Hello tilderinos! I'm currently on the hunt for a new job, and it's been a very long time since I've had to do any kind of real interviewing to compete for a position. I'm looking for some general tips and, if anyone is experienced in the field of education, tips specific to teacher interviews.

My strengths in interviews are that I'm generally a confident speaker, I know my field well, keep pace with recent developments, and have an enormous amount of experience to draw from.

My weaknesses are that I tend to ramble (adhd!), I lose track of multi part questions (adhd strikes again!), and I'm terrible at quickly recalling specific examples from my mountain of experience. I also feel that, especially when interviewing for positions a bit outside my experience (Eg a 2nd grade teaching position) I come across as naive at best and ignorant at worst.

I also generally have a hard time selling myself with words. I'm very much a man of action, and would love to demonstrate my skill firsthand, but that isn't terribly easy to do in an interview setting.

I hope this topic isn't too selfish of me and I appreciate any feedback I get! Thank you all.

I did a masters in data analytics, and then the niche I fell into in the working world was building dashboards, reports and spreadsheets of financial data for non-technical bureaucrats. Instead of ensuring data quality by technical means, my current company often just has me manually reviewing and checking financial data. This is pretty frustrating to me because I have no education in finance, and the things I miss or get wrong are so second nature to my boss that he doesn't even see them as something I should have been trained on. The only technologies I use are SQL server and excel. Any proactive steps I've made to automate processes has been discouraged as not worth the time.

I'm aware that most people spend years on tedious stuff before ever getting to work with more engaging technology, but honestly I'm starting to wonder if they've forgotten I'm not a finance guy. I want to move up in my career especially to escape my current role, but I'm feeling completely lost as to how. There's no obvious role in my company that could be a 'next rung of the ladder' to advance into, so there's nobody I can emulate to help chart a course. My boss had an unconventional path to his current role, and isn't really into manager stuff like career mentoring, so he's no help in that regard.

To anyone with experience in data science, what is the advancement supposed to look like? What are the key skills I should be developing? Am I being too averse to learning the subject matter of the data I'm working on? Any insight is appreciated!

When is is okay to give up on making a situation work?

I legitimately ask, as I’ve pretty much given up on most “immediate” family in recent months. As an American federal civilian employee, I found the rhetoric of my immediate family crazy enough to warrant cutting them out of my life. I can’t get beyond their clear contempt for my livelihood. Despite conversations regarding how a certain admin’s policies are making my life worse, I have been told constantly not to complain because it could be worse. So I have “given up” and no longer interact with them. There have been further conversations prior to this, but I don’t think it’s necessarily important to the conversation.

I ask this legitimately, as I am feeling guilt over it, despite the fact that I no longer feel dread or anxiety about it. I haven’t visited immediate family in over 2 months now, despite living within walking distance.

At what point should one continue making attempts to repair to maintain relationships, even familial, and when is it okay to end them?

I was having a recent conversation with my friends about PTO and who thought they had too much or too little.
The results were interesting, so I thought I'd ask Tildes.

• Are you happy with the amount of PTO you get? Do you wish you had more or do you struggle to spend them?
• US and European PTO is very different, how do you feel about the other side of the pond?
• Do you like the format you get given PTO? Or is there a better way you'd prefer?

Let me know!

Edit: Thanks everyone for responding! So many interesting thoughts and different policies, it's really hard to reply to any specifically lol. I've read them all though!!