Asklemmy

Like... Literally any of it. I'm a software engineer and my degree didn't have anything to do with software or engineering.

I'd have to really stretch to something like "time management" or "active listening" to find any connection, lol.

How frequently business leaders will ignore advice from experts and "go with their gut" instead.

How long it lasts. Year after year after year. No end in sight. No summer, winter or spring breaks. One vacation a year and a few sick days.

Mostly the human factor in working in IT. It shows you have to manage systems and the larger concepts so that you can keep yourself up-to-date, but they don't prepare you for how bad some people can be.

Most of it. I went to college for Funeral Directing. School will tell you it's an ancient and honourable job of serving people in a time of need. 50% of school is learning "the art" of embalming and the other 50% is rules and regulations.

In real life, embalming is becoming a rare option, so most funeral homes have one or two directors on staff who can easily do every embalming the business gets. The other directors are essentially just salespeople. Most funeral homes are now owned by a few large corporations who don't run it like an honourable service but rather like a used car lot. These corporations have found every trick to skirt regulations meant to protect consumers and drive up prices while lowering quality of service.

It hasn't gone unnoticed by the consumers, who will take out their anger and frustrations on the overworked and underpaid funeral director who are not in on the take. Directors are typically paid for 40 hours a week but are required to take on all clients who call. It's rare that a director can handle every client a week in just 40 hours. All places I worked were severely understaffed and burnout was incredibly common.

I eventually got burnt out myself and switched jobs. I would not recommend funeral directing to anyone. College acts like you'll be treated like a doctor or lawyer but they must just mean the gruelling hours because funeral directors get none of the pay or respect.

Understanding benefits packages and basic labor laws.

Office politics. I was a 4.0 student who was given an award by the faculty as best computer science student two years in a row. Despite being talented, extra hard working and driven, I had no idea how to play the game and my career stalled almost immediately. I watched others with weaker skills get promotions and raises because they knew the right people and served on the right committees. Being slightly autistic, I never realized the rules of the game. I quit after 8 years and started my own business, went back as a contractor getting 4x the pay, and it was awesome. There should be a class for people called "sucking up to management and gaming performance reviews."

Senior citizens being the outright meanest demographic. Not by frequency, but by intensity. The amount of stubbornness, entitlement, and just absolute resentment for everything around them shocks me. The way they react to things not going exactly how they think they should go is astounding. Don't get me wrong, the majority of them are pleasant and wonderful. But when an old person is mean, it's on its own level. I'd say middle aged people are more likely to be difficult, but they never even come close to the tantrums that seniors will throw. Part of this could be chalked up to mental decline, but the main part is entitlement. Plenty of people experience mental decline, and dont become vitriolic assholes. They truly think they're special and should get whatever they want at all times. Its exhausting explaining to an adult why I can't do something for them that our organization is literally unable to do.

Workplace bullies.

Worst thing is when you don't even realise when its happening to you. My manager did and moved me to another team after a few months...

I now work elsewhere with much kinder and nicer people in a much smaller team 😁👍 but sadly the previous bullying has affected my life quite a bit, as well as how I interact with my partner.

I’m a filmmaker. Allllllllll of it. What I really needed to learn is that the name brand of the film school you went to will ABSOLUTELY have a huge bearing on how high you can climb. If your film school isn’t name brand, drop out and start working in the industry instead. I went to art school and learned all technical aspects of filmmaking. If I hadn’t actually worked on set while I was in school, I’d be absolutely clueless.

In the end, I have come to realize that it’s who you know.

Lesson: if you go to film school, at least make it a name brand like NYU, AFI, USC, etc or you will basically be a carnie because those rich kids look out for the kids they went to school with and NO ONE ELSE.

Office politics and networking.

How crappy leadership destroys culture and employee's mental health.

The crushing pointlessness of it all.

They never told me I couldn't get a job as a programmer. I just reset passwords all day.

All the meetings that either have no relation to your job or could've just been an email or text conversation.

How often my patience is tested by corporate platitudes and meaningless work.

Corporate "motivational" nonsense. Leave the woodpile higher, write everything in pencil, drink your most expensive wine first. Some companies base - quite literally - everything on these nonsense blurbs.

That, and the way many [past] jobs tried to cover up the lack of compensation opportunities and bumps by things like basketball courts, restaurants on "campus" (sigh), goat yoga... I can't feed my family with a basketball court at the office. I guess I could feed them a yoga goat but I surmise it would be frowned upon.

Thank goodness for WFH. Never going back.

The high level of sheer incompetence at all levels, but especially in management. I'm lucky to work with competent folks directly, but the sheer amount of work created by stupidity outside of my department is soul-crushing. I can present definitive proof of systemic failures all day long, and no one is interested in doing a damned thing if the people or departments in question are politically powerful within the organization. Neither I nor my immediate colleagues are perfect, but we acknowledge our failures and try to create solutions. So many others, though, seem so invested in the status quo beyond all reason.

Employment.

I basically double majored in international affairs and economics but ultimately became a software engineer. I actually think both my courses of study were valuable. I’m basically self-taught as a developer (though I had mentors) and other than Comp Sci or Physics, there’s probably no other majors I’d pick as a base.

For international relations, it’s just always good to know about diplomacy and history. We had courses where we studied successful negotiations. The military history wasn’t so useful but there’s way more history made without guns than with them.

Econ is a good default major for a lot of fields. You learn to make statistical models and there’s strong math requirements with more of a focus on practical math than theoretical. (There’s even a little coding involved.) There’s classes on how businesses are run at a high level. Behavioral econ is helpful in small, but important ways (like designing little user interface nudges and prompts).

If I could redesign college, I’d make everyone in STEM majors do a minor in one of the humanities (and vise versa). We’d all be better off.

All of it

I work a job that doesn't require a degree

Edit to specify: I'm a forklift inspector in the LTL industry, I use excel a lot but that's something I learned on my own for personal reasons. Basically everything I do now is something anybody could do for little to no education except perhaps some training for the spreadsheets I made to make my job easier and our terrible software that I wish I could change. And I make about $30 per hour. So that's nice.

Risk assessments.

These days my job doesn't have much connection to my degree subject at all, so there is very little that it prepared me for. But my previous role - ranger - was very much tied into the subject that I took: Environmental Science.

Risk assessments are not unique to this area, of course and some of this is due to it being 20 odd years ago that I that I got my degree, but even so, looking back, I am surprised that risk assessments didn't feature anywhere. Not during that degree nor during the - much more practically based - arboriculture course that I took shortly before.

Tight deadlines. In college, we were given 2 weeks to complete projects. Of course that time also took up other assignments from other classes but it was manageable. In a real job, sometimes we need to get something done TODAY, or even 3 hours from right now.

Douchebaggery and ultra elites.

They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results.