March 2021

weekend free-for-all – March 27-28, 2021

This comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand. Here are the rules for the weekend posts. Book recommendation of the week: Girl A, by Abigail Dean. Lex is known in the media as Girl A, who escaped from the house where her parents had kept her and her […]

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it’s your Friday good news

It’s your Friday good news, with more accounts of success even in this weird time. 1. I graduated in 2020 into a dismal job market. The only things I had lined up were abroad, so of course they all became impossible. Disappointed and uncertain about what to do next, I applied for every job that […]

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open thread – March 26-27, 2021

It’s the Friday open thread! The comment section on this post is open for discussion with other readers on anything work-related that you want to talk about (that includes school). If you want an answer from me, emailing me is still your best bet*, but this is a chance to talk to other readers. * […]

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colleague won’t leave me alone after my former employee died, lunches with a strictly kosher employee, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My colleague won’t leave me alone after my former employee died I have been employed at my company for three years, although I spent one summer in college interning for this organization. One year ago, I transitioned from a supervisory role to my current role in […]

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my boss sent me work questions while I was in the hospital

A reader writes: A few weeks ago I had a bizarre experience with my usually great boss, and I’m not sure if I handled it right. I had a medical emergency over the weekend and ended up having an emergency appendectomy on Sunday morning. (Side note: ouch.) Sunday evening, while recovering in the hospital, I […]

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Ask a Manager in five languages

1. All the foreign editions of the Ask a Manager book! Top row: U.S., UK, Poland. Bottom row: Ukraine, South Korea, China. 2. Separately, an announcement: When you are reading a letter in the archives that later had an update, you will now see a note at the bottom of the post with a link […]

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what’s the best networking experience you’ve had?

So many people hate networking — they worry it feels slimy, they don’t quite know how to do it, or it just makes them uncomfortable. It doesn’t help that most of us have had run-in’s with bad networkers. So let’s talk about good networking. What’s the most satisfying or useful networking experience you ever had? How […]

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