1. Secret restructuring plan would have me report to a coworker I hate
My boss, Sara, is retiring in a little over a year. She is one tier down from the director, Emma. Earlier this week, Emma pulled my work-best-friend, Theresa, aside and told her that when Sara retires, Emma wants to restructure. She plans to appoint Theresa to a new deputy director position. She also plans to promote another coworker, Carol, to Sara’s position. That would leave me working for Carol. I don’t want Sara’s position for myself, but am more qualified and have more experience than Carol. I also hate Carol to the depths of my soul. I will not spend a single day of my life working for her. The thing is, I cherish this hatred in secret and have no reason to suspect that anyone other than Theresa knows that I will refuse to work for Carol. Strictly speaking, Theresa should not have disclosed the plan to me, but told me so that I could be ready.
I have several reasons to suspect why Carol has been chosen, including my own somewhat-obscure technical skills that no one else wants to learn and a general reluctance to search for someone new for Sara’s position outside of the organization. In addition, they plan to assign me more technical responsibilities that are part of Sara’s position because Carol does not have that skill set. This would not come with a promotion and it is unlikely it would come with a substantial raise.
My spouse makes plenty of money to support us. I work because I want to, and for my own spending money, not because I need to.
I don’t want to insinuate that I know of the plan and get Theresa in trouble, but I also don’t want to blindside Emma and rage quit when Carol starts (and it would be against company policy to announce Carol’s promotion before her new contract is signed). Emma can be vengeful and petty and I think if I rage quit, I would walk away without a reference from a former supervisor, which would be problematic because I have been in this position for most of a decade. I am not sure what to do. Despite the fact that my organization is small, Emma speaks to me maybe three times a year, and when I attempt to talk to her, she is terse and clearly annoyed. I think if Theresa tells Emma that I will refuse to work for Carol, Emma will lose any respect she has for me. Do I wait to quit until Carol’s contract is signed? Quit while I can still get a good reference, taking the chance that the plan will never actually happen?
Would you need to rage quit and leave on the spot? Couldn’t you simply give two weeks notice and attribute the timing to something else? You could say you’d been planning to leave for a while and let Emma believe the timing is a coincidence. Dealing with Carol being your boss for two weeks is unlikely to be a massive burden — she’ll be getting settled in her new job and you’ll be on your way out, and if anything you’ll be able to enjoy two weeks of knowing you’re getting away from her. I can see why you don’t want even those two weeks of working for her, but truly it’s no time at all in the scheme of things and it would let you sidestep your worries about Emma’s reference entirely. (Also, you’ll still be able to use Sara as a reference too.)
That way you’re not prematurely quitting over something that might never come to pass. For all we know, Emma could be gone by the time Sara retires and this plan will never be implemented, or Carol will leave for a different company, or something else will happen to change Emma’s plans. But if it does happen and you decide to quit, you can give notice at that point.
2. How to respond to AI responses to questions
I have been at my remote job for a little over a year and a half, but have been in the data world for about nine years. I’m running into an issue that I just don’t know how to handle.
I tend to be someone who exhausts all of my options before asking someone else for help. I enjoy figuring things out and actually tend to avoid asking people for help to a fault (I am actively working on this and improving, though). Typically, by the time I ask a human being for help, I have already attempted to research how to do something or I have determined that the issue is org-specific, so Stack Exchange, Reddit, or any Google search result isn’t going to help me.
My org has also been pushing AI usage. I think their general policies around it are responsible, but there are definitely some people who seem to think we should be using it simply because it’s the Next Big Thing. We have CoPilot, including the premium version that’s been trained on internal data, as well as several agents that are specific to a particular Microsoft product (Power BI, Power Automate, etc.). I have no problem using these when it makes sense to do so, but I am also very familiar with the limitations of large language models and have had mixed results consulting the agents for things they absolutely should know, so they aren’t my first choice.
Recently, I have had multiple instances in which, after struggling with some hyperspecific thing, I asked a coworker for help and their only response was to send me the output they got from one of the AI agents. I seriously have no idea how to respond to this. Like, to me, this is equivalent to telling someone to “Google it,” except it’s worse because the implication is that I don’t even know how to use one the AI agents that are shoved in our faces every day (I know they aren’t actually saying that; it’s just how it feels).
I just don’t know what to do with this. It’s rare that the AI agents give any instructions that I haven’t already tried, and if I’m asking a coworker, I want their input. If they don’t know, that’s fine! I can look for someone who does. But I just don’t know how to respond when this happens, especially since the information given is often unhelpful.
The easiest thing is to ward it off preemptively when you first ask for their help by saying something like, “I’m not trying AI because X” or “the AI agents weren’t helpful on this” or “you’re really good at figuring out X so I think you’ll be more helpful than AI was.”
But if you don’t do that and they send an AI response back, there’s no reason you can’t say, “I was hoping for your thoughts because AI didn’t give me what I need and you’re good at X.” There’s value in spelling that out (and in fact it would be interesting to see if spelling it out like that a few times has any longer-term effect on how they respond after that).
3. Is our company-wide meeting bad news?
The boss suddenly called for a company-wide meeting in two days and didn’t state the topic. Now everyone’s in a panic.
We managed to ask our manager if they knew anything. They replied that they did not.
In our last performance review, the company was meeting goalposts. Our parent company did get acquired this year, but we were told there were no plans in place regarding us and we’d continue to work like usual. What could this meeting be about? Should we be worried?
I’m extra worried because I’m one of the few working entirely remote right now due to health issues. They increased our in-office days a few months ago. Surely they wouldn’t increase it again…?
There’s no way to know! It could be anything. It could be a bad announcement about finances, layoffs, and budget cuts, or it could be a celebratory announcement about good news, or it could be your CEO retiring, or the company shutting down, or a new product line, or the parking lot is going to be shut down for two months, or some kind of employee recognition, or an update on strategy, or a dreadful motivational speaker, or yes, it could be a change to remote work. There’s no way to know, and trying to predict it just sets you up for a stressful, panicky two days. You’re better off trying to put it out of your mind (easier said than done, I know) and figuring you’ll know when you know, and two days isn’t that long.
4. I was rejected for not having experience that I actually have
I recently received a rejection email for a position that I’ve been interviewing for. In the email, which seems like it was written by the hiring manager rather than just being a form letter, they said that they’d decided to hire someone who had experience with a specific population in our community. But I actually have experience working with that population in a past job! It just never came up in the interview. They didn’t ask me about it and I didn’t know it would be relevant so I didn’t mention it either.
Is it worth me writing back and explaining that now? It’s frustrating to hear that I could been hired if they’d just asked me about this.
Well, sort of. Not as a way to tell them they made the wrong choice or in the hope that they’ll change their decision — they’re not going to do that after someone else has already accepted the job — but in case a similar job opens up in the future. You could say something like, “Thanks for letting me know! I actually did work extensively with bearded tortoises when I was at the Amphibian Alliance, so if a similar role opens up in the future I’d love to talk with you about it.”
It’s also possible that more went into the hiring decision than just who did/didn’t have that experience. Often there’s more to it but a hiring manager will find it simplest to offer one specific by way of explanation, without intending to communicate “it all came down to this one factor and only this one factor” (but then candidates end up taking it that way). And they might not have asked you about it because they didn’t realize it was something they cared about until they talked to someone who raised it — which is frustrating on the candidate end, but the reality of how hiring sometimes goes.
5. Should my resume have one big list of achievements up-front, not tied to specific jobs?
I know you always say to focus on achievements on a resume. My last job was 8.5 years and had lots of achievements. But now I’m doing a one-year contract that will result in a lot fewer achievements. Would it be okay to have a single list of career achievements as page one of my resume and then a list of relevant roles and dates the achievements are from as page two? I’m worried about only having one or two bullets from this job that are as good as the eight bullets from the previous one.
The format you’re proposing is called a hybrid or combination resume: it blends a functional resume (a list of all your achievements without tying them to specific jobs, which most hiring managers hate because we want to see what you did where and when) and a reverse-chronological resume (the usual format, listing what achievements go with what job). There are very few circumstances where it makes sense to use it; in nearly every case, hiring managers prefer the standard reverse-chronological format, and that’s what you should use.
Anyone reading your resume will see that you were only at this job for one year, versus eight at the previous one and it will make sense that you had fewer achievements at it. In fact, I’d expect to see that!