Your Desperation Screws Everyone

That friend who graduated top of their class and is now “taking a break” because the market is cooked, you know them.

Or you are them.

Every graduation season a fresh batch of broke, high-energy 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 it.

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 three 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 a data point: “Graduate accepted offer at #### with a two-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, let’s 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, an 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 judgement, it’s their job description. The same way your job is to write code or analyse data or design systems, their job is to minimise labour cost while filling the seat.

If you walk in thinking “they’ll recognise 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 four 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. That’s 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, weaponised 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 materialise? 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.

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Next up: Part 2, Never Take the First Offer, how to spot predatory offers, why not acting desperate makes you more attractive, and the ripple effect that keeps me up at night.