‘I'm in a bait-and-switch nightmare’: 5-months pregnant woman is hired as a head of department, then turned into a support agent, denied the maternity leave she was promised, and put on a sketchy performance plan

Author image for Etai Eshet
Etai Eshet • Editor
Jan 8, 2026 10:00 AM EST

Like anything that evolves on this planet, every line of business evolves its own branch of Corporate love bombing. In this particularly shaky, twitchy start-up, they ended up with this version:

First, they court you with a shiny title, eight interviews, a nice salary, and big talk about impact, then two months later, you are being scolded for not resolving enough customer tickets like a teenager on their first shift. Modern leadership in one sentence: we value strategy, unless things get slightly busy, then grab a headset and count.  

What really stands out here is the classic startup bait and switch. On paper, this woman was hired to build, lead, structure, fix messes, and shape a department. In practice, she is being treated like a very expensive filter in Zendesk. One minute she is designing multiple-layered plans, the next she is explaining basic reporting filters to the same founder who thinks he is qualified to decide her performance. It is less a company and more a live reenactment of that meme where the dog sits in a burning room saying this is fine.  

The pregnancy angle just gives the whole thing a nice apocalyptic glaze.HR promises eight weeks, the CEO confirms it, and suddenly there is an internal wiki page no one read that says actually no. It is not just disrespectful, it is lazy. They will spend hours building systems to track ticket volume, but nobody can be bothered to align on whether a pregnant hire gets time to meet her own child. This is how you know it is not about resources, it is about priorities.  

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  • Pregnant woman at an office desk appearing stressed while reviewing work documents on a computer.
    via Dmytro Zinkevych

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • At the end, you have a founder who wants loyalty from someone he is actively grinding into dust. The funniest part is he probably thinks he is being tough, visionary, data driven. In reality he just recruited a leader and then trapped her in the world’s worst call center cosplay.

  • Recruited for a "Head of" role at 5 months pregnant, now I'm in a bait-and-switch nightmare and being PIP'ed. Need to vent/advice.

    Long term lurker but first time ever posting.. I absolutely need to get this out of my brain and not just talk about it with my husband/friends and therapist.
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  • Sorry ahead of time for the length! I am currently 6 months pregnant and dealing with the most unhinged career situation I've ever experienced.
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  • I was recruited away from a leadership role at a great startup-I wasn't looking, but they offered a 30% pay bump, equity, and a Head of Department title.
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  • After 8 interviews, I accepted and was really excited. I told HR I was pregnant when the offer came.
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  • They told me I'd get 8 weeks paid leave immediately (and yes, I did clarify if it was immediate..
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  • at my last company I was actually 7 months pregnant with my first child when I started and they gave me 10 weeks right away..
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  • Pregnant employee standing at her desk looking stressed while working in an office.
    via Dmytro Zinkevych

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • no waiting period). I assumed they told the CEO/ rest of the team, but they didn't, so I had to tell him on my first day which is not a huge deal.
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  • I had one interview out of the 8 in person but I wasn't showing too much at the time, they prob assumed I just had a big lunch.
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  • Anyways, CEO/Founder congratulated me and confirmed the 8 weeks. No mention of any fine print at this point.
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  • The company is a disaster. I've scaled teams from nothing before and fixed dysfunctional ones, so I was ready for the challenge.
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  • In my first month, I put out massive fires. We were lying to customers about 24/7 coverage, so I fixed the schedule and onboarded a trusted contractor within two weeks.
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  • Pregnant woman standing at an office desk holding a pencil and looking thoughtful.
    via Dmytro Zinkevych

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • I fixed a failing training class, created a job description for a manager who had literally never had one, and built out 30/60/90 day plans for the new hires and myself.
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  • My plan 30/60/90 plan was approved by the CEO and the Head of Ops. I had no issue with creating my own plan at all, I've done this many times before but not for myself.
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  • Didn't think of it to be weird or a problem. I put in exactly what fires I needed to put out and my goals for each week.
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  • I ran this by him several times in our 1:1s and we went through it all together.
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  • The two main takeaways were that I needed to get the previous Head of Ops fully out of Support, and that the first month was for putting out fires while the second month would be for me becoming a product expert.
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  • Pregnant woman sitting at an office desk looking stressed while working on a desktop computer.
    via Dmytro Zinkevych

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • I even took this to the Head of Ops to see what he needed to get off his plate.
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  • He asked me to take over management needs like scheduling and employee issues immediately (which I did), then move to metrics, and eventually growth and tiering systems.
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  • The CEO approved all of this. End of my 60 days I should be a product expert who can independently work tickets.
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  • On top of that, the CEO and the rest of the team explicitly told me not to "bother" the Head of Ops for training because he was too busy.
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  • But three weeks in, we had a volume spike that I know now, was not going to be reflected in previous volume data I pulled.
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  • We had a large influx of customers and I would never have known that with data, and on the day of the influx all I got was a DM from the Head of Ops saying "it's going to be busy" - that's literally all I knew.
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  • At this point, I didn't have the product knowledge to crush tickets yet (because I was fixing the department structure like I was hired to do), and the CEO went off the rails.
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  • Pregnant employee standing at her desk in a modern office, holding a pencil.
    via Dmytro Zinkevych

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • He started sending unhinged, nit-picky messages over the weekend about my team sending tickets with small typos in them and messages asking "where I was" when I should have been helping in our inbox.
    via FullSpace6770
  • Keep in mind, I have NO issue taking tickets - I've done it in EVERY leadership job I've ever had and probably won't ever stop that practice.
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  • I was just too new at this point to start taking tickets and helping out in that way.
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  • It should never be a core job responsibility for me because I should be focused on growth and strategy, but like..
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  • if we're busy I'll jump in and will be happy to do so. After that awful weekend... I got pulled into a 1:1 with the CEO on Monday which I totally expected because he was so angry that weekend.
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  • He told me I was not meeting expectations at all, the fact that I didn't jump in and help do tickets and couldn't do tickets yet was unacceptable.
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  • He said that being low staffed on a busy week was unacceptable too. THEN he told me the HR rep (who was fired a week or two before this meeting) gave me wrong info and I actually don't qualify for maternity leave because I haven't been there 6 months.
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  • Mind you, he also personally said I would get 8 weeks of full paid leave. He pointed to some outdated internal wiki page as proof.
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  • I told him straight up I never would have taken the job if I knew I couldn't bond with my baby.
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  • He created a "reset' plan for me. Goal 1 reads exactly like this: Be able to answer 95% of tickets solo and be doing 100/wk.
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  • It then goes into detail saying I need to be 25% by week 1, 50% by week 2 and so on.
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  • Because of the way it was written I am assuming he wants be to get to 100 tickets by the end of the whole goal, which is Jan 10th.
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  • Goal 2 is to ensure adequate coverage based on volume/peak times and ticket complexity. The coverage goal is totally fine, this was part of my plan after I fixed the immediate egregious schedule issues.
    via FullSpace6770
  • Our data is useless though because our agents don't assign tickets to themselves, they bounce from person to person - our tagging is a MESS and the CRM doesn't actually track what we would consider handle time.
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  • There are just no standards yet (1 could set them but I'm busy taking tickets). So I go about this plan while still managing the team.
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  • I start taking tickets and planning training sessions on things I need to catch up on.
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  • I'm feeling great because I think I'm doing exactly what he wants me to do. I don't hear anything negative for two weeks until yesterday.
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  • He pulls me into a 1:1 and shares that "he's not firing me don't worry" but that he's putting me on a PIP because I'm still not meeting expectations.
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  • He clarifies that I should have been doing 100 tickets right after the reset (uhhh no..
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  • that was not agreed on). The week of Christmas I worked on 60 tickets, it was slow - I even told him it was slow and I had Christmas off..
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  • so my numbers would be lower and he was OK with it at the time. This past week I worked on 100 tickets, I took a sick day and the company holiday on New Year's Day (probably shouldn't have taken either of those days off..
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  • this was my first sick day btw). But even with those days off I wrote 13 performance reviews AND worked on 100 tickets and did other manager stuffs like 1:1s, team meetings etc.
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  • The other big issue is that when he pulled me into this PIP meeting he shows me that I only resolved \~40 tickets, he had his filter on the wrong dates and was also looking at a brand new metric we'd NEVER looked at together.
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  • I actually resolved close to 70 tickets that week, after I showed him how to look at the right dates.
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  • Team average is 90 resolved tickets per 5 shift week. I did 70 in 3 shifts that also included tons of meetings and performance reviews.
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  • Resolved tickets are not something this team measures performance on, most of the team doesn't resolve 100 tickets a week with our volume and how often we switch tickets around.
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  • I never knew he wanted RESOLVED tickets, I was working towards handling 100 assigned tickets. So now I have a PIP with a new, never mentioned before goal that I don't even agree with.
    via FullSpace6770
  • This guy is a nightmare. I've decided to pull back. I'm giving all people management and scheduling back to the manager who was poorly managing the team before I was onboarded.
    via FullSpace6770
  • I'm skipping all meetings except 1:1s with the CEO. I even cancelled my sessions at the company offsite. because I have zero time to plan a 3-hour session while being forced to grind tickets to keep my job.
    via FullSpace6770
  • I'm so conflicted. My husband and I can afford for me to quit. We have no debt and low expenses and still live a great life.
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  • My husband (who HATES this CEO even before they pulled my promised parental leave / PIP situation) wants me to stay home for a year and pull our 3-year-old from daycare to save even more money.....
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  • but y'all my career is a huge part of my identity. I feel like a failure even though I know this is a toxic "bait and switch" culture.
    via FullSpace6770
  • I know I could crush this role if I was actually allowed to lead instead of being treated like a ticket agent.
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  • Do I even want to work for a founder/CEO who acts like this? END RANT. Sorry for how long this is, I actually cut a LOT of this out including other absolutely bonkers red flags I saw before I was on his shit list.
    via FullSpace6770

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management workplace discussion employment issues boss workplace-stories hr hiring work-life balance pregnant
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