My uncle said take the $52k job over the $61k one and I did not listen

He said the smaller paycheck came with a boss who would actually teach me, and 18 months later I was stuck doing data entry while my cousin got promoted twice. Did anyone else blow off family advice about a job and pay for it, or was your stubborn call actually the right one?

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hunt.leo7d ago

The "boss who would actually teach me" line is the part that gets people every time, because it sounds so wise and you can't really argue with it in the moment. But here's the pattern I keep seeing with family job advice: it's almost always based on how things worked when they were coming up, and the working world has changed a lot since then. A good mentor is great if you actually get one, but "this guy will teach you" is a promise, not a contract, and promises about other people's behavior are the easiest things in the world to break. The $9k gap was real money you could count. The mentorship was a maybe. My take is you didn't really blow off his advice, you just bet on the sure thing instead of the nice story, and that's not stubborn, that's just how odds work.

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