‘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

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.  

Author image for Etai Eshet Etai Eshet
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management workplace discussion employment issues boss workplace-stories hr hiring work-life balance pregnant
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