context: I’m a nurse with several years of job experience in several units.
I’ve always seen that in each unit there is a group who somehow are the ‘alphas’ in the unit and can make your life hell if you cross any of them, the kind of people a careerist would give attention and flatter if he wanted to climb the job ladder. I’m calling them alphas not because they’re the best academically, but the best organized with the best contacts, the ones who due to these contacts get to decide who gets promoted (friends) or ignored. And management trusts them because they keep shit working.
Where I am now this on practice means they get to enjoy a one hour pause while I do a 30 minute one.
I guess some of you would tell me now to pick my battles, not to be jealous, to do my job and go home and accept I’m employed… but it’s not a nice feeling. This has happened in every workplace I’ve been. People are tribal, sadly. This is also why I’m leaving the bedside, but people are tribal everywhere, so I’m sure I’m gonna find this everywhere I go, right?
It’s sad if I want to escape this I have to feed attention to people, to fake being something else, or have you found a better way?
As said in other posts, I’m an introverted so this would be another reason to find a job where I work alone?
I’m confused as to why you are confused. What you are describing sounds like a very normal workplace - new people get the boring and unpleasant menial tasks, while veterans take the more complex, interesting ones. New workers work harder in terms of effort or hours, veterans work by having experience for difficult situations and emergencies. How much skill you have doens’t matter as much as how you are able to gain others’ trust.
You say you are introverted. What this usually actually means is “I have social anxiety and don’t trust others.” And of course, if you don’t trust others and assume that they are nice people who want the best for you, then you will give off a bad vibe, and people will feel uneasy and distant from you. Thus, you will never gain their trust, which means they won’t trust you to take on more complex tasks (or at least, their trust will build slower) and you will stay at the bottom of the totem pole for longer. Stay in this job long enough, and you will likely notice younger, less experienced people zooming past you in terms of career growth. Why? Because they trust that the work they are doing is all part of the process of improving, they know what they want and work towards getting it, and they assume everyone around them is a nice person who wants to help them acheive their goals (until proven otherwise); rather than focusing on how X, Y, and Z are “unfair”.