Bad Job Bingo

When you go through as many jobs as those of us who work in Tech kinda have to in order to keep our careers going, you start to see themes and patterns emerge. You see commonalities in the way companies frame job duties and responsibilities, signal what the cultures are like within their companies, and convey their actual work values in the subtext.

I realized that I probably wasn't the only one seeing those trends, and that I also wasn't the only one who could benefit from speeding up the spotting of those trends so that I could get to the jobs that matched my professional skills and values faster.

Thus Bad Job Bingo was born.

The idea is to play Bad Job Bingo with any jobs you're considering, except the job wins by not getting a bingo. If the game does result in a bingo, then at least you know what the potential problems are going in – if you decide to go in for the job at all.

Because that's my ultimate goal with Bad Job Bingo: to give you more agency in the job search process, especially when so much of it feels out of our control.

I play Bad Job Bingo with every job I feature in the Support Human newsletter or that appears on Support Human Jobs, and I've also been known to write or talk about particularly egregious jobs (see below). If you'd like to submit a job for me to play Bad Job Bingo with, you can do that here.

If you'd like to play Bad Job Bingo with a job, use this interactive bingo card.

And here are the designed Bad Job Bingo cards along with a blank card to use if you wish: PNG | PDF

And here's some of the content I've created with or about the game so far:

Explaining the Bingo Spaces

Individual Bad Job Bingo Games

Job Red Flags

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Please be aware that Bad Job Bingo and its related resources and materials are © copyrighted 2023 by me, Stephanie Lundberg, and are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.