I’m pretty certain that customers just know when you are busy. They know when you have company all-hands or all-day company kickoffs… because that’s when they intuitively know you are overwhelmed and exhausted, and thus they then reach out to you, insisting they need help with x or y task, or that they absolutely MUST get on the phone or a video conference with you because they totally need your help….. even if said customer had totally ignored you or failed to respond to your emails from weeks or even months prior. Last week and this week have been especially exhausting because of our annual company kickoff, and because, well, I had to reschedule customer meetings around these huge time blocks. And then, the ad hoc requests started coming in far more than they normally would!

I just feel exhausted. I’ve even had dreams about work. And then it suddenly dawned on me… I haven’t had a real vacation in over a year, since we were in Australia and Indonesia. I’ve really only taken one day off here or there this whole year, other than the days off I’ve been given for Wellness Days or national holidays. I’ve had no REAL break from work to really unplug and relax. I really need to do something more intentional and take time off…. but we can’t really safely go anywhere. What am I going to do with myself other than sit around my house, exercise, meditate, cook, make videos, read….? I’ve already read four books and we’re not even halfway through February this year!!

For most of my career, I’ve been in a customer facing role, meaning that I interact with customers who use my company’s software as my actual day job. There are lots of upsides to being in a customer facing role in a non-pandemic era: you get to travel for work (and hence, can really load up on status via miles and hotel points), your role at work is taken seriously because you are essentially the voice of the customer; if you work on high-profile customers, for the most part, you’re probably in a relatively secure position. But the downsides? Customers sometimes can see you as not being human, meaning that they will not necessarily respect boundaries of off-hours to call you on your cell with something they consider urgent (the last time I checked, we didn’t work in the ER). They may not care that you have other customers and other meetings; they may expect that you respond to every email they send you literally as soon as they send it, and then react angrily when there’s a “delay” in your response (as in, in 4 hours or even, GASP, the next day!). They may not care that you had to take the day off because you got sick or had a family emergency and insist you get them a response anyway. They also may not care that you get a national holiday off since they may not have that day off.

The last example actually happened to me for the first time today, and I was really in shock. A customer asked to reschedule a meeting to a later time, and he asked if I was available on February 15th, which is actually President’s Day, meaning our office would be closed. I told him that our offices would be closed that day, but I’d be available to chat the following Tuesday. He had the balls to respond, asking if I could make an exception and meet with his team on that Monday. Well, that was easy to say no to; NO, I’m NOT making an exception for you or anyone work related on a NATIONAL HOLIDAY.

I told a colleague about this story after it happened, and she responded, “I see customers like that as children who ask if they can have cookies before dinner. They know the answer is no, but that doesn’t mean they won’t ask, anyway, to see if there is some slim chance they may actually get their way.”

Earlier this month, the head of our team threw a random invite on my calendar to sync 1:1. I wasn’t really sure what this was about because she didn’t give much context in her invite, but I figured it couldn’t have been bad news. I mean, I’ve only been working at this company for the last 3.5 months, so I couldn’t have already screwed up that royally yet, right?

When we met, she said she had a proposition for me. At the time, I was engrossed in reading Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, in which Lori invites a guy out to coffee with a proposition to use his sperm for artificial insemination to impregnate her. So this was the first thought that came to mind. I was pretty certain she was not planning to ask for a) my eggs or b) my future first born.

Instead, her request was simple: would I be willing to MC one day of our company’s annual sales and success kickoff the last week of January? I’d have a co-host, and it would be a great way to get my name out there and interact with colleagues from around the world. Leaders across teams had apparently dropped my name as a potential fit because… I guess there’s been talk that over Zoom, I have “great presence”?

When the leader of your team asks if you’d be willing to take on a task this big, you don’t really have an option. Your only option is to say “yes.” And so, I said yes, thinking that this may be a great way to build my internal brand (putting on my sales hat here), and especially since I’m a fully remote employee even after the pandemic, it would also be a way to literally get my face and name out there across our global offices.

We had a few planning sessions. My co-host and I went through a few rounds of drafted scripts. I ad libbed a lot and also added in a few friendly jokes about specific individuals who are easy targets on my team’s leadership. And today was the big day. It was a strange time to be doing it; I was feeling quite low because of this whole fertility journey and not feeling my best. But in reality, the world doesn’t stop for anyone. No matter who lives and dies, no matter what awful experiences you are going through, the rest of the world continues moving forward, and so that pushes you to do the same regardless of whether you want to. So I dialed up my energy and enthusiasm, painted a huge smile on my face, and ran through the half-day session. And it seemed like it was a success, as tons of positive feedback poured in through the application we were using, and my Slack blew up with messages.

“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare once said. Sometimes, you just have to act like you’re happy and excited… even when you actually aren’t, and in reality, are feeling quite the opposite. And if you try hard enough, sometimes, you can actually fool yourself into that feeling.

I always marvel at how and why Americans and Canadians seem to think they speak proper English, or “English without an accent.” First of all, in case anyone needs a history lesson…. English, surprise surprise, comes from… ENGLAND. And second of all, American accented English still has an accent, as does Canadian accented English (let’s stay away from the regional accents for this conversation). We ALL have accents. It’s just that some may be easier or harder for you to understand given your own accent.

I was sitting on a Zoom 1:1 call with one of my Canadian colleagues, who I’ve gotten along with quite well. He’s a White male and is stereotypically Canadian in his accents (his “abouts” sound just as you’d imagine) and his politeness/friendliness. And out of nowhere, he started venting to me about how a new colleague on my team started, and he cannot believe my boss made the decision to assign her to one of his large accounts. “I mean, she’s new and she barely speaks English!” he complained to me. “Her written English is fine, but it’s so, so difficult to understand what she is saying during calls. Customers barely understand her. You know I’m a nice guy, but this is just ridiculous. You and Sabrina have been great at your jobs; you are so eloquent, you present so well. I need someone like you on this account.”

What he really means when he says “someone like you” is someone who speaks English with a Canadian/British/American accent. What he really means to say is that he doesn’t like the new colleague on my team, who was born and raised in Mexico up until she was 13 and who speaks English with a Mexican accent. What he means is that unless you speak Canadian/British/American accented English, your English is unacceptable and you “barely” even speak the English language. What he means to say is that he’s unaccepting of people who come from non-Western cultures who learn to speak English as a second language with the accent of whatever their first learned language was, and that if you speak with said accent that you no longer sound professional in front of enterprise customers who are spending a large sum of money with our company.

What I would like to know is: if HE were to speak another language, what accent would HE have, and how accepted would HE be by said country’s people? The complete lack of empathy for those who learn English as a second language infuriates me all the time, especially when I know English is the only language I am fully literate and fluent in. I really feel for those who learn English as second language because there is really nothing consistent or constant about it (no four tones like in Mandarin Chinese; not everything rhymes with a/i/u/e/o/n like in Japanese), and there are so many slangs and colloquialisms that even if you have studied English for 20+ years, you still won’t know it all.

This is my sixth week at my new company, and I can honestly say officially that my honeymoon period is over. Not everything is glossy and shiny and beautiful. Not everyone is incredibly friendly, kind, and eager to help anymore. As of last week, I already began doing “real work” with customers, and so the training wheels are pretty much off now. I’m not necessarily complaining, but just speaking of the reality.

While I’m certainly at a company that is a hundred times better than the last one, I’m no longer looking at everything through rose-colored glasses and thinking, “ahhhh, what a good life here.” I’ve already encountered some passive aggression, the usual sales vs. customer success hostility and territorial feelings, plus some issues with management that just seem a bit too pushy and too sales, not necessarily how I would define “customer success” at a SaaS organization.

Since early on in my career, I’ve had a general distrust of people who work in Human Resources. That sounds judgmental, you’re thinking. But think about it this way: trust is something that should be earned and should never be a given, regardless of who it is. Whether you are aware of this or not, you feel the same way, too. Are you just going to trust the guy who’s standing next to you at a red light with your baby?

When something goes wrong at a company — say, some bullies you, slaps your behind, or tries multiple times to ask you out on a date that you absolutely do not want to accept, what you will initially be told is, “You should talk to HR.” But I am here to say…. well, think about it for a second. What are the positions of power here? What is the social standing or level of hierarchy of the person you want to “report”? What is your social standing? These are all things you should consider before “going to HR.”

At every single company I’ve ever worked at, HR has been known to have loose lips, and having worked for over 12 years and spoken with people across industries, this is not unique to places I’ve worked; this is a universal fact. People who work in HR, contrary to their titles, are gossips, and they are more than happy to share confidential conversations when they feel like it. They are only human, after all.

I once worked at a company where our HR director would go out for drinks with different colleagues and just spill the beans on all the C-level execs and managers she couldn’t stand, sharing very colorful details around specific incidents she had witnessed or conversations she’d participated in. Once, I went into her office to discuss some questions I had about our health plan, and with the door closed, she went off for about 10 minutes about our company’s CEO and how childish and unprofessional he could be. At that point, I had only been at the company for a few months, but I definitely did not think this reflected well on the company overall that our head of HR was so willing to badmouth its leadership with a new employee.

In another meeting with an HR professional at another company, perhaps in an attempt to gain my trust and reveal something that was particularly vulnerable (and controversial), an HR rep told me that many people I would never expect to be struggling at their jobs actually are: she then divulged that my manager had sought her counsel and was “under review” (oh, hello, performance improvement plan!), that another manager was also on plan (she actually named names). Oh, and someone on our CXO team? He doesn’t believe that race is an issue in our society anymore; he thinks we all need to be focused on the gender divide!

These conversations were supposed to be… confidential. Yet, this HR professional shared these tidbits with me completely on her own, without my asking or even wondering about these individuals. Sadly, I’ve experienced so many of these breeches with HR professionals that now, I have to assume by default that nothing I ever share with an HR person at any company will be kept 100 percent confidential. It’s supposed to be HR’s job: to act discreetly and in confidence. Yet somehow, they can’t even get this basic piece right. If they are willing to divulge even what our C-level execs say, what do you think they will do with your or my information?

Historically in the United States, the concept of “paid time off” has been a controversial one. The U.S. is the only industrialized Western nation to have zero national policy around paid parental leave in the world; some companies, some of which I have called customers, who are large multi-national companies with thousands of employees, have zero recognition for parental leave at their U.S. locations, and so when employees become new parents, if they choose to take time off, it’s deducted from their paid time off (PTO) allotment. We’re also the only Western country that does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacation leave, sick leave, or federally recognized holidays. These benefits are considered matters of agreement between an employer and an employee.

So it would appear that the U.S. values capitalism, productivity, and work, work, work as its number one priority. And it values human life or human health very little to not at all (we will not discuss healthcare in this post, though, as that is its own disgusting can of worms). It’s a wonder why people want to continue living here sometimes, self included.

But that idea inside, when you are living in a country that has egregious laws, or lack of laws, around paid time off, it would initially seem to be a sort of dream when you are finally employed by a company that actually has what is known as an “unlimited PTO policy.” The average American company across industries only offers around 10 days of PTO per year, so… unlimited? WHAT A DREAM LIFE, right?

Perhaps initially, it may seem that way. That’s why so many tech companies list it as a “benefit” or “perk” when you visit their Careers page or see one of their job listings on sites like LinkedIn. That’s why when recruiters do phone screens with potential candidates, it’s one of the very first perks they note on their calls. But in reality, it’s much more nuanced than this. No, just because you work at a company that has unlimited PTO does not mean you can just take off for half the year, a quarter of the year, or even a full month. Nope. They expect that you will still work as you would normally work as if there were a set number of days you could take off per year.

As an HR professional once told me pointedly, “‘Unlimited PTO’ is not a benefit to the employee; it’s a benefit to the company,” she said. What this means is: the day you decide you want to leave your company (or said company fires/lays you off), the company will be required to pay out zero accrued PTO days because you didn’t accrue anything; there’s an “unlimited” policy, remember? The company wants to “owe” its employees as little as possible, and this is their way of getting there while also at the same time appearing to do something that is beneficial and “perk” like for its employees. Yet, hmmmm. Despite having an “unlimited” policy, pretty much all companies that have this policy in place still require you to “log” PTO so that it’s still be tracked (to potentially be used against you later for baseless reasons). Fun, right?

“So then, how much PTO are you expecting I actually take with this policy?” I responded back to this HR professional.

She smiled. When HR professionals smile, you should really never trust them. Every time they smile, they are just lapping up their perceived power in the conversation. “You should take however many days you would have taken if you were able to accrue PTO at your previous company.”

Here is where I smiled back. “Well, it’s funny you say that because the last time I actually accrued PTO, I had 23 PTO days, 4 summer days, plus the week between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day off,” I said to her. “So in other words, here, do you suggest I continue taking 31 days off?”

Her smile faded. She paused, wrinkled her brow, unsure of how to respond. Frankly, I don’t remember what her response was to that in the end because it was so plainly insipid. But I did remember to tell her at some point of this conversation, “If the stance of HR at this organization is that ‘unlimited PTO’ is a benefit to the company and not to its employees, I would suggest that you stop having our recruiters talk so enthusiastically about it during their phone screens with prospective candidates, and also to remove it from our Careers page as a listed perk.”

That was when I made it clear to our HR professional that I wasn’t going to take bullshit explanations. It was also probably when they decided to wage a form of war against me. At the end of the day, stupidity and hypocrisy need to be called out, and I don’t really care if they enjoy it or not.

I once worked at a company that had “coffee klatches” where you could get to know people with whom you do not normally work through “coffee appointments.” An automated script would pair colleagues together based on “shared interests” you’d identify in a Google form. It was a voluntary activity, but a way in which you could get to know others across the organization, and thus would build work culture. I decided to participate in it to try it out.

I got paired up with someone who… let’s just say, from the surface level, you’d think we had shared interests, but we absolutely did not. Let’s call her Anna. We both wrote in our Coffee Klatch form that we both loved “travel.” In the last year, she had traveled to X country, and after telling her I was planning to go to X country in the next month, she eagerly shared her “must see/do” list with me. As someone who always loves to share packed lists of sights to see, nooks and crannies that most tourists would miss, and local eateries complete with cuisine type, what dishes to try, and price expectations, I jumped at the chance to look at her list.

I opened up the document to discover a flight itinerary, hotels booked, and a couple lines pertaining to a Hop-On, Hop-Off sightseeing bus schedule (literally, all this section said was, “Pick up at Hotel at 8am; Last stop at hotel at 6pm”), in addition to a few restaurants (no descriptions, just names). If you aren’t familiar with this company, it’s a mainstream tourist company that allows for easy double-decker bus transport from different tourist destination sights in specific cities around the world. Let’s be clear: I don’t really care that she used a sightseeing bus to get around, but this bare-bones document didn’t have any details — no sights, nothing about what to look out for – it had nothing. This was not the kind of “list” I was expecting, and I was pretty baffled that she would send something so barren to me. I genuinely thought she had made a mistake and sent me the wrong list. How would a hop-on, hop-off bus pick-up and drop-off time from her booked hotel me plan my trip…?

Anna was so excited to hear about what I thought of her list. She came to my desk and asked my opinion. “Did you find it helpful?” Her eyes were overflowing with hope and the desire for positive feedback.

“Hey!” I said, startled. “So, I opened the doc, but all I saw was your flight schedule and a hop-on, hop-off bus start and end date each day. Was this a mistake?”

Anna’s face immediately fell. From her outward expression, she was part confused, part hurt, and part angry. “No, that’s the right doc. I just wanted to share it so it might help you with your trip planning,” she responded slowly.

Oh, crap. She thinks I’m a jerk now, I thought. “No, no! It is helpful! Thanks so much for sharing! I was just thinking it might have a list of specific sights or something…”

It was too late. Anna had decided I was an awful person. She had no idea why I would dislike her awesome list. She eventually trailed off and started a conversation with another colleague. Later, I learned that she told a work friend of mine that I was “rude and passive aggressive.”

To be fair: Yes, we both do enjoy travel. But we do not travel the same way, and therefore could not really help each others’ travel journeys. So the next time you think you have a common interest with someone, dig a little deeper and ask the probing questions, and don’t just assume you will be joined at the hip with them.

In the tech industry, and in every industry as well as in life in general, you should always be aware of people who are looking to take advantage of you. These people are only out for themselves to gain and have no care in the world for you at all, and if you can, be polite and do not egg them on. They will take you for everything you are willing to offer them, and then some, with zero regard for you at all. While I am a strong believer in “paying it forward” and have lots of hesitations around a term our current President Dipshit made popular, “quid pro quo,” I am not a believer in people who associate with you only when they have something to gain, then immediately forget you exist after. I find it rude, distasteful, and just reeking of selfishness.

Unfortunately, this is quite common in our industry, not just when people are seeking new opportunities, but also within organizations for Internal “favors” done, whether that is beneficial 360 reviews leading up to promotion/raise considerations, adding “thumbs up,” compliments, or AOPs (“air of praises”) to certain individuals on public channels. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. You talk me up to your boss, and I’ll talk you up to yours. This is how the working world works.

Some of these instances are more blatant than others. Let’s look at one recent incident that a friend experienced: she’s currently working at a large, reputable public tech company (let’s call it TechCo) with over 20,000 employees. A former company she used to work at recently had layoffs, resulting in a mutual ex-colleague getting let go – let’s call him Harry. Harry reached out to her on LinkedIn, noting that she worked at TechCo, summarized the layoff story, and asked if she knew if there were any relevant openings that might fit him. She replied back, suggesting he look over their career site and note any job listings that stand out to him, and she’d be happy to refer him.

Harry didn’t respond right away, but while she was procrastinating one day, she took a look herself and noticed a listing that would be an exact match for him. She responded to Harry again, sending him a specific listing and suggesting he look it over. His response? “Wow, thanks! I”ll take a look when I have time, but right now I don’t have time. I’m prepping for an interview.”

Okay. But it gets better. Eventually, Harry replies back to her and says, “Great. I’m going to see how I’m connected to anyone else at TechCo and reach out through those channels.”

So, let’s summarize what just happened here. First, my friend was too kind and actually looked up specific jobs for Harry on TechCo’s career page, and I’ll remind you, in case you aren’t aware, that at large companies, navigating their career listings pages can be a total BEAST and a time suck. Second, Harry’s initial response ignored the fact that my friend was offering to do a favor for him that she did not need to do at all after he initially did outreach to her. Third, Harry, in the end, decided that my friend was not “good enough” to be a company source or referral for him despite the fact that he started this conversation by seeking her help, so he would review his other connections to the company via LinkedIn and try to get a referral through one of THOSE potential channels.

These are the types of people you need to be aware of. And when you properly identify them, avoid them. Run. Far. Hide if you can… Because they are only pests in a world that is running rampant with cockroaches.

One of the many skills that hiring managers look for in tech and pretty much every single job outside of engineering is teamwork/collaboration: how do you work with and share ideas and projects with other people? Are you able to navigate cross-functional teams, build relationships, and work to come to one solution, even when your points of view at the beginning may be starkly different? If you work in any kind of customer-facing role, during your interview process, you will likely get grilled to show examples of how you tread through murky waters with disparate personalities, opposing opinions, and undercurrents of passive aggression on a team or across teams.

A while back, I had to work on a project with someone (he will be called Daniel) who was so anti working with others that when he disagreed with you and did not want to incorporate your idea, he simply said, “Well, let’s see what Jack (pseudonym for our mutual manager) thinks.” End of discussion. No more shared ideas, no compromise. Just bring in Dad to sort this out. Got it.

The project we were working on was a user manual for the technology platform we were supporting. Our team was lean, and thus we had no team members solely focused on educating our customers on how to use the platform they bought via any type of training portal or webinar. This meant countless hours of live trainings and demos, which meant a lot of time (read: money) wasted for the company. We needed to streamline this process and enable customers to first train themselves, then be supplemented with a live, one-time training with someone on our team. The solution? A user manual complete with screen shots and a step-by-step guide of how to use the platform. Daniel was ecstatic; he could finally use his experience as an English teacher in his first job in tech! He spent the next week owning the project, completely leaving me out of it and pretending to work on other tasks when I asked him, until he proudly showcased the 110-page user manual he had come up with (he stole the formatting and style from his previous job’s templates).

I balked when I saw the document — 110 pages? Who is going to use this, much less read even the first few pages? I told him that no customer would take this manual and run with it; everyone is constantly complaining about how little time they have, so what is their incentive to read through a 110-page user manual? He argued, “Well, they bought this platform, so it’s on them to learn it.” Well, here is where his lack of experience in the tech industry truly showed; just because some stakeholder signed a SaaS contract with us did not mean the actual day-to-day users would adopt the product. He did not get this… at all. I tried to explain to him, and he kept going back to, “Well, they bought this, so they should use it.”

“Yes, but 110 pages is not a reasonable ask,” I responded. “It’s WAY too long!”

“It’s mostly just screen shots and pictures,” he fought back. He refused to make it shorter or even consider cutting specific words out of the document which I thought were just plain verbose. He wouldn’t even give me the document so that I could edit it. He was that resistant to even considering a change. Plus, there was no way in hell I was going to create a user manual from scratch if he’d already started work on one.

I went to our mutual manager Jack and told him my point of view. He agreed, saying it should be shorter (Daniel was NOT happy with this), but we could still keep the 110-page version (Daniel was thrilled with this – he wasted endless paper printing out many copies of these and placing them all over the office. For the record, no one ever opened a single copy). So, now I was tasked with taking Daniel’s guide and condensing it. Within a few days, I got it down to just 15 pages – yes, with the screen shots and pictures. We eventually shared this with every new customer who was onboarded. To be frank, there weren’t that many new customers, but hey, I got my point across that 110 pages wasn’t going to fly!