Wibbling Widgets

Would you — or rather, should you — work an entire week without pay if it meant gaining yourself a new job? 

The old saying used to advise that if you're good at something, you should never do it for free. Turns out that in today's day and age, companies constantly ask you to do things for free just to get a job in the first place. That old advice has withered away and instead, you have to ask yourself: how much of my free labor does a company deserve in order to assess if I can do this job? (I admit, the old saying has a much nicer ring to it.) 

These days, if you're good at something, I suppose you should do it for free for long enough to show off your skills to the hiring manager. It's not a satisfying answer, but in some job fields, you truly cannot get the job any other way. 

However, this company is really pushing the boundaries of workplace etiquette here. Some might say they're even breaking laws! These people apparently requested that one candidate give them a trial period, unpaid, for an entire week. 

This is problematic for a lot of reasons. Let's consider that it was paid. Who can quit their current job for a week to try out a new one? What if the company decides they don't want to hire you after that week, and now you're totally jobless? This would give those who are currently unemployed an edge, but still, this isn't gig work, it's supposed to be an application for a full-time job. 

I worry that this kind of thing targets young professionals who don't know any better. They might be used to doing unpaid or low-paid internships and they think that this is just how the world works. 

Well, money makes the world go round, baby. This person sent back an excellent email roasting them, and commenters had lot of differing opinions on the whole debacle. Check it all out below and see who you'd side with here… and think about if you'd work a free week for any job, ever. 

What is the point of coming into an empty office only to spend the vast majority of your work day attending virtual meetings?

It's a fair and just question that few employers have been able to answer compellingly. As far as the standard responses are concerned, they usually range from some bogus about inspiring a strong company culture or establishing a false sense of professionalism and accountability. The truth often has to do with justifying a lease or catering to the preferences of a few senior members within the company who still subscribe to outdated views on what it takes to succeed in a workplace

In this instance, an employee who had been working on a remote basis was suddenly told he needed to return to work in person, despite the fact that his cubicle is sectioned off from everyone else and his entire team is not based in that location. Naturally, this meant that he would be commuting to the office to then spend the entire day alone and attending virtual meetings with largely remote employees. 

The reason for this change? Well, the author's boss argued that part of his work required him to be in person, but we all know it was likely about this mysterious fun workplace culture everyone keeps talking about. The amusing thing about establishing a robust workplace culture is that you actually have to do more than simply compel everyone to come into the office. Fostering an authentic sense of community requires a lot more than a simple mandate over email.

Farmcore is strong right now. As everyone grows tired of the hustle and bustle, they dream of the day they can live on a farmstead, tending to the tranquil animals, and living off the land in peace and solitude. It's a pipe dream for a city slicker, of course, because most of us don't realize the amount of work, dedication, and animal feed that goes into raising livestock. Even chickens, the most common of farm animals that have burrowed their way into our domesticated hearts, are a lot more complicated than farmcore influencers online claim they are. 

Chickens give us eggs, sure, but they root up the ground, destroy landscaping, leave their refuse haphazardly in their wake, and if you're unlucky enough to have a rooster, say goodbye to your lazy mornings sleeping in. Farm animals may be handsome and wholesome on paper, but they're oftentimes more trouble than they're worth… Especially in suburbia. 

A suburban man recently leaned into the waking whims of farmstead lifestyle when he bought 6 chickens. Without a coop to house them, he let a half-dozen birds roam free in his yard; however, to the dismay of the neighbors, who never thought they needed a fence, that meant their vegetable garden and hard-won flower bed were up for grabs. 

Chickens don't recognize property lines, but this neighborly feud certainly should. 

This cashier is breaking both the spoken and unspoken rules of his cashier job by bothering the managers, making everyone else give him the side-eye. 

We all make some faux pas here and there in the workplace, especially as the new person. Live and learn, right? In your first weeks and months at the job, you're still learning the ropes. You don't know everyone, you barely know how to do your job, and you certainly don't know who's your friend and who's totally untrustworthy. These first few weeks are crucial to learning how to succeed at your particular workplace. Who do you report to officially, and who do you report to in practice? Who should you be super serious with, and who can you be a little goofy around? You'll find out as you go. 

This worker made the serious mistake of being extremely impolite to a vice manager at his store, and it seems like, from start to finish, his retail tenure was filled with mistakes. His coworker, who shared the shocking tale, shares that he was hired during a rush, meaning that he might not have been the best choice for the job in the first place. He totally skipped a big chunk of orientation time, and since the company took him at his word, he literally lied his way into the job! They were so desperate to find workers that they didn't properly vet them, and that leads to instances like this one. 

I don't know about you, but if I lied my way into a job, I'd probably be on my best behavior. But John here took the opposite approach: he started telling actual managers that they didn't know how to do their jobs! 

As you can imagine, that kind of jaw-dropping impoliteness didn't go over well with either his fellow workers or the managers. The audacity of this dude to think that he could get away with such sass is truly stunning. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. Keep reading to check out this person's full account of what happened. They then checked in 2 weeks later with an update, and whew, it's quite the read! I want to hope that John learned his lesson, but with an attitude like that, I can't imagine he has any more managerial opportunities coming his way any time soon. 

Like anything that evolves on this planet, every line of business evolves its own branch of Corporate love bombing. In this particularly shaky, twitchy start-up, they ended up with this version:

First, they court you with a shiny title, eight interviews, a nice salary, and big talk about impact, then two months later, you are being scolded for not resolving enough customer tickets like a teenager on their first shift. Modern leadership in one sentence: we value strategy, unless things get slightly busy, then grab a headset and count.  

What really stands out here is the classic startup bait and switch. On paper, this woman was hired to build, lead, structure, fix messes, and shape a department. In practice, she is being treated like a very expensive filter in Zendesk. One minute she is designing multiple-layered plans, the next she is explaining basic reporting filters to the same founder who thinks he is qualified to decide her performance. It is less a company and more a live reenactment of that meme where the dog sits in a burning room saying this is fine.  

The pregnancy angle just gives the whole thing a nice apocalyptic glaze.HR promises eight weeks, the CEO confirms it, and suddenly there is an internal wiki page no one read that says actually no. It is not just disrespectful, it is lazy. They will spend hours building systems to track ticket volume, but nobody can be bothered to align on whether a pregnant hire gets time to meet her own child. This is how you know it is not about resources, it is about priorities.