my boss keeps “forgetting” my disability accommodations, is this job a scam, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My grandboss keeps “forgetting” my disability accommodations

I’m recently diagnosed as AuDHD — a combo autism/ADHD that means I cannot switch gears very quickly, and need preparation time for meetings. I met with HR when I got the diagnosis and we set up some new expectations, one of which was “no last-minute meetings.” I need at least a day’s notice so I’m not having to switch gears with little notice.

But my new grandboss treats whatever is top of mind for her as an emergency for the rest of us, and if she wants to talk about something right now, by god, she will schedule that meeting right now. This is significantly out of step with our workplace culture, which is causing conflict. My disability accommodations mean I can flex my schedule to when my brain is functioning the best and sets an expectation that no one should expect an immediate response from me, which is part of the “no last-minute meetings” accommodation.

She keeps “forgetting” I have the accommodation, and I’m at the end of my rope. I’m interviewing for other jobs because I need to leave this position for a multitude of reasons, but I’m at a loss as to handle this without blowing up my current position before I’ve secured a new one. My boss will always side with her grandboss and is not great at defending her employees from leadership behaving badly.

Go back to HR! They’re the ones who helped you set up the accommodation, and they need to know it’s not being adhered to. I can’t guarantee that they’ll handle it well (some HR is good and some is not) but when you have a formal accommodation that’s not being followed, that’s the right next step  and the most likely to be helpful.

You should also say that you’re worried about your grandboss reacting badly to you involving HR and ask for their help in guarding against that (which they should give you because retaliation for exercising your rights under the ADA is illegal, and they’re not going to want the company exposed to that legal liability).

2. Our techs suck at customer service and our boss won’t do anything

I work in an outside IT field where we dispatch technicians to fix onsite networking issues. The team is friendly, my boss is great to work for, no complaints there. The problem is that some of our techs utterly fail at basic customer service abilities, and our boss doesn’t seem interested in doing anything about it despite the behavior violating policies.

If this were as simple as “yeah, William cuts people off in conversation” or “Brandy gets a chip on her shoulder with some clients,” it’d be one thing, but this is most of them and consistent. The biggest problem is communication. My boss told me we should never have to deal with a client asking where their technician is, yet literally every day I’ve got people calling asking just that. The techs are supposed to call the clients directly and provide an ETA for their arrival. Our clients are usually high strung, because a business owner with a network failure is understandably under some pressure to get up and running again.

So despite being told that running IT dispatch doesn’t mean I should be fielding calls from angry customers, that’s where we end up. I’ve asked the techs to please remember to reach out, and no improvement. My boss has been made aware of the situation multiple times, but it never gets better.

Am I just stuck with this as long as I’m in this role? Or is there some kind of conversation I should be having I just haven’t broached yet?

Maybe. But when you say your boss has been made aware of it multiple times, what does that mean? If it’s been fairly casual, in-passing remarks, try a more serious, focused conversation. Sit down with her, describe what’s been happening and why it’s a problem, and ask if that’s something the team just needs to work around or whether it’s something she can address with the techs. When you phrase it that way, it might get more traction than if she’s just been hearing the occasional frustrated remark without “okay, this is really an issue, what do you want to do about it?”

3. Is this job a scam?

I was contacted by a headhunter who saw my profile on LinkedIn, asking if I would consider applying to a C-suite level job at a biotech company. I have had a long career in academic medicine and the job description seems tailor made to my expertise. I sent her my CV and she told me that I would need to have an Executive Scientific Leadership Assessment and a Board Scientific Readiness Report created and put me in touch with a colleague who writes these reports.

This is when I began to smell a rat. I went to the company’s website and the position is not listed. Also, while the company works in the same medical specialty that I do, they specialize in a different part of it. Earlier today, I think I saw the rat. The specialist that the headhunter introduced me to indicated that there would be a substantial fee for creating these reports.

Am I correct in thinking that this is a scam? I assume that if a headhunter needed a specialized report created for an applicant, they — or even the company — would pay for the report. But I have never been headhunted before so maybe this is typical? What do you think?

Yes, it’s a scam. If a company needs that kind of assessment of a candidate, they pay for it. You don’t. Run run run.

4. LinkedIn and misrepresenting your work history

I’ve noticed recent changes to two former coworkers’ LinkedIn profiles. In both cases they had short tenures at the jobs where we intersected, something that I think could have been predicted when these short tenures were preceded by equally short tenures beforehand. They were both challenging to work with, with deeply abrasive personalities.

Both of them have deleted these individual jobs and subsumed years of experience into their own purported consulting firms, meaning that three or more short-term tenures have disappeared and it now looks like they’ve been a successful consultant for years. For example, the actual work history was:

Consolidated Companies 2025-2026
Acme Manufacturing 2023-2025
Apex Holdings 2021-2023
Generic Solutions 2020-2021

But it has become:

Eugenia Warbleworth Consulting, LLC 2020-2026

In each case, however, if you google these folks, you can find press releases announcing, for example, that Eugenia has joined the staff of Apex Holdings or spoke on behalf of Generic Solutions at a major industry conference. In addition, if you look at Eugenia’s posts on LinkedIn, there are things like, “Proud of my team at Acme,” “We’re looking for a teapot designer here at Consolidated,” and “My kids really enjoyed Take Your Children to Work day at Apex today,” with pictures of her and her children.

I can understand not wanting a list of four or five short-term gigs on LinkedIn, but I wonder what these people are putting on their resumes. Do recruiters checked LinkedIn after getting someone’s resume? Do they notice discrepancies if the resume and LinkedIn don’t reasonably align?

Yes, a lot of people involved with hiring will note it if there are major discrepancies between a LinkedIn profile and the candidate’s resume. Not small ones, but a whole different work history, definitely. However, if the LinkedIn profile and the resume match, the chances are a lot lower of it coming out via the type of update posts you’re describing.

What’s more likely is that during the reference-checking stage, the person will be asked to provide references who can speak to their work during that time period (like clients, if the consulting was real) and it’s going to cause a kerfuffle at that point (unless they actually were doing consulting work concurrently too, in which case they might be able to pull it off).

5. When should I ask about maternity benefits?

I am in the process of trying for a baby, and I am currently working at a company with a very decent maternity policy. However, my team has a lot of turnover, and I wouldn’t like to find myself pregnant and out of a job, so now might be the time to start searching proactively.

At what point during the interview process is it appropriate to ask about the company’s maternity leave policy? I am worried that, by asking this question, I will make the interviewers think that I might join the company and go on maternity leave a couple of months later (which is a possibility, but it might also take much longer, due to my specific circumstances).

Wait until you have an offer. It’s illegal for them to reject you because they think you might get pregnant soon (or be pregnant now) but it does happen (and sometimes that’s unconscious on their part) so it’s safer to wait until they’ve already extended an offer, because revoking it at that point, after you ask about maternity benefits, would be a huge legal liability.

When you ask, include it in a list of other benefits you’d like to know about. “Could you send me details on vacation and sick leave, parental leave, retirement matching, and anything else I should know about?” reveals less than asking about maternity leave on its own.