# Is there such a thing as truly honest work in the United States anymore?



## aus2020 (Jun 29, 2011)

telepariah said:


> At this point, I'm hoping in five years I'll be retired.
> 
> The thing is, that question is often used to weed out people who are ambitious enough to be a threat to the interviewer. I have always avoided promotion. I don't want the responsibility, nor the stress, and I definitely do not want to swim with the sharks.


I agree that the question is a test of ambitiousness. However, I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. Any company has to eventually promote people and that question would be beneficial in assessing people as potential management prospects.


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## dizzycactus (Sep 9, 2012)

telepariah said:


> The question I always hate is, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW?


I think that's a question to weed out (or encourage?) stupidity. If they asked me where I wanted to be, that's fair enough. But if they ask me where I will be, I can only answer if I have absolute confidence that all my plans will magically align with reality and work out without a hitch, and a pre-requisite for that attitude seems to be being stupid enough to not being able to comprehend all the possible scenarios that might disrupt those plans. Kinda like a planning-dunning-kruger effect where the incompetent planners assume things will work out, while the more competent know enough to know otherwise lol. 

But maybe I just demonstrated that I think about things too much, and they don't want you to think. Most of the service oriented jobs value mindless action above consideration any day. That's maybe why I struggled in the minimum-wage job market but have an easier time in the more professional job market, where you have to think.


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## Whatevs (Oct 17, 2016)

Elusive_Certainty said:


> The thread topic isn't an entirely rhetorical question. I am being at least partially serious about it. Sure, you can get into creative fields and make an honest living, if you have enough time (usually years) for your work to bear any fruit, but I'm talking about average jobs. Jobs where you are expected to lie through your teeth on an application form and in an interview and sell an unthinking, corporate-friendly persona to whomever is giving the interview. It's such a load of f*cking horsesh*t, it amazes me how little it gets talked about with any level of gravity in the wider public discourse, let alone through any relatively popular form of media.
> 
> I knew I would never make a thread like this on Personality Cafe unless I was in a particularly unpleasant mood, so here it is. Depending on how the response to this thread goes, I might just make an account on wrongplanet.net and see how this kind of topic fares over there. I'm hoping that some of you can surprise me on here. Personality Cafe itself has been a disappointment over the years, but perhaps some of you can redeem it at least a little by answering a query that doesn't fit the mold of what society expects us to swallow without question, day in and day out. Have fun.
> 
> ...


You're right as rain about the whole interview process being nonsense. It is just a game of lies. They tell you lies like "We care about our employees here!" and you tell them lies like "I really care about this company!" and if you like each other's lies enough you go work there. Personally, I blame this issue on the creation of human resource departments that hire 24 year old ditzes that know nothing about the job or company, to artificially boost female employment numbers to appease statistically illiterate people...


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## Aladdin Sane (May 10, 2016)

dizzycactus said:


> But maybe I just demonstrated that I think about things too much, and they don't want you to think. Most of the service oriented jobs value mindless action above consideration any day. That's maybe why I struggled in the minimum-wage job market but have an easier time in the more professional job market, where you have to think.


That is the same reason why I have found those sorts of jobs unbearable. Having to switch off my thoughts to do mindless tasks like making coffee and repeating the same sentences to customers was enough to damage my mental health, I had never had worse depression than when I was working in those jobs and IT WAS ONLY PART TIME. I am very bad at physical work.


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## Kn0wB34 (Sep 2, 2016)

Ditto the person who said customer service jobs.Oh, and receptionists and post-office people too. Those types of jobs in the US just have the most inconsiderate people.Hell, the customer services representatives I've dealt with while living/traveling in other countries totally outbeat most of the ones that I have dealt with in the States.


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## Arzazar Szubrasznikarazar (Apr 9, 2015)

Whatevs said:


> You're right as rain about the whole interview process being nonsense. It is just a game of lies. They tell you lies like "We care about our employees here!" and you tell them lies like "I really care about this company!" and if you like each other's lies enough you go work there. Personally, I blame this issue on the creation of human resource departments that hire 24 year old ditzes that know nothing about the job or company, to artificially boost female employment numbers to appease statistically illiterate people...


I don't think HR has anything to do with female employment numbers. It's all about a general problem of massive levels of manipulation involved in business nowadays. It exists on multiple levels - advertising, customer service, etc.
+ various "life coaches" and similar "experts" promoting various types of pseudopsychology to get money on training business people.
Just getting in contact with ads, seeing all this degeneracy:





It's all a part of process of hiring the pod people who are willing to manipulate customers and lie to them and weeding out real humans.

We're living in a world where customer service businesses will readily throw their employees under the bus and for example tolerate stalking and people aggressively hitting on them. For what reason? Just to stroke someone's ego? Or worse, making employees flirt with customers and stuff.

Degeneracy.

This world needs to burn.


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