Know Your Worth (Or Someone Else Will)

You know that friend of yours who graduated top of their class but is currently "taking a break" because the job market is cooked? Yeah. We all have one.

Or worse — you are that friend.

I've been watching this cycle play out in real time. Every graduation season, a fresh batch of high energy, optimistic broke graduates spills into the market, and a certain type of recruiter sharpens their fangs. It's not malice — it's opportunity. Desperate people take bad deals. And the market knows this.

Here's the thing nobody tells you: your desperation is the reason the next guy gets a shitty offer.

The Desperation Spiral

You've sent out 200 applications. You've had 17 interviews. You've gotten 3 rejections and 14 "we'll keep your CV on file" (which is corporate for "Hard luck chief, already forgot your name"). Your savings are running out. Your parents are making those concerned sounds whenever you walk past the living room.

Then an offer comes. It's not great. The salary is mediocre, the benefits are thin, and the job description had so many red flags you could call it The Chinese Communist Party Parade. But it's an offer.

So you take it.

And now the recruiter has data point: "Graduate accepted offer at #### with a 2 week notice clause. We can go lower next time."

That's the mechanism. Every bad deal that gets accepted becomes the baseline for the next negotiation. Companies don't pull salary bands out of thin air — they pull them from what people actually agree to. High supply of the desperate pushing prices lower and lower. If you take lets say BWP5,000 for a job that should pay BWP10,000, you just told every recruiter in the industry that P5,000 is acceptable for that role.

The next grad who comes along doesn't get offered BWP10000. They get offered BWP5,400 — a 8% bump from your desperation, not a market rate.

You didn't just screw yourself. You screwed the pipeline.

Who Decides Your Worth?

There's this beautiful fiction we tell ourselves about the free market: that your salary is determined by your skill, your output, and your value. That compensation is a meritocratic reflection of how good you are at your job.

Lmao.

Your salary is determined by four three things:

1. How badly they need someone
2. How badly you need the job
3. Whether you know how to say no 4. How much they got in the bank lowkey

That's it. That's the whole formula. Skill matters only at the threshold — you either can do the job or you can't. The minute you clear that bar, the negotiation becomes a psychological game, not a technical one.

Recruiters are not in the business of paying you what you think you're worth. They're in the business of paying you the least they can get away with. This is not a value judgment — it's their job description. The same way your job is to write code or analyze data or design systems, their job is to minimize labor cost while filling the seat.

If you walk in thinking "they'll recognize my talent and pay me fairly," you are the mark in a game you didn't know you were playing. You're the new coworker — everyone's coming at you with the wrong intentions.

The Contract Tells You Everything

Let's talk about the documents nobody reads.

I've seen graduate contracts that include:

• "Probation period" that functionally means you can be fired for any reason, but you have to give 4 weeks notice. This is not reciprocal.
• Non-compete agreements on a BWP5000 role. Laughable and almost certainly unenforceable in most jurisdictions for a junior employee, but it looks scary on paper.
• Performance based pay that lets them pay you that extra if they feel like it or to string you along just a bit longer. Remember young desperate graduates have the energy and love doing the most. Thats why Government Workers complain about them
• “Anything and Everything Duties and Responsibilities” — the catch-all clause that lets them pile on whatever work they want outside your actual job description. This is the contract equivalent of “let them eat cake.”

Marie Antoinette never actually said “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” — the line was propaganda, weaponized by pamphleteers to paint her as a detached, frivolous monarch who thought the peasants could just eat luxury bread when they couldn’t afford the regular stuff. Whether she said it or not, the structure of the response is what matters: a person in power, completely insulated from reality, offering a fantasy solution to a genuine problem.

That’s exactly what the vague “any other duties” clause is. It sounds reasonable — flexibility! adaptability! team player! — but in practice it means they can shift your entire job description whenever it suits them. Hired as a data analyst? Congratulations, you’re now also the IT help desk, the social media manager, the meeting note-taker, and the person who has to explain why the printer isn’t working. For the same salary.

The young graduate is the starving populace. Desperate for a job, desperate to prove they’re a “team player,” desperate enough to accept that the vague catch-all in paragraph 14 probably won’t be a problem. And the company? It’s Marie Antoinette — completely out of touch with what that clause actually costs the person who signs it.

All of this is theatre. The contract is a script, not a binding prediction of reality. Companies put things in contracts not because they'll enforce them, but because they want you to believe they will.

Here's the part that matters: if a clause is not legally enforceable, it doesn't matter if you signed it.

Non-competes for junior? Struck down in court daily. "Unlimited leave" policies that ghost your requests? Constructive dismissal waiting to happen. "Discretionary bonuses" that never materialize? That's just theft with extra paperwork.

Just because it's in the contract doesn't mean it's real. The law is the actual contract. Everything else is a suggestion.

How to Spot a Bad Deal

I've been around enough to smell these from a mile away. Here's what to look for:

The salary is "competitive." This means "we don't want to tell you what it is because you'll stop talking to us." Real companies quote numbers. Bullshit artists use adjectives.

They mention "projections" before you're profitable. Projected revenue in a startup that hasn't found product-market fit is a lottery ticket.

They ask about your current salary. Standard trap. They want to anchor negotiations to your previous bad deal, not the value of the role. Answer: "I'd prefer to discuss what the role is worth."

The job description is a wishlist. "Looking for a rockstar who can go from 8-5pm (obviously they'll forget to add a boundry to the workdays), manage a team, build a CRM, analyze how much they got and wont pay you, and also make coffee." They want one person to do the work of three. You will burn out.

Interview process is chaotic. If they're disorganized in the hiring stage, imagine what the day-to-day is like.

They rush you. "We need an answer by Friday." High-pressure tactics are a red flag. If the role is good, it'll be good next week.

"We're like a family." No you're not. My family doesn't PIP aka Performance Improvement Plans when revenue is down.

The Fix Is Stopping Being Desperate

I know. "Just stop being desperate" is the most useless advice when your bank account is at zero. I get it.

But there's a difference between feeling desperate and acting desperate. And the acting part is what kills you.

Here's what acting desperate looks like:

• Accepting the first offer without negotiating
• Not asking about benefits, growth, or expectations
• Signing anything put in front of you
• Ignoring every red flag because you're scared the offer will vanish

Here's what it looks like to not act desperate even when you are:

• "I need a few days to review the offer"
• "Can we discuss the salary band for this role?"
• "What does career progression look like after the first year?"
• Walking away when the terms don't work

The paradox is that not acting desperate makes you more attractive as a candidate. Recruiters want someone who seems like they have options. It signals competence. It signals that other people value you.

When you crawl for the job — begging, pleading, accepting anything — you're telling them "I have no other options." And that's exactly the candidate who gets the lowball.

The Ripple Effect

This is the part that keeps me up.

Every time a graduate accepts an exploitative offer — unpaid internship, ludicrously below-market salary, "exposure" instead of payment — they're not just hurting themselves. They're creating a data point that says this is acceptable.

The company goes to market research next quarter and says "well, we filled the role at BWP5000 last time, so the band is BWP5–6000." And the next candidate, who might have commanded BWP10,000 somewhere else, now has to fight uphill against your acceptance.

You're not competing against other candidates. You're competing against the ghost of the last person who settled.

The only way to break the cycle is to stop accepting deals that shouldn't exist. This means more candidates need to say no. It means more candidates need to walk. It means more graduates need to realize that not every job is better than no job.

Taking a shitty job because you're desperate does not fix your desperation. It just moves the timeline. Now you're six months in, miserable, underpaid, and still looking. But now you have less energy to interview, less confidence in your skills, and a gap on your CV that you'll have to explain.

So What Do You Do?

I don't have a perfect answer. The market is genuinely rough right now. Jobs are scarce. The system is designed to exploit your uncertainty.

But here's what I know:

1. Know the market rate. Talk to people. Check levels. FYI, ask people , you claimed you've been networking ask your network. Walk in with a number.
2. Negotiate everything. The worst they can say is no, and you're already considering the offer as-is. There's no downside.
3. Read the contract. Not as a legal document. Read it as a vibe check. If you see clauses that feel predatory, ask about them.
4. Talk to someone who's been in the industry. Your parents don't know what you should make in this market. Find someone who does.
5. Say no. It's terrifying. Do it anyway. The offer you're afraid to lose is often the offer you should have walked from.

And remember: every time you accept a bad deal, you're not just setting your own floor. You're setting everyone else's ceiling.

The next graduate who comes after you deserved better.

PS: If you're a graduate reading this and you've already accepted a deal you're not sure about — you're not stuck. Contracts can be renegotiated. Jobs can be quit. Bad decisions can be unfucked. The only irreversible mistake is believing you have no choice.