Apologies if this isn't in line with the spirit of the group/site but I'm just looking for some advice really.

I'm 27m and just feel really stuck career wise. I didn't do very well in school and it took me a lot longer than everyone else to figure out myself. I have a degree in a redundant subject (very niche, no value in any career). Before COVID I was finally able to get my live music photography work off the ground but then that came crashing down. Other than that I mostly only have experience in retail and hospitality, and I've been a manager in both fields.

I'm looking for a work from home job for multiple reasons, mostly customer success/account management jobs and have had a few interviews too. I even got down to the final 2 for a promising one a few months ago. Every single job basically said that it was only down to my lack of experience compared to other candidates, but they did like me.

What is there I can actually do to aide this? I'm just worried that the older I get with only retail management work the harder it will be for me to start a real career path. The whole thing is getting me really down and I just don't know what to do.

Thanks.

In a few weeks I'm starting a new position at work that will be 7p-7a, 2 days in a row (each week, so work for 2 days, off for 5). It'll be a sort of "on call" type position that will have busier spats at the beginning and end of the shift, but the middle tends to be slow, occasionally no work at all. My employer doesn't have any major restrictions as far as work downtime, I have a lot of freedom there.

What tips do y'all have for managing sleep surrounding overnight shifts, and also maintaining alertness/awakeness during the overnight shifts?

I have a very senior role inside of a 450 person company, in IT. I'm not going to be too specific but it's in the TV industry. I state this because anyone that works in TV probably knows it's full of hot heads and technically inept people. I have a very small team of two in the UK looking after four sites, a couple of guys in the US too, looking after almost pure remote folks, they're mostly cloud.

Every time I go on holiday and as the most technical and senior person, some shit happens that ruins my break. I've had everything from ISP issues caused by finance not paying the bill so we had a site cut off, through to a show not being able to be delivered to channel on a deadline of hours which meant I had to step in, no matter where in the world I am and on what vacation.

I'm away again. Today, 10am, ping after ping about a site outage. Servers unavailable. Telephones not working. IT have failed again. The usual email chains and Teams/Slack chats that start pointing and poking. Absolutely furious and away on a family break I ignored it for the youngsters to solve, it should have been an easy fix. But no, the information given to them was wrong. The diagnosis handed to me incorrect. A cancelled ISP contract kicked in but we have multiple site outbound connections so that should not effect us. The site to site link goes dark for this particular site. I finally get THE CALL. I'm not going to rant too much as it gets technical but there's only so much that can be done from a phone VPN over a poor quality cell connection when you're somewhere between a wooded area a beach, and all you have on you is a 6" android device. I eventually got hold of my US senior tech who spent a four hours trying to direct the UK youngsters on what to touch, where to look. Turns out, some people randomly plugged in a switch, a NAS with DHCP server on and then managed to loopback the network using two ports of a SIP phone over the weekend as they had no clue what they were doing and eventually the network gave out. Spanning tree is not as good as it should be. We're a small team and due to always being overridden in protocol I've never been allowed to MAC address deny by default even though we're often a hacker target. BYOD is rife and it's getting harder to not lose data.

Anyway. Another day of my vacation ruined, time I should have spent concentrating on my family and having fun, building memories. The seething email I have sent to the board will go down like a lead balloon, I cannot wait to read the responses on Monday! Deny is going to get enabled by default or I'm going to resign.

So I ask you, how many others like me are there in here that work pushes in to your personal time, every time you try to get away from it?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984322000583

Abstract

We submitted over 12,000 job applications, to over 4,000 job advertisements, to investigate hiring discrimination against six ethnic groups for leadership positions.

For leadership positions, applicants with English names received 26.8% of positive responses for their job applications, while applicants with non-English names received 11.3% of positive responses. This means ethnic minorities received 57.4% fewer positive responses than applicants with English names for leadership positions despite identical resumes.

For non-leadership positions, applicants with English names received 21.2% of positive responses for their job applications, while applicants with non-English names received 11.6% of positive responses. This means ethnic minorities received 45.3% fewer positive responses for non-leadership positions despite identical resumes.

Ethnic discrimination for leadership positions was even more pronounced when the advertised job required customer contact.

I've been doing a postdoc in molecular biology in academia for a little while now, and getting ready to take next step. I'm looking into industry careers, but it's difficult to know what they entail since we don't often get exposed to them.

If you or someone you know works in biotech, I'd love to hear about it.

How did you get into it? What do you enjoy or not enjoy? Where do you see the industry heading? What are some of the positions like?

Whether you work indoors or out on the field, with your hands or with your mind.
Whether you create things, fix them, sell them. Or whether you work with people or look after them. What gets you up in the morning, keeps you going through the day (or night) and makes it enjoyable? (or bearable!)

I'm in England, this is going to matter with this.

My wife's business has outgrown a small office space. She does HTV clothing and accessories, mugs, etc. Basically, personalised vinyl and sublimation. The equipment she uses is large, A3 printers, dye cutter (Cricut but about to get an A2 bad boy) and probably an A2 printer too.

I've been looking for 5m squared log cabins and similar. Something like this would be an ideal shape. One wall, floor to ceiling, will be dedicated to storage of vinyl, mugs, t shirts, etc. hence thinking there's no point in going A frame style.

I'm assuming 15cm deep concrete base by whatever size the cabin will be, squared, plus 30cm to make sure the base is big enough.

Thoughts?

Do I build something myself or spend out on the Lego cabin style everyone seems to be selling in 44mm timber? Do I put in the base and build my own cabin around it using straight timber and sheet materials from merchants?

There's two main factors for me, cost and insulation. As she's using it for storing clothing it needs to not get damp so it'll need to be a good material and probably will need a dehumidifier in and on all year round when the door is closed. Do I sheet in layers with insulation foam?

Anyway, you get the idea. Links and general advice is welcome.

My girlfriend and I have been in the market for new computer chairs at home, as we have been getting increasingly uncomfortable in our existing chairs. We are both shorter people (both under 5’5”) and the problem we’ve been coming across is in most chairs (even the ones I’ve found for “short” people) tend to have seat depths of 16+ inches. What ends up happening is the edge of the seat ends up pushing into our calves leading to bad posture because we can’t sit up fully to the back of the chair unless our lower back gets leaned forward a bit due to the size of the seat depth. This leads to bad posture and back pain.

So I’m curious fellow short people of Tildes, does anyone have any recommendations for a more comfortable and ergonomic chair for short people?

I've been having a particularly rough time finding a new job in the field I graduated in. I'm doing pretty much everything most job sites have told me but networking is kinda hard.

I don't currently work in my field so I don't know anyone that would be particularly useful. Everyone I know is already aware of my situation and some of them have even found leads for me but no luck yet.

I have gone to events related to organizations I'm interested in and spoken to people there but it feels super weird to just approach people and tell them I'm looking for a job.

Similarly Linkedin is super foreign to me. This post is literally the most I've ever interacted with a social media site. What do I do once I open that app? Am I supposed to just stalk people on there that might hire me someday? I tried joining a "group" but it's been pending for a week now.

This week marks my 8th year of working in IT, and I have been feeling more and more that I am ready to move onto something different. Both my undergraduate and masters degrees were in the arts (Japanese, and Linguistics respectively), and I just sort of fell into IT as a job because I was always good with computers and it seemed like it had a pretty great pay-to-effort ratio. Now that I am approaching the decade mark, I feel like it's not what I want to do any more. Even my current job (which I once described as my dream role) has lost its sheen, and the prospect of spending the rest of my working life having to study and learn new technologies, and keep up with the latest developments just fills me with dread. I don't want to be in my fifties and reading endless documentation to try and understand why MacJibbleGPT is now the preferred way to skilter a virtualised quallock. In short, I would like to relegate my computing to the level of "hobby."

The problem is, I really don't know what I would like to do instead. The last time I had an idea of a career that I wanted to follow was as a teenager when I wanted to be a doctor, but I didn't get the grades. Since then I've just sort of fallen from thing to thing, and been a bit directionless, just assuming that IT would be enough to carry me through my working life, and focus on my hobbies for fulfilment. Well my hobbies are now very fulfilling, but they just make the slog of the work day even harder.

So how do I go about figuring out what it is that I want to do? I have done a few quizzes online (via reputable organisations), I've contemplated the jobs of my friends and family, and I still just feel like nothing is inspiring me. There are a few problems that I need to try and work around with finding something new as well:

• At least for the next 6 years or so, I am geographically fairly restricted to being within a reasonable driving distance to my daughter's home
• Shit is expensive, so I need to minimise the hit to my salary
• I do not have the money to get a degree or similar vocational qualification
• I would like stable hours, and not to work weekends or evenings (this is more job-specific than it is career-specific)
• Hybrid working is preferable to full-time in the office or full-time WFH (ditto)

So I ask my fellow Tilderen, have you ever pivoted into a completely different career after several years of investing your time into another? How did it go? How did you go about figuring out what you wanted to do instead? What advice would you have for me, a nearly-31-year-old who still has most of her working life ahead of her?