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Engineer Is Fuming After The Hiring Team Changes His Promised Salary Of $40,000 To An $8/Hour Contract On The Interview Day
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Engineer Is Fuming After The Hiring Team Changes His Promised Salary Of $40,000 To An $8/Hour Contract On The Interview Day

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It’s a well-known fact that the career world can be challenging and exhausting. Firstly, you spend ages studying and getting a qualification in your chosen profession. God forbid, halfway through, you realize that it’s not something you truly want to do, so you jump into more debt while changing your path. The time comes, you finally graduate, and everything becomes progressively more concerning since it’s your first time leaving the education system – therefore, you have to figure things out on your own.

Time flies by, and you’ve applied to dozens of companies. Finally, there’s some experience on your checklist, however – you’re married now, and the responsibilities have doubled in size, so you go out of your way to find a company that will offer decent pay. But then you bump into a rather unhealthy business that starts it off with a lie:

This is the story of Reddit user WaterFidec. He used the antiwork subreddit to share all the troubles he has faced while finding a job as a mechanical engineer. Now, the post received a “maybe fake, but we like it” tag – thus, we can’t be absolutely sure that the story wasn’t sugar-coated for entertainment purposes. Nevertheless, it received over 67K upvotes and almost 9K comments where people engaged in a fiery debate about the whole situation.

More info: Reddit

This is the story about how a company wanted to lure in a potential hire with a fake salary

Image credits: Doc Searls

The OP shared an odd story about how the organization that he potentially wanted to work for informed him about the yearly salary he would be making as a mechanical engineer. However, when he arrived to an interview, the pay was heavily cut, to say the least.

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Organization offers $40,000 a year but magically cuts it to $8 an hour during the interview

Image credits: Reddit

The OP starts out by explaining that he’s a proud owner of an engineering degree and that one day, he received a phone call from the company that he presumably applied to. The hiring team explained to the OP that he would be making $40,000 yearly, and by the looks of it, he was delighted about the potential offer.

The interview day came; however, the team ended up having completely different numbers in their proposal. It was said that the contract would start at $8 for the duration of 9 months. And then eventually, they might consider those $40,000.

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Image credits: Reddit

Nevertheless, OP connected the dots and realized that when they were previously discussing the pay, the hiring team mentioned a project that would last approximately from 8 to 9 months.

Naturally the OP asked the interviewers if the contract was based purely on that project, to which he received an awkward silence and a crystal clear lie.

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Image credits: Reddit

The OP clearly didn’t like the fact that he was lied to straight to his face, so he decided to forwardly ask the hiring team if they would be able to survive on $8 an hour. Moreover, he made sure to add that they’d also be paying him for his experience and skills – not only for the work.

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But one of the interviewers decided to voice his concerns and reminisce about his past with chicken eggs, which could only be assumed was done to somehow persuade the OP into accepting the offer. To that the OP wondered if the man was implying that him designing for their company would be worth only a few bucks more than getting chickens’ waste off of their eggs.

Image credits: Reddit

After getting kicked out of the interview, our OP started to question his whole reality. He revealed that he and his wife were in an agreement to never have kids, purely because of how expensive everything is.

He also shared how unbelievably overpriced mobile homes are, as his mother-in-law’s costs quarter of a million and requires $45,000 as a down payment.

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Image credits: Reddit

After contemplating about life and its expenses, the OP began thinking that if the engineering degree and a bunch of loans don’t actually matter in the career world – maybe he would get experience at a fast food restaurant, since the starting pay is a whole dollar more than at the engineering company.

Things like that happen, as you never truly know if years of studying will pay off or if you’ll end up like our OP. Moreover, it’s an everyday practice, where companies ask for years and years of experience in order for you to be able to apply to a certain position, and people that just graduated have a hard time finding jobs that relate to their degrees which quite often leads them to similar stories.

What do you think about this situation?

Fellow online users were equally shocked with the OP’s situation

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Darja Zinina

Darja Zinina

Author, Community member

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Darja is a Content Creator at Bored Panda. She studied at the University of Westminster, where she got her Bachelor's degree in Contemporary Media Practice. She loves photography, foreign music and re-watching Forrest Gump.

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Darja Zinina

Darja Zinina

Author, Community member

Darja is a Content Creator at Bored Panda. She studied at the University of Westminster, where she got her Bachelor's degree in Contemporary Media Practice. She loves photography, foreign music and re-watching Forrest Gump.

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Sky Render
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

To that recruiter, I would say: you were paid minimum wage in 1970 for that job, and that $2 an hour then is worth about $14 an hour today. So yes, you are valuing that engineer's work LESS than that of your job as a chicken egg cleaner in your youth.

Joshua Williams
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Oh 2$ an hour 50 f*****g years ago? When you could buy a brand new car for a couple hundred bucks? When a nice house was 20 grand? That guy was a piece of s**t.

Load More Replies...
Nicholas Kraemer
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I have a hard time believing any of this story. All of the details seem very off. OP never mentions what the degree is in or where they worked before (remember, they have experience and skill). Also, no one who has one just vaguely says they have an engineering degree and someone wants to hire them to design some unspecified something. This story was clearly fabricated for internet points

Dave P
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I don't buy it. I know Engineers, the lowest starting salary at the lowest paying specialty in the US is 53K, average is starting at 65K. And that is from a non-elite university. 40K is what a technician gets paid (starting at 35K on Average, where after 10 years is usually earning 70), maybe his alleged degree is a Technicians Degree (which is an associate degree) not a Bachelors. Or he went to a non Abet certified school where there are ones that offer "engineering degrees", but if not Abet certified one cannot work as an Engineer in the US because they dont have a legit Engineering degree.

Anony Mouse
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Average teacher salary in Alabama is around $50K. No mobile home is worth $250K, especially in Alabama. A lot of this story doesn't add up.

Load More Replies...
Load More Comments
Sky Render
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

To that recruiter, I would say: you were paid minimum wage in 1970 for that job, and that $2 an hour then is worth about $14 an hour today. So yes, you are valuing that engineer's work LESS than that of your job as a chicken egg cleaner in your youth.

Joshua Williams
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Oh 2$ an hour 50 f*****g years ago? When you could buy a brand new car for a couple hundred bucks? When a nice house was 20 grand? That guy was a piece of s**t.

Load More Replies...
Nicholas Kraemer
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I have a hard time believing any of this story. All of the details seem very off. OP never mentions what the degree is in or where they worked before (remember, they have experience and skill). Also, no one who has one just vaguely says they have an engineering degree and someone wants to hire them to design some unspecified something. This story was clearly fabricated for internet points

Dave P
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I don't buy it. I know Engineers, the lowest starting salary at the lowest paying specialty in the US is 53K, average is starting at 65K. And that is from a non-elite university. 40K is what a technician gets paid (starting at 35K on Average, where after 10 years is usually earning 70), maybe his alleged degree is a Technicians Degree (which is an associate degree) not a Bachelors. Or he went to a non Abet certified school where there are ones that offer "engineering degrees", but if not Abet certified one cannot work as an Engineer in the US because they dont have a legit Engineering degree.

Anony Mouse
Community Member
2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Average teacher salary in Alabama is around $50K. No mobile home is worth $250K, especially in Alabama. A lot of this story doesn't add up.

Load More Replies...
Load More Comments
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