In my 40s: I'll do anything I can to not work and be lazy and it'll be fine. (You have to be good at what you do for this to work.)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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In my 20s, I was definitely pulling extra hours for no OT or just off the clock. I'm now in my 30s and am suing my previous employer for wage theft.
If they're doing it to you, they're doing it to co-workers. Save ALL your receipts, stubs, emails, chats... Collect contact info from other employees, so you have that info when they/you quit. Found out it was actually pretty easy to find a lawyer willing to take a (in the grand scheme of things) small payout case on contingency. Don't know how it's going to play out yet, but it's looking good for something the employer considered me being petty.
My ambition in my 40s
Don't. Draw. Attention.
Just keep my head down, quietly complete the minimum acceptable requirements, only submit them when their deadlines are imminent. Aim for the equivalent of a "B" on my performance reviews.
Dress plainly, don't talk about hobbies or personal life, don't reflect or amplify drama, never volunteer my opinion.
I guess I am mentally 40 now.
don’t talk about hobbies or personal life,
Fuck that, I'm loud as shit (not literally) about the fun stuff I do (live shows, nerd projects, etc). Otherwise, no notes. We got chased by dolphins on a whale watching trip. You think I'm not gonna talk about that? It was awesome.
Pretty much been me from my mid 30s
Start to realise Corp never cares about you and will take advantage of any extra performance you put in.
Then when to times get tough "oops redundancies for y'all". "oh no we have to keep all the middle and upper management that put us in this position in the first place". "of course they make the final decision on who is made redundant, that's part of their job"
Agent 47, for this corporate mission you should avoid attention. Hide in cozy underperformer stealth mode.
A place I used to work had to add a rule banning unicycles from the parking lot because of me.
Story mode?
Try a tricycle next time.
Not much of a story. I used to practice riding my uni with another guy I worked with. One of the managers got bent out of shape about it and started a whole crusade. I asked what rule I was breaking since it was such a big deal. No rule about minimum number of wheels was found, so next year they had to make such a rule.
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Dear young people entering the work force: your extra efforts will be rewarded with extra work. You won't be paid more or experience progress going this way; you'll be Sisyphus. If you work enough on networking and making the right friends, you might climb the ladder, but it will be at the expense of wife and kids, if you have those. Only a select few can have it all. Remember to focus on the important things while you can.
Amen. Like the song says, You can’t always get what you want, you get what you need.
Trying harder only hurts your body more and more, and you rarely see the results you hoped for.
Yeah. The best strategy is to do the average, network, and job hop once every year or so. Focus on your health, friends, and family.
Networking with seniors and managers is more likely to get you decent pay rises than being the most productive member of any team, but job hopping will likely net you far more; including leaving and coming back.
Job hopping is also very easy to explain during an interview.
Why did you leave this job. "I was seeking new opportunities for personal growth and development. The 30% pay raise wasn't bad either. "
Job hop every year? What kinda jobs are those
Any job in media/VFX within central London, from my experience.
Bold to assume there are any entry level jobs for young people to get into the work force haha
Really does suck though. I'm just about at a point in my career where working hard has somewhat paid off (I'm pretty irreplaceable due to having very specific knowledge about our software and infrastructure). I'm absolutely using that power to ransom my manager into treating the Junior Dev I'm mentoring way better than he would otherwise. I'm actually insisting that he gets his promotion to Regular at least 6 months earlier than is company standard, as well as at least a 12% raise this year. Just because my Junior is great, so I'm giving him way easier access to my domain knowledge which makes him irreplaceable as well. And guess who's handing in her resignation tomorrow, so the company has to scramble for a replacement 😎
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The second half of this post is how I got through highschool. And college. And the military. “I didn't see anything about it in the handbook/UCMJ” was my motto. And I already realized hard work didn’t pay off, cuz I watched my siblings do that.
There are two ways to get through life. You can conform, which is hard for you but easy for everyone else, or you can find and exploit every loophole you can which is hard for you AND hard for everyone else. I’m not one to make things easy for other people unless its also easier for me, so..
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Apparently I've been in my 30's for my entire 20's
God damn if you were working that hard in your 20s that would suck.
Yeah it did
now I'm unemployed and will die before I take a managerial role again
Not unemployed but I refuse to ever get a job managing people. Fuck that shit.
Good choice. Unless they pay you enough to get a nice house, nice car, and take care of all of your immediate family, it is nottttt worth it.
Yeah I mean if the money is life changing then what the hell
In my 20s and it is really true that I am ready to work for free just so that I can get some sort of start
Yeah it's really tough at the start of your career. Low pay, long hours, no vacation, and starvation if you don't play ball. My advice is don't allow yourself to feel loyalty for any company or anyone in a higher position than you. They'll act like they'll have your back but the moment the calculus says throwing you under the bus is beneficial they won't hesitate. They won't give you the raise you deserve, so the only way to get that is to jump ship whenever it's beneficial for you to.
They don't owe you anything more than the agreed upon compensation, you don't owe them anything more than what's in the job description.
Many countries guarantee vacations as long as you're working full time.
In your 20s is the ideal age for moving to another country if you can afford the trip.
20's: learn to read the room, if your manager doesn't move people on merit, don't do extra shit for them. If you really want to try step one, you're going to have to bounce around until you find a manager willing to give you what you're worth.
I know i serve for at least 2 examples. First one was as a a security guard, though that was back in my early 20s, on what not to do at work on some seminar. There was a video of me dosing off standing up. In my defense, i have ADHD and it was boring as hell job and it was impossible to make a living wage with normal hours so everyone had to do overtime massively.
Other one is at my current job, as a printing machine operator. It's rather important to make sure that the active runnin rhe machine is in correct way, aka facing the machine or the operator, etc. primarily for the next steps in production.
For one specific job i constantly messed it up and printed it the wrong way. Eventually design department did a special picture just for me, with my name on it. On how this certain run must face while in the machine. It had a human figure on it(with my name) the run and machine.
This picture still goes along with that job up to this day, though no one else afterwards hasn't messed it up in the threat that my name will be replaced by theirs.
"Be the (cause of) change you want to see in the world"
I love you
Some previous employee's last name became slang for “a major fuck up” in one of my jobs. I don't think that's too uncommon.
We had something kinda similar at my last workplace.
A guy, "Bob", with the worst attitude you'll ever come across. Total nightmare. Multiple times on any given day, he'd put down and even threaten people or rat them out to their bosses if some tiny little detail didn't go the way he liked it. When said bosses reacted indifferently, he'd full on stalk people before and after work to have a go at them. For this and only this purpose, he even drove to a guy's house several towns over.
At last, he got reprimanded (kinda rare in Europe) and was fired (even more rare) within a few months. And only because that specific company was generally very intolerant of this sort of behavior.
For a long time after this whole ordeal, if somebody displayed a bad attitude at work, we'd say: "Hey, look, he's pulling a Bob."
I'm the reason a single hardware store in a chain of stores has a specific policy. After they mix a can of paint, they offer the hammer to the customer and ask if they want to seal the lid themselves.
Can you elaborate for us? Did they just not seal it when they handed you paint?
It's not exciting.
I was a customer. The employee didn't seal the paint can properly, it spilled, caused damage to other things. I made a huge deal about it, ended up escalating to the owner of the store, got store credit for replacing things.
I had that with coffee and the other things was my balls.
Thankfully that was merely hot coffee, not burning hot. No demand for store credit to replace my balls was made.
I'm thinking they worked for the hardware store and bungled the sealing so catastrophically that the higher ups refuse to take any chances on the risk of such calamities reoccurring.
Well yes, but also it's my hard work in my 20s that put me in a place where I'm paid enough that 50 hour months aren't catastrophic to my livelihood.
If you're too competent you'll get promoted. Now you have to do all the same stuff you already did plus deal with a bunch of management shit. Literally anything is better than attending meeting after meeting, even work.
My 20s were spent in grad school hoping to change the world. My 30s were spent trying to survive.
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