#worklifebalance

The position is being described as “an amazing opportunity” in a “winning company”

The reality is you will be working at a store in a dead mall from the 1970s.

A mall parking lot with creators in it that can swallow your car

A store full of mold and rodents

A skeleton crew of employees

I need this job, I have a family and a mortgage.

By all means: what can I do to maximize my survival probability at this company? Any hints?

I am sure a lot of people need this information today!

This 4 days a week sitting in a cubicle is literally soul crushing. I worked remotely or mostly remotely for years before CVX and only came here under the guise of flexible work and I would give up an annual bonus and $30k a year to wfh. If the hiring market weren’t so dismal I’d already be out.

I read post on this site often about what a manager can and cannot do when it comes to hiring, firing, RIF, salary, bonus and remote work. Here is my direct experience in no particular order of importance. I retired over a year ago and am receiving my pension, so can freely write this. I know some things have changed in the past couple years, since my retirement but most of this was true in the early 2000's when I started at hBBT and is will be true forever at Truist.

1- Managers have the final say on who is hired. However, I never hired any FTE that the people that I manage did not approve of first. i.e. The candidate had to pass the team's interviews and I would have the go-ahead from my team before any offer was made.

2- If you don't get all the salary you can get upon initial hire, chances are you will never get to a salary of a newer hire. i.e. 99% of all new hires are paid more salary than experienced FTE, given the same pay grade. see next item...

3- It is nearly impossible to get more than a 10% salary increase and stay within the same paygrade. To get a real salary increase you have to get paygrade promotion and then the salary increase is capped at 20% increase (promotion) unless we managers can get a Level 3 (L3) (this was CTO level approval in my mgmt chain) to approve...which is almost impossible. If the original salary is so low that the paygrade promotion forces the new salary to be more than 20% then L3 has no say so; they have to approve. Prior to my retirement I got overy half of my FTEs a paygrade promotion and/or up to a 30% salary increase with the smallest salary increase 12%. I had 2 of the FTEs get a two paygrade promotion...from 109 to 111. Hence, it can be done, but most managers are spineless and will not even put for the effort to do so. It took me over 12 months of asking, begging, paperwork, more paperwork, arm twisting, etc.

4- AIP, yearly bonus, are somewhat decided by direct managers. We were given a bucket of money and would allocate a certain percentage or amount to each FTE that was AIP elegible. The higher the paygrade to more amount of bonus was allowed. The higher the performance rating the more bonus amount was allowed.

5- AIP allocation could be and was overwritten by the CTO at his whim. You may have heard stories from a couple years ago of the current CTO stating "It's my money and I will do with it what I want". Yep! it is true. I was there when he said it. i.e the CTO would go in at the last minute and take money from our buckets and give to his teacher's pet people with no regard for we manager. We had NO say so as direct managers. I fought that battle with a previous CTO (not the current CTO), anyone remember Eduardo J?, and HR and lost.

6- HR is not your friend. They tow the company line and will, virtually, stab you in the back while giving you a reach around. Never trust anyone from HR with anything. SERIOUSLY!

7- RIFs are 90% pre-determined. Someone/some group above a line manager is making the decision on who gets RIFed. It doesn't matter your performance, your time in service, or your salary...if someone wants you gone, you will be gone and there is little a line manager can do about it. You are nothing more than a line on a spreadsheet when it comes to RIFs. More on the next item.

8- Line managers do have some say on RIFs...if they put up a fight. In a round of RIFs in 2024, I was given a list that ~45% of my FTEs RIFed, roughly 11 of 25 people. I fought that tooth and nail and got the number whittled down to 5 that were RIFed. I was told by HR, "Your group will have some RIFs. You are not exempt". I picked those 5 names because I knew they could get a better job elsewhere and quickly. It was still a VERY hard decision for me to make. Of those 5, three ended up on a contract doing the same job for more salary, 1 was rehired 6 months later, and the last one moved on to a new company.

9- Take your vacation...every day of it each year. There is nothing that you are doing that can't get done by someone else. You are not the glue holding Truist together. Take your sick days also. Use it or lose it. They are your sick days and there isn't a darn thing your manager or HR can do to keep you from taking your given sick days. If you have a real good manger, be honest with him/her on sick days. Tell them that you need a couple days of sick time as a break from Truist. Good managers will understand. POS mangers will hold it against you and question you and demand a doctor note for every 5 minutes you are away.

10- Lastly, If you have a good manager, you know it. They will do what is right for you...not for them. They will fight for you and your livelyhood at Truist. Most managers are self-serving douch bags that only care about CYA and using you as a stepping stone.

P.S...DO NOT let Truist run your life. It is only a job. Your family, your physical and mental health, your life are more important.

This post is nothing new in regards to WF monitoring employees keyboard/mouse/Teams activity. We have been aware of that since last year. Not sure if all computers at WF are running Skan. If yours has it in the system tray be careful. They are using metrics from Skan to displace people without severance. I know this for a fact so just be sure you aren’t one that takes long breaks or inactive for long periods over days or weeks. Not meant to scare anyone just beware of it.

Does anyone who has an ear to the C-suite or close to it know if another VRP offer will be coming in 2026? I am eligible for it based on age and trying to weigh my options as to whether to wait and see if I get an offer, or just retire from this dumpster fire. This work environment is so toxic and it's not worth it anymore - it hasn't been for a long time actually. Appreciate any insight anyone may have.

Just rest and vest

Don't ever forget it. You're more likely to get laid off if you're skilled, experienced, and outperform than if you're an average slacker who's just good at office politics. The better you are, the higher the chance you're deemed too expensive for a company that cares neither about the quality of its people nor the quality of what it delivers.

AC not working in Burlington everyone is complaining, its so miserable. We're all jammed into these smaller rooms I'm sure all the body heat is not helping. How about let us leave an hr early instead of having this 1 hr social hr!!! The A side is working of course because no one is working over there.

Do IP logs only count during certain hours?

People at my area, secure, with same people , picking same desk are now coming in Friday. Leave computer on over weekends, come in early Monday.

The 2 days on weekends count

Brilliant system by USBank

Earth day eh? They encourage people to to leave laptop on all day and drive to work

For the activity monitoring skeptics. Given how hard charlie fetishizes JPM, still think this concept isn't coming to Wells eventually?

https://fortune.com/2026/03/24/jpmorgan-monitoring-keystrokes-video-calls-meetings-junior-investment-bankers-its-for-employee-wellbeing/

Curious if anybody else works on the weekend and isn't seeing it reflected in the time tracking. I don't work weekends regularly, but need to be in the office for certain software changes/deployments. I've, with my managers acknowledgement, treated this as part of my RTO days, but now I'm out 2-3 days what was previously shown.

I FINALY RELEASED WHAT THE MOTO MEANS.

I heard this moto many times in All hands meetings, they essentially say "Do More with less" in the context of AI, to encourage you to feed your work details to AI so they can train capable models to replace you eventually.

BUT from talking to many engineers in EMEA, which haven't seen a promotion in years now despite having good reviews.

Did everyone in lake Mary get told to wfh? Does this mean what we think it does?

I'm not going to waste time going on and on about the same things but who is actually going in to work at 8/9 and staying till 5pm? Obviously RTO 5 days means working from the office all 5 days but there's no way in he-l the majority is willingly going to go from WFH to now commuting to an office just to sit there for 8 hours.

Everyone I know from 40 to 45 lately has been moving to lateral or even jobs they're overqualified for. Has anyone in this age range been able to move up in the last year or so?

Epam HR and internal big brother tooling make work environment absolutely toxic and anxious. Now we all fight for one position which advertised as “any location”. As a full stack lead, I need to self apply to many so called open roles, to find that i am one of dozens of candidates, pass interviews and find out that my rate card is above SOW. Or someone is better fit, or project postponed, or backfilled etc etc. Total chaos with constant HR pressure, forced vacation days use. I know many people who quit on this torturous conditions like myself

In 2024, when we were hybrid, I used to be genuinely happy going to work. I was energized, motivated, and excited to contribute to the largest telecommunications company in the United States. But after nearly a year and a half of the five-day return-to-office mandate, I feel completely drained.

Every day is a battle — fighting traffic, searching for parking, and then scrambling to find a desk. To make it worse, people schedule meetings during my commute, which makes no sense.

Back in 2024, I felt bright, energetic, and enthusiastic about the work. Now I feel like Squidward, doing the bare minimum just to get through the day. Whenever I am asked to go above and beyond or deal with some ridiculous request, my response is basically that I am commuting or that I will get to it once I can actually find a desk. The whole thing feels like a joke.

To make matters worse, everyone on my immediate team and in my department seems endlessly enthusiastic about chasing more wireless and fiber gross adds. Maybe some of that excitement is real, but a lot of it feels rehearsed. I look around and see people acting energized and engaged, and it is hard not to wonder whether they actually feel that way or are just playing the part. Honestly, the only place I ever see people expressing what this experience really feels like is on this site. In person, people seem scared to say it out loud. It often leaves me feeling like I am the only one being honest about how exhausting and demoralizing all of this has become, especially because I am overshadowed by so many coworkers who seem enthusiastic about their jobs and about taking AT&T to the stars.

Did it all get pushed back to accommodate for layoffs and WFH weeks?

Does anyone actually find any value in this process or is it just TD ticking a box?

PORTLAND GUY DAY:

Show up between 930 and 10 as a group. Almost everyone wearing sunglasses in the office like complete tools.

Immediately take a coffee break in the Cafe with the entire group until 1015-1030.

Take an hour lunch 12-1.

Leave between 2-3 PM.

Curious has anyone been around long enough to remember the last time corporate gave the employees some good news? Feel like its been nothing but bad news the last 10 years. Offices closing, forced moves across the country, returns to office, replaced with people overseas, forced realignments due to corporates unwillingness to staff and retain properly.

Id say the last "good news" was us working from home during COVID, which wasnt exactly good news but maybe the only positive change I've seen in like 15 years. Ok i guess they did the math and so few people were having children they increased maternity benefits like 5 years ago.....

Cant wait for this weeks bad news meeting either way.

Can anyone explain why such high turnover in claims has been acceptable for so long? Assuming they will be moving people from jobs that are not 100% horrible to a claims department that is.

I am the manager of three former ExxonMobil employees:

The first is desperate to please me and shows strong “boss-pleasing” behavior. It’s frustrating because I need him focused on productivity, not on feeding my ego. His results are what matter.

The second reacted strongly when I asked for help moving a table, saying it was a safety risk and refusing to do it.

The third seems to be living in the past. I hear “when I was at ExxonMobil…” at least five times a day.

I’ve started to notice a pattern. Former ExxonMobil employees often seem like they’ve gone through some kind of conditioning and struggle to behave normally in a different environment.

I don’t know what the company is doing to its employees, but it feels intense. They all come across as somewhat distressed, almost like they’ve developed an obsessive or overly rigid mindset.

I’m not sure what to do. They seem like capable employees, but their behavior is unusual, and I don’t want to fire them.

Any ideas on how to “reverse” the ExxonMobil effect?

P.S. They all say they left due to strategic changes, like departments being moved to other countries, not because of performance issues.

There's clearly a willing contingent that would instantly take them up on it.

Instead they choose to sever people who might really need the job, throwing them into the crocodile pit of the current job market.

Or they push to make working conditions annoying enough that people who have options voluntarily leave (this part of it makes zero sense to me, these are typically the people you can least afford to lose).

Meanwhile the people who stay are made increasingly miserable, both as a result of the voluntary attrition measures, as well as having to operate for years in an environment with zero job security and no end to the layoffs in sight.

How is any of this better than just yanking the bandaid off, and letting workers have a hand in their own fate?

It feels very "the cruelty is the point" to me

Does anyone know how many sick days per year employees in the US get ? If unused, do sick days accumulate ? If so, does it accumulate to a max number of days ?

Its not clear to me on walgreens tolerance on people working a second job in parrelel. Also is any one doing it?

Personally would rather have a back up in case I get fired 💀

I’m told I can’t have my phone out at my desk even if it’s just to pull it out and turn on music while I work.

Meanwhile, the people who sit in the next row over talk all day and it’s so distracting. I have no idea how to get anything done. And I have people from other areas walking over to them all day long as well and all these people talk about are their lunch plans and then complain about their peers at other sites.

I need to put my AirPods in and listen to something that helps me stay focused- the way I see it. I’ll get fired either way… either from pulling my phone out to turn on Spotify or because my work is not as productive as it used to be because of these geniuses that sit around me who have zero respect for others.

So I’m guessing the bank went back to assigned seating? I’ve been out on sabbatical and just returned to our new space, but all of the seats appear to be assigned and I have no idea where I should randomly sit.

It doesn’t feel good to start my day like this every morning, trying to search for a place to sit that isn’t near the break room. But I’m told all the other spaces are neighborhoods. I can’t continue to take calls from a desk next to the break room so people keep asking me to go on mute because I hear all the noise, but then I have to forget to go off mute to start talking and lose my opportunities to speak up. This is ridiculous.

Those teams sitting in a neighborhood who are not on the phone all day. Need to have their dedicated seating over here. I don’t know how they got away with giving them the prime seats.. but I can’t continue working like this and I will be figuring out a way to work from home if this continues.

• Jacksonville, Florida

Are people really in the office 5 days a week or is there flexibility/WFH allowed?

Apparently, a family member having a medical emergency that requires someone to be present isn't a valid reason for a remote work exception! I learned my lesson, I'll just call off sick instead of giving a damn about this sc-mmy org.

Why the he-l does workday never actually work. I have to click the buttons 16 times for it to take me to the time off section

What’s up with word floating around that the in office requirement is being updated to 9 hours for the day to count?

It felt like I was signing divorce papers from a bad marriage. I'm very glad to be out of that company. The max severance package and unemployment are like having a hot girl say she just wants to hang out with you after your divorce but nothing serious, just casual fun. After that, retirement and traveling around with the actual love of my life. I ran the numbers, it's like getting a ~$100K payout into retirement. I'll happily take this over a retirement card and going away gift at a pizza party.

Assuming more layoffs are to come, and if and you're in a similar time in your life, I highly recommend trying to manage the last days of your career aiming for a layoff rather than announcing a retirement date. If I would have told them I was retiring in May, I don't think I would have been laid off, so keep that info to yourself. Don't tell a soul because it WILL get out if you do, and that could be a very costly mistake.

Copy and paste link below to view post. Don't accept "NO".

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7427118095061819392/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7427118095061819392%2C7447726858751746048%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287447726858751746048%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7427118095061819392%29

Historically, it’s always been a professional courtesy to give two weeks notice before leaving. However, as recent layoffs have shown, companies are giving no notice (Oracle). This has and will become the norm. And before someone says, well it’s courtesy to your colleagues, just remember that it comes at a cost to you and your family for being nice.

So with that said, why continue this legacy practice of giving two weeks notice? Again, if it helps the employee pack up and wrap up, sure. But otherwise, I think it’s time to reevaluate the practice. Just because society followed the same rule for so long doesn’t mean it’s correct in today’s AI world.

Love to hear your thoughts, including how you would advise your own kids if they were in the situation.

Nobody's exactly clinging to this place. A voluntary package would have takers, lots of them.

They've got us stressed out constantly. No breaks, no rest, no relief. This company has completely taken over our lives.

I used to stay late learning new skills. Used to take on extra projects to grow. Then I watched three people who did exactly that get laid off anyway. Now my full potential is doing my job well enough to not get noticed, because getting noticed here isn't safe anymore.