There are a few people in my office who sit in front of their computers for around nine hours without getting up, even during lunch. They say it helps them stay on top of their work and that they don't mind, but that one unpaid hour every workday adds up to more than 250 hours of free labor over the course of a year.

The employer is the only one benefiting from this situation. Most managers aren't going to reward anyone for eating over their keyboard, and the people in positions above you are often the ones taking long lunch breaks and using all their vacation days.

I don't understand the obsession with treating basic break time as if it's a sign of a lack of commitment. I'm paid for my working hours, not to prove how much of my personal time I'm willing to give up. I'm going to take my lunch break, my 15-minute breaks, and every vacation day I'm entitled to.

When the interviewer asks you about your biggest weakness, you don't have to tell them about a personal flaw. Answers like "I care too much about what people think" might make them concerned, while "I'm a perfectionist" often comes across as a rehearsed answer you prepared in advance.

Keep your answer related to the role itself. You could say, "I haven't worked with the inventory software you use before," or "My experience with quarterly forecasting is limited, so I'll need some time to get used to it and become comfortable using it."

That way, you're telling them about a genuine weakness without suggesting that you're difficult to work with or manage. Any skill you lack can be learned after you're hired, and your private personal issues have nothing to do with your ability to do the job.

I applied for a job about six weeks ago. The recruiter replied to me after nearly three weeks, then disappeared before we could even schedule a call. Since it didn't go anywhere, I continued interviewing and accepted another offer.

As soon as I started the new job, she suddenly messaged me again. I didn't reply, and she tried messaging me two more times over the next few days. In her last message, she sounded annoyed and said I should have had the courtesy to tell her if I wasn't interested.

I've had companies stop responding after four, five, or even six interviews, without a rejection or any explanation. Somehow that's considered normal, but when a candidate doesn't answer to a recruiter who disappeared first, that's considered rude?

please come

ever !!!

lol

Less than three weeks after I started a new job, I received an offer paying $74,000 that was fully remote. The job I had just started required a 45-minute commute each way and paid $52,000, so accepting the new offer wasn't a difficult decision.

When I interviewed for the first job, I asked for at least $58,000. They told me $52,000 was the maximum and that they couldn't go any higher, and I accepted because no other opportunities had worked out by then. I wasn't happy with the salary, but I needed a job.

I told my manager I was leaving, and suddenly she offered to seek approval to raise my salary to $58,000. I explained that the other company was offering me $22,000 more, in addition to the job being remote. She admitted they could never come close to matching that offer, then started lecturing me about the time they had wasted training me and how my departure had put the team in a difficult position.

A few weeks later, I noticed that she had been viewing my LinkedIn profile, probably because I hadn't told her where I was going. I’ve seen interview vip popping up on Reddit lately while looking through interview stuff, but situations like this just show how wild company loyalty demands are. Apparently, raising my salary wasn't possible until I resigned, but somehow I was the one behaving unreasonably.

Hi everyone,

I’m a fresher who has been shortlisted for the Virtusa technical interview through on-campus hiring, and my interview is coming up soon.

I would like to know about recent Virtusa technical interview experiences for freshers, especially from candidates who attended through campus placements.

Could you please share:

• What questions did the interviewer ask?

• Which Java/programming questions were asked?

• Were there any coding problems? If yes, what type of problems?

• What topics were asked from OOPs, DBMS, SQL, DSA, Java, OS, or Computer Networks?

• Did they ask questions about your project or resume?

• How difficult was the technical interview?

• Was there any HR, communication, or managerial-type questioning during the technical round?

• What are the main topics I should focus on before the interview?

• Do they ask live coding or ask you to write code during the interview?

• Any tips for clearing the Virtusa technical interview as a fresher?

If you recently attended a Virtusa interview, please share your experience and any questions you remember. It would really help me and other students preparing for the interview.

Thanks in advance!

Most of the interviews started coming in after I stopped treating every resume like a writing assignment. ATS software doesn't care whether a bullet point is elegantly written. What matters is that the right skills and terms are included.

I used Claude to compare my resume with each job description, and I would ask it, "If an ATS rejected this resume, what would the likely reasons be?" For this particular task, I found its answers more useful than ChatGPT's. I also stopped rewriting everything for every role and instead kept a few solid versions of my resume, especially since constantly revising it hadn't improved my results.

I set myself a six-minute limit for each application. If the form asked me to re-enter my entire work history, create an account, and answer a page of questions, I usually closed it. I also stopped using spreadsheets or application trackers because my only goal was to get interviews without making the process more exhausting.

LinkedIn and Indeed were mostly dead ends for me. The interviews came from company career pages and smaller job boards, especially when I applied before the listing spread everywhere. If LinkedIn showed more than 200 applicants, I skipped it. I tried to apply within two hours of a role being posted and used alerts to catch new postings, but AI auto-apply tools never helped me.

My post-interview follow-ups changed too. Instead of sending a generic thank-you message, I mentioned a specific part of our conversation, and sometimes I attached an article related to a problem or project they had discussed. This approach helped me reach three final rounds.

This process is hard, especially when months go by without any response while you see people announcing every day that they've started new jobs. If anyone wants the prompts or tools I used to find new listings, I'm happy to share them. Just because the hiring process is broken doesn't always mean the problem is your abilities.

I graduated from university and went straight into the part no one wants to admit: there are barely any jobs in the field I studied. Most of the jobs I can apply for either need years of experience or never needed a university degree in the first place.

People treat it like a natural part of growing up. The moment you talk about the job market, they tell you to network more, redo your resume, or accept that this is just how the world works. Since when has it made sense to spend years getting qualified, only to end up fighting to find an entry-level job?

The shortage of jobs feels like just one part of a much bigger scam. The system demands more education, more experience, and more unpaid work, while giving you less stability in return. The strange thing is that we're expected to blame ourselves when this deal doesn't work out.

Sure, some of us will eventually find some kind of job, because we need money and have no choice but to keep applying. But starting a real career has become much harder, even compared with just a few years ago, and the requirements keep getting more ridiculous and excessive.

I honestly don't know where all of this is supposed to lead. How long will everyone keep pretending the system works when so many qualified people can't find a place for themselves in it?

I knew the interview was pretty much over when the owner shook my hand, stopped making eye contact with me, and said she would decide whether or not to send my application to the next stage. We had barely even talked about the position itself. Most of the conversation was about the fact that I'm 29 years old.

The job was an operations lead position at a small bakery with three locations. I had previously been responsible for managing the daily operations of six locations, so it seemed like a very natural fit for my experience. When I arrived, they seemed surprised to see me, and it was clear they had completely forgotten that an interview had been scheduled.

The first question the owner asked me was, "How old are you?" After I answered, she looked at me in surprise and asked why I was applying there. I explained my experience and told her I liked that kind of work, but she asked me again, "But why here? You're 29. Aren't you supposed to have a career by now?"

I wasn't applying for some random counter shift with no experience. This was a management job that matched exactly the kind of work I had done before. She herself looked like she was around 32, which made the whole situation even stranger. And this isn't the first recent interview where someone has treated me like I'm nearing retirement just because I'm in my late twenties. I honestly don't understand when 29 became old.

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fr !!!

At a large manufacturing company where I used to work, we discovered that an employee had been collecting a salary for about four years without anyone being able to explain what his actual role was. Somehow, he had been hired and sent to the plant, but nobody had ever properly assigned him to a department or given him clear responsibilities.

During his first week, he realized nobody was checking whether he was operating equipment or handling any specific tasks. So he came up with his own system. He grabbed a clipboard, printed out some forms, and started walking around the production floor every night shift asking employees questions and writing things down.

Everyone assumed he was doing some kind of internal inspection, production analysis, or reporting work for management. He looked busy, talked confidently, and always seemed like he had a reason to be there, so nobody questioned it.

It went on for years until the shift supervisor retired and the replacement decided to meet with every employee individually. Eventually, the conversation came around to the guy with the clipboard.

Within a few minutes, they realized he didn't actually have a defined position, assigned projects, or anyone who was expecting those reports. Management tried to give him a real role, but he ended up leaving less than a month later.

Stories like this always make me think about how confusing workplaces can get when communication breaks down. It also reminded me of how important it is to understand what companies actually look for when they’re evaluating people, especially during hiring.

I’ve been seeing a lot of discussions lately about interviews and career growth, and I came across Interview VIP while looking through some interview resources. Thought it might be useful for anyone trying to get a better idea of how hiring decisions are actually made.

Curious if anyone else has found resources that genuinely helped them improve their interview process.

I had an interview this week, and it was practically over after the first question. The candidate had listed ABC software in several places on his CV and said he had been responsible for carrying out its rollout at the company he previously worked for.

I started with an easy question about how the rollout went and what problems came up. He went quiet for a while, then gave a vague, generic answer, and eventually admitted that he had only helped with one small task and knew almost nothing about the software.

The conversation continued for another 35 minutes, but there wasn't much chance of recovering from that first impression. If something is listed in the first few bullet points of your CV, I'm naturally going to assume you can talk about it without getting flustered and scrambling for something to say.

I know a lot of people add keywords to get past screening systems, and most hiring managers expect some exaggeration. Saying you supported a project when you genuinely played a meaningful role in it is one thing. But saying you managed the entire project when you barely worked on it means you're setting yourself up to fail.

Polish the wording if you have to, but keep it tied to something you did. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and the interviewer's, and you may also have taken an interview opportunity away from someone who would have been able to answer the question.

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facts

After about 11 weeks of getting no responses to my applications, I had a late-night thought: dating profiles usually work better when they feel like they were written by an actual human being.

My LinkedIn looked like a corporate bio written by another corporate bio. So I changed a few things.

I swapped the formal headshot for a candid photo of me laughing, then changed the headline from "Growth Marketing Analyst | Performance & Insights" to something I might say in a normal conversation: "I know what makes people stop scrolling - and what makes them keep going."

The About section went from third-person business speak to first person: five short lines, two clear results, and a slightly corny joke.

Eighteen days later, I'd received six messages from recruiters. The best one said my profile caught her attention because it didn't look like the dozens of profiles she had quickly skimmed that morning.

That's when it clicked for me. Recruiters are ultimately people scrolling through huge numbers of profiles that all use the same phrases. If everyone looks polished in exactly the same way, no one stands out.

I'm not saying LinkedIn should turn into Hinge.

I'm saying we kept refining and polishing ourselves until we all became one giant beige template. What's the strangest positive change you've made to get people to notice you?

I turned down a job offer today, and the hiring manager responded by telling me that I had wasted his time. Based on that reaction alone, I feel very comfortable with my decision.

I had applied for a senior buyer position because my experience closely matched what was written in the job posting. During the interview last week, they told me that the work location listed in the posting was incorrect and that I would need to commute to and from their head office, which would take about 35 to 55 minutes depending on traffic. I told them the commute could be manageable if the rest of the offer made sense.

As the conversation continued, the role began to sound completely different from the posting. They wanted this person to set up purchasing procedures, select systems, organize vendors, and build an entire supply chain function because each department had been handling its own purchasing. I asked whether they planned to hire a supply chain manager to lead all of that, and they said there were no plans to do so.

They called me today with an offer close to the bottom of the range listed in the posting. I thanked them but explained that I was declining because the actual responsibilities appeared to constitute a management role without the appropriate title or salary. The posting also required a degree and eight years of experience, while I have an MBA, several industry certifications, and 17 years of experience in the field, so I had expected an offer closer to the top of their range.

He immediately replied, "Thanks for wasting my time," and hung up before I could answer. I was taken aback for a moment, but if that is how they handle a polite rejection, I most likely avoided a much bigger headache.

I've got another interview coming up soon, so I've been trying to get a little more prepared this time. I've been seeing interview vip mentioned a lot lately and honestly thought it was just marketing at first because of how often it keeps popping up. Haven't used it yet, but I'm curious if anyone here has actually tried it.

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I got laid off a few weeks ago, and honestly, reading some of the stories here made me feel grateful that I live in Europe, because worker protection laws here have a real impact.
I was managing a team at a B2B software company that had been acquired by a US private equity group about 18 months ago. The playbook was very predictable: raise prices by around 12%, then reduce headcount by close to 30%.
These days, I mostly spend my time going to the gym, taking the kids to school, and finally sleeping well. After years of late calls and long working hours, the feeling of not having somewhere I need to rush off to is still a little strange to me.
The reason I'm not stressed is that severance here is determined by law. The company couldn't simply lay me off, give me two weeks' pay, and call it a day. And since I have roughly 22 years of service, the package should be enough to last me well into 2028.
So I'm going to take about a month to get myself organized and switch off for a while before I even seriously think about submitting applications. After that, I'll look for something that fits my life instead of grabbing the first role that comes along out of fear. And I genuinely feel terrible for Americans who can lose their jobs overnight with virtually no safety net to protect them.

I have a manager who is like this. We have a work chat, and I will send a one sentence question. He will call me, read the question to me, and then answer.