A “Bad Jobs” Open Thread

Photo credit: Anders Sandberg, CC BY 2.0.

I pre-wrote all of this week’s posts before going on vacation, which means today’s Open Thread is about a Slate article from Monday — but if you haven’t yet read it, it’s worth the look.

In the article, Alison Green (of Ask A Manager) explains how bad jobs can distort our sense of what the workplace should be like:

Working at a dysfunctional job is terrible for all the obvious reasons: unclear expectations, unrealistic workload, tyrannical boss, toxic co-workers, or whatever might warrant the category of “dysfunctional job” in the first place. But on top of the obvious, bad jobs exact an additional price that many people don’t know about. If you stay in one long enough, it can totally warp your idea of normal. You’ll often end up accepting things as unexceptional that you shouldn’t tolerate at all, like unfair pay or being yelled at—and these expectations can shadow you into your next job too.

So consider this your Bad Jobs Open Thread, whether you want to discuss your own bad jobs or the examples Alison cites in her article.

(Also, I’ll start doing Friday Chats again once I get back home — so if you’d like to volunteer for a Friday Chat, email nicole@thebillfold.com!)

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