I was a pentester. In ye olde pre-Covid days of 2016, it was important (at least to this manager) for pentesters to be available at precisely 9am for client engagements.
I actually didn’t know I had narcolepsy when I got the job. The discovery happened on the job. It was pretty comical. He was putting increased pressure on me to make sure I was there at exactly 9 (rather than leaving at ~8pm or later like I usually did). So I remembered a coworker from my first job being miraculously cured by a CPAP machine. I suggest “let’s try out a sleep study, I bet I can get this taken care of.” So I do that and they couldn’t even wake me up for the 3rd check. (There’s three checks during a sleep study, and I was apparently the heaviest sleeper they’ve seen.)
They were like “So it turns out you have narcolepsy” and I told my manager “so it turns out I have narcolepsy” and he was like “so it turns out I can sidestep disability laws. Gimme two months, I’ll speedrun your notice.”
It was an interesting experience being booted out with no severance and no notice. It’s just one of the many reasons I simply don’t believe any manager when they go on about family values or protecting employees. Even if they have good intentions, they still answer to the person one step above them.
From an employee POV the optimal strategy is to treat everything professionally. When times get tough, be professional. It sounds trite, but if you do your best and try to do a good job, then you’ve done all you can, and you can be satisfied with the outcome. Even if it’s not in your favor.
Was super relieved to be out of that situation. Though not so relieved when the electricity was almost shut off. Luckily my wife got a job within a mouse’s breadth of losing the apartment.
I'm interested in getting more details on this. Mandatory meeting times makes it sound like you were a W-2 employee and not a contractor, and it's hard to imagine that an accommodation for narcolepsy would cause the employer any kind of undue burden. How did they avoid legal consequences?
Step one was to transfer me off of client engagements entirely. No more pentesting. Which raised the question of what exactly I would do at a pentesting shop.
His particular solution was to have me write security documentation and recommendations for clients deployed on Azure, then to say that the resulting documentation wasn’t satisfactory.
I actually noticed one morning my access had been cut off, so I snagged a few chat messages from my laptop. I went in and was called into the side room to be lit on fire.
In reality it’s not so dramatic, though at the time it felt like the end of the world. I was putting my wife through college so she could be a developer, and without a job we’d have to abandon those plans. None of that matters to an employer; they’re not here to accommodate people, they’re here to make money. And I say that with seriousness, not cynicism.
Your problems are your own. When I started transitioning to that mindset, I became both more professional and tougher. I expect to be laid off within one month as of this writing, and it’ll roll off my shoulders like I’m laying in a river letting the water flow by. It doesn’t phase me, precisely because this time around I planned from day one that day next-month would come.
I could have taken them to court, but I was a mess at the time. Getting on Prozac and taking care of my mental health really turned my life around.
I’m a contractor at Groq working on custom ASICs for ML (at least for about the next month). The specialness was to plan my entire schedule around tuesdays and thursdays. Those are my only days with required morning meetings, and thankfully those are 11am and noon respectively.
With careful planning, I’ve managed to only miss one meeting.
Getting a diagnosis is the most important step. It helps you accept that it’s not your fault (a big one for me). Which lets you focus on delivering value in your niche, which is all that employers actually care about.
If I’d known I had narcolepsy, I wouldn’t have tried to get into an industry so focused on client meetings. So the planning phase is pretty crucial.
I actually didn’t know I had narcolepsy when I got the job. The discovery happened on the job. It was pretty comical. He was putting increased pressure on me to make sure I was there at exactly 9 (rather than leaving at ~8pm or later like I usually did). So I remembered a coworker from my first job being miraculously cured by a CPAP machine. I suggest “let’s try out a sleep study, I bet I can get this taken care of.” So I do that and they couldn’t even wake me up for the 3rd check. (There’s three checks during a sleep study, and I was apparently the heaviest sleeper they’ve seen.)
They were like “So it turns out you have narcolepsy” and I told my manager “so it turns out I have narcolepsy” and he was like “so it turns out I can sidestep disability laws. Gimme two months, I’ll speedrun your notice.”
It was an interesting experience being booted out with no severance and no notice. It’s just one of the many reasons I simply don’t believe any manager when they go on about family values or protecting employees. Even if they have good intentions, they still answer to the person one step above them.
From an employee POV the optimal strategy is to treat everything professionally. When times get tough, be professional. It sounds trite, but if you do your best and try to do a good job, then you’ve done all you can, and you can be satisfied with the outcome. Even if it’s not in your favor.
Was super relieved to be out of that situation. Though not so relieved when the electricity was almost shut off. Luckily my wife got a job within a mouse’s breadth of losing the apartment.