the competitive exams, the volatile admissions, but it's like diagnosing a patient who refuses treatment. He wants her to stay, to wait, to trade her dream for proximity.  

What he calls love is simply fear dressed up in sentimentality. Relationships like this run perfectly fine until one partner evolves, and then growth feels like betrayal to the one still standing still. His insecurity is not subtle, it's a quiet attempt to clip her wings before she takes flight. He imagines control as stability, forgetting that love built on limits is simply dependency with better lighting. Her hesitation doesn't come from doubt in herself, but from the emotional guilt he's spoon-feeding her as affection.  

It's interesting how, the last time you walk out of the doors of your high school, you expect that somehow all of that pettiness and immaturity that you experienced, the cliqueness and the put-downs, will somehow remain contained within the walls of that school. That as you enter your adult life, you'll meet people who approach situations with fair rationality.

Well, the truth of the matter is that those people leave the walls of that school, too; they don't simply remain within them or evaporate into thin air. They get older, they find jobs—just like you do. And while some of them will experience growth and learn tools for self-reflection, a great many won't and will be perpetually stuck at the same level they were at in high school.

Unfortunately, they have a tendency to drag others down to their level, and sure enough, when you enter certain spaces, you will find yourself faced with those all-too-familiar old feelings of shame and not belonging.

When this employee resisted joining in with the gossiping of her supervisor and another member of her team, she found herself instead the target, with the pair sending very obvious messages to each other and making passive-aggressive comments at her expense. Luckily, the employee was able to get herself moved to another team without things getting too messy, but there are plenty of instances in the workplace where this type of thing would quickly escalate into an issue with HR.

More and more people are going low or no contact with their own parents because the parents simply cannot act right, and this MIL is a great example. 

A lot of people these days have been cutting off their parents, and some have posited that it's because we're all too connected. In the past, if your mom annoyed you, you could just let all her calls go to voicemail for a while, and if she showed up knocking at your house, you could pretend that you weren't home until she left. This would give both of you time to cool off and think about how to mend things. But these days, parents talk to their kids constantly through texting and social media, and a lot of them have their children's locations, too. This makes it all but impossible to ignore a parent who's been behaving in an unkind way. And oftentimes, the parent will push their child too far, making them make the painful choice to limit their contact. 

This person's MIL is a great example of the selfishness that some parents bring to the table, as you can read for yourself in the utterly insane pity-party post she wrote for her son's birthday. As one commenter noted, in a birthday post to someone else, she used the words "myself" and "I" more than a dozen times! She wants everyone to know that she's the innocent party here, and her big mean old son is the one who's "hurting" her and her husband. If she actually had respect for her child, she would never write this humiliating message for the world to see. It's crystal clear that she thinks she's 100% in the right — so much so that it's all she can think about, even on her son's birthday. It's telling that she writes about how he requested to go no-contact 6 months ago due to things being said that couldn't be unsaid. But it's as if she hasn't taken a single second to reflect on her own actions, because she refuses to acknowledge that most of these parent-child conflicts are caused by both parties, to some extent. It's really pathetic, and if she ever sees the post and reads the comments, maybe she'll gain a much-needed reality check. In the meantime, though, I hope this person and the husband demand that the MIL take this post down, before blocking her so they don't have to see this kind of drivel ever again. 

Manager gave that whole speech about lack of experience and not being "invested," and ever since then, the dynamic has started to feel a little rigged. The engineer points out issues, offers fixes, does the boring thinking-ahead part of the job. The manager waves it off in the moment, only to circle back later and roll out the same idea with his own name attached once reality proves the engineer right.

When the backup area might be unavailable, the engineer suggests putting a clear procedure in writing. Manager insists it will always be free. Of course the first time they need it, it is not available, and suddenly the concern everyone brushed past becomes a fire to put out. On the construction site, the engineer spends time talking with the company, gets them to agree to clear junk on the condition of a written order. Without a laptop handy, the plan is to send it the next day and keep things moving. After a call, the manager tells them not to send anything. Later, when the workers ask for that written authorization, it comes straight from the manager along with the praise.

Remember when finding a healthy work-life balance was in vogue?

This employee was reprimanded and accused of not having enough "passion" for his job after he didn't respond to Slack messages that were sent his way at 10:00 PM several hours after his work day finished. For the record, this refusal to answer those messages immediately is not reflective of a lack of passion. Rather, it's a display of self-control and a desire for a proper balance between one's professional and personal life.

There was a time when finding that balance was praised, as it forced managers, coworkers, and colleagues to recognize the need for a healthy amount of space. However, it seems that in the past few years, we have regressed in terms of our overall approach to workplace culture. This manager's insistence that his employee's choice to set up healthy boundaries illustrated some kind of professional negligence is just further proof of that cultural regression.

When the employee, who worked in marketing, came in for his annual review, these boundaries were brought up and framed in a negative light. Keep scrolling below to find out how the employee responded and what options he should weigh moving forward!

Finding a decent landlord can be as rare as finding a needle in a haystack. There's always a catch when it comes to these things. The closer the property is to how you wanted it, the more terrible the landlord will be; that is just how the way things are.

The story below proves just that. A family moved into a cute little house that checked all their boxes, and they thought everything worked out nicely when they signed their lease. Except that as soon as they moved in, things started to fall apart around the house. When they called the landlord to fix these issues, the landlord decided to cut corners and do these repairs in the cheapest way possible, which obviously meant they didn't last long.

When it became clear that the only option the tenants had was to move out, the landlord started demanding they pay to fix everything that was wrong with the house, including structural repairs, which would end up costing the tenants thousands of dollars.

Pay raises in the workplace are what keep employees lower in the corporate hierarchy on track to try and believe they can become something bigger and greater someday (even if that's just the lie they sell us so we keep clocking in every morning). Everybody needs money, especially right now, so companies can really do whatever they want and give us as little money as necessary because, well, that's the way the world works.

However, this employee refuses to accept that. They want that sizable pay raise, and they'll look elsewhere to get it. If you've ever left your workplace for greener pastures, you know that it's equally nerve-wracking and exciting once you figure out that you're worth way more than the small number your ex-company attached to you.

This employee makes a point to internally transfer to another team at their company when their boss tries to tell them the other team cannot give them a pay raise of over 12%, which is allegedly the cap for internal transfer raises. Well, what do you know? A few days later, a nice letter stating the employee's 28% pay increase enters the chat. What was that, boss? Maybe it was just the wind…