updates: boss renegotiated my start date behind my back, meetings in the metaverse, and more

by Alison Green on August 22, 2024

Here are three updates from past letter-writers.

1. My boss renegotiated my new job’s start date behind my back

I took your advice with the exit interview and shared just enough for them to understand exactly why I was leaving without having to say it outright, without getting into detail or emotionality about it. I’ve since run into a number of former colleagues from that company at conferences, many of whom expressed their support for me leaving – it seems like word has gotten around about B’s behavior and folks were upset about the circumstances of my departure, though as far as I know, B is still at the company so it sounds like not much has really changed there.

One commenter asked how it went when I informed B that I wasn’t changing my end date. The answer is, remarkably smoothly! B did express that they were upset I didn’t “negotiate” with them more before putting it in writing, though by that point HR was involved in the situation and was explicitly backing me up, so I suspect they knew that throwing a bigger fit about it would cause them more problems than it would me.

Many commenters expressed concern that my new boss C had given into B’s demands and what that would mean for our working relationship moving forward. That’s a valid worry and I appreciate everyone who brought it up, though in this case (and as some commenters noted), there were a lot of factors at play that were pressuring her into agreement, not least the close relationship between the two companies. She was pretty transparent about the complicated politics behind the decision, and I opted not to push the issue of the start date so as not to put her in a more difficult situation than she had already been cornered into by B. I’m very fortunate to be in a situation where being without work for a month was more of a vacation than a hardship, but I recognize that I’m very lucky for that to be the case!

I’m happy to report that over six months in, things are going swimmingly. The job is a big step up professionally, I’m enjoying it, and my new boss is great to work for. We’ve been able to acknowledge the bumpy transition period at the start, and she recently expressed to me that she thinks I handled the situation very professionally, which was a relief to hear. Everything has worked out well in my favor, and I’m so glad to have made the choice to leave the previous company. Thanks to all the AAM readers for your validation and support!

2. Meetings in the metaverse (#39 at the link)

A while back you answered a quick question about meetings in the metaverse.

You will perhaps be unsurprised to learn that the company that purchased expensive Oculus headsets so that everyone could join one 30-minute weekly team meeting in the Metaverse was rapidly running out of money. They laid off the head of HR and asked me to step in and manage some of her responsibilities (I was the CEO’s EA and had absolutely no HR experience or training). That was the third round of layoffs since I’d started – I was finally laid off during the fourth round.

It wasn’t a surprise, given that my first team meeting included a layoff announcement, so I’d been applying for other jobs from the get-go.

A friend of mine was laid off the same week, so we both decided to make an irresponsible choice and traveled to Ireland. It was fantastic! When I got back, I was hired into a new job pretty quickly and have been there for over a year. It’s a decent job with a boss that I like, and since we’re a nonprofit we’re far less prone to making expensive purchases for shits and giggles.

What happened to the headset? It made me nauseous and I couldn’t wear it for more than 5 minutes. You can join the metaverse using a web browser, so I just did that. When I was laid off, I was told I could keep the headset and my company-issued laptop (because the CEO didn’t feel like dealing with the logistics of taking them back). I gave the headset to a friend, and he seems to be enjoying it.

3. My company wants me to start a new job without a raise for a “test period” (#3 at the link)

Wanted to share a happy update. I wrote to my head of people outlining my hesitations in frank but unemotional terms, noting my investment in the company, track record of exceeding expectations, and that, most importantly, a new hire would not be treated the same way.

It worked! Whether I simply called their bluff or changed their hearts with dazzling rhetoric, they agreed that I would be paid my new salary on my official start date. I’m working remotely for now but am settling into my new role, loving the work and the new salary, and preparing to move from my home in the upper Midwest to our office in sunny California next month. Thanks so much for your input; you confirmed my suspicions and gave me the courage I needed to stand up for myself.

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{ 61 comments }

{ 61 comments… read them below }

  1. samhain*

    < When I was laid off, I was told I could keep the headset and my company-issued laptop (because the CEO didn’t feel like dealing with the logistics of taking them back).<

    Nope, no information security concerns there at all, having the HR person keep their laptop. ‍♂️
    this could be a violation of various privacy laws, but company is crashing so… ‍♂️

        1. Nonanon*

          “Ah yes, it DOES have very masculine energy, weird thing to post on AAM, but I don’t disagree”

      2. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

        Emoticons are fine! They’re just punctuation symbols. It’s emojis you can’t do.

        –signed, old enough to remember :-) (and I still use it!)

        3. TeaCoziesRUs*

          Old skool is the best school! :D

          Also >.< was one of my favorite go-tos LONG before *facepalm* became a thing. I just miss the huge smile that goes with it.

        4. Vio*

          I always find myself annoyed if autocorrect turns my emoticons, usually :) :P or :S into emojis, I’m not exactly sure why but it’s probably because I’m getting old.

    2. H.C.*

      Also, if they are doing that to every laid off employee – no wonder company’s crashing and burning.

      I’d also be worried about the LW’s own info security if there are any monitoring software installed on that laptop. I’d advise a hard drive format before using it personally.

      1. Antilles*

        From a purely fiscal standpoint, you could argue it’s pretty trivial. The cost of the electronics probably totals somewhere between $1,000 and $1500 depending on how nice the headset/laptop are, what kind of bulk-purchase deal you have, etc. That’s not nothing, but also kind of trivial compared to the cost of salaries, benefits, etc. If they had 25 employees in a layoff round, the total lost value of this missing equipment likely isn’t even enough to have saved ONE job.
        But it definitely says something about their overall mindset and business acumen that they just wave off $1,000 in completely reusable electronics because they can’t be bothered to spend 5 minutes printing a FedEx label.

        1. Kevin Sours*

          The security concerns are real. But if they are shedding staff like that they probably have no use for the laptops — especially if they still have a pile from the prior rounds of layoffs. It’s not just five minutes to print a label, somebody would need to handle the shipping details, receive the unit, prep and package it for sale, and then sell it. Probably for no more than a couple of hundred per.

          Especially given that the company has bigger problems it might legitimately not be worth it.

        2. MBK*

          It’s not the cost of the equipment, but what employee data might be left on it after it is “decommissioned” – especially given the nature of the user’s position as head of HR.

        3. tamarack etc...*

          I think from a fiscal standpoint, the effort expended on planning in-metaverse meetings, deciding on software and hardware to implement this and then purchasing and distributing the hardware as well as training employees on how to use it, is probably more than the price of the headsets themselves and somehow signals distraction and a lack of prioritization.

      2. MassMatt*

        It sounds as though they were spending other people’s money so who cares what happens to it. Unfortunately there’s more than a few people whose “career” is creating startups and burning through investor cash. A resume of failed companies is not much of an obstacle to the glib salesperson who can spew the right buzzwords.

  2. Frankie*

    Fun fact about VR headsets– there’s evidence that “male” and “female” brains process visual information differently, and most VR development prioritizes the type of visual processing (parallax) that “male” brains use more than “female” brains (which prioritize shading). OP2, you didn’t note your gender, so this could have nothing to do with your experience, but it’s interesting that the person you gave it to who is enjoying it is male!

    The reason I’m using quotation marks here is that there was some research that actually looked at how people undergoing medical transition via hormone therapy processed visual cues, and it turns out that vision is highly impacted by sex hormones– so it’s not actually all about assigned sex or gender, but hormone balance!

    Including a link to a blog post by the researcher: https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2014/04/03/is-the-oculus-rift-sexist.html

    1. BlueWolf*

      Hmm, that’s a fascinating theory. We have a PlayStation VR, and I (F) definitely feel like I had more issues with it than my husband, although the severity depended on the type of game. However, I also tend to have more motion sickness issues than him (for example, seasickness), so I attribute it more to that than sex differences, but it would be interesting to see more research done on the subject.

      1. misspiggy*

        The same sex differences in parallax vision are linked to greater motion sickness in women.

      2. Meep*

        Yeah, I bought my husband a Rift S ages ago. He loves it. Makes me queasy, but I have all flavors of headaches and migraines to begin with so I should assumed it was that. /shrug

    3. Lady Danbury*

      I have a male cousin whose job gave them VR headsets when covid lockdowns hit, ostensibly for work purposes. A few years on, he mostly uses it to watch movies without disturbing his wife, lol. I’ll have to ask if she ever used it and if so, what her experience was.

    4. LonelyAussie*

      Woman who uses VR here, it’s really important that if you start feeling unwell in VR that you stop using it for the day, you can actually train your brain to associate VR with nausea. Lots of short five to fifteen minute sessions getting used to the movement and building up over time is usually recommended. In addition to that, the person wearing the headset needs to have it properly dialed in for their IPD (you can use apps or ask your optometrist for this) and the type of lenses make a big difference (frenal vs pancake). Basically, VR can be a magical experience but oof companies should not be forcing people into headsets without proper guidance, training and time allocated to ensure they’ve got their VR legs so to speak.

      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        Major motion sickness here so I want to verify that it IS important to stop using it for the day, or that it is important that you DON’T? I’m struggling to understand the first sentence but am intrigued at maybe convincing my brain that VR and other various 3D computer things…don’t necessarily mean nausea?

        1. LonelyAussie*

          Stop immediately. Do not try and push through it. Just take the headset off, drink some water, maybe have something with ginger in it and try again tomorrow. First experiences with game choice are also really important, no getting into Ritchie’s plank experience, epic coasters or any of the fps games. I’m pretty sure Meta has a first experiences walkthrough (though I don’t use a meta quest so not sure on the deets)

          When I first got into VR, I was playing a game that triggered a bout of nausea, likely due to framerate and the style of movement. I stopped, put the headset down and was fine the next day. It took me about a week to build up to an hour of play time and now I’m only limited by my headsets battery (2-3 hours)

          Something you can do to help with a bit of the disorientation is have a small fan outside of the play space blowing over your legs and feet.

          2. JustaTech*

            Yes to all these things!
            When I first tried an Oculus VR I refused to move my head *at all* because I am so prone to motion sickness. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the VR.
            When we got one of our own I found that I could do the demo fine, and I love Beat Saber, but almost all the “experience” games (rollercoaster, plank, flying etc) make me sick pretty much instantly.
            I was also super annoyed to discover that one of the music packs I bought for Beat Saber had some background patterns you can’t turn off that also make me motion sick.

            What I didn’t expect to bother me were the “room walkthroughs” from places like Tested. Walk through Adam Savage’s cave? Awesome! Nope, instantly sick, even though I know it was recorded in high-def and made for VR.

            I will also admit that I’ve made myself motion sick playing Minecraft on the computer and watching other people play video games, so I’m a good example of “yes, it is possible if you’re very selective and don’t play too long”.

    5. Annie*

      How easily could, say, special graphics card drivers or TV/console settings presets be created to reduce motion sickness in light of these gender and hormone differences in how humans process visual information?

      My preliminary research indicates current technology doesn’t give us a whole lot options that don’t change the actual games, and options are even more limited if you’re trying to make gameplay videos on YouTube, Twitch, etc. more accessible to people who would otherwise succumb to motion sickness.

  3. Stuart Foote*

    Facebook changed their name and sunk $46 BILLION into the “Metaverse”…and I had forgotten all about it until I saw this update. Just a wild amount of money for a company to waste.

    They are now spending a similar amount of billions on AI…good thing there is no way that could ever become a money pit like the metaverse was.

    1. Dittany*

      Hey now, that’s not fair. AI isn’t JUST a waste of time and money. It’s also a waste of water and electricity.

      1. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

        I mean, so are the various flavors of Bitcoin and those are all still around…

        Anyone remember when Ginger (aka Segway) was going to change the world? Silicon Valley sure is a bubble.

        1. WellRed*

          The old dotcom bubble as well. Investors with money but no understanding throwing everything at what they hope is the next big thing. Repeated again with Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann etc.

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            I’ve always called the 90s/tech bubble “a time of overpriced Champagne and imaginary money.”

            1. JustaTech*

              At the very peak of the 90’s dot com bubble I was in high school and taking my first “real” programming class (Java).
              One day I was visiting my dad at his office (management consultants) and describing a thing I was programming when one of his coworkers overheard and offered me a job. I was 16 and had been taking the class for like 2 months so I said “no thank you, I’m busy with school” but I was thinking “what kind of loon hires a kid with 2 month’s exposure to do coding that is used for an actual company?”
              When the whole thing went belly up the next year I realized how utterly bananas the whole thing had been.

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        And the end of privacy and intellectual property laws! Credit where credit’s due.

    2. Pay no attention...*

      Eh, if we don’t think big and risk failure, we’ll never have successes; and sometimes the flop sort of sits around for a while until it returns and becomes a success.

      Electric vehicles were a dismal failure in the 70s.

      1. Meep*

        As someone who has friends who work at Meta… The decisions there are really ad-hoc and depending on Zuck’s mood somedays. He will hire a bunch of people to pursue a pet project he is really interested in and then lay off the entire department once it gets successful because he is bored. Don’t even get me started on their contingent worker policy.

        I know very competent and renowned engineers and physicists fired based on his whims. And they recently “restructured” the AR department by using mass layoffs and then rehiring a lot of them back at a higher salary to do the exact same thing. Insiders into the decision said it was like throwing darts at a board full of names and then deciding after they were let go if they were important.

        tl;dr – from what I know about Meta, you could pay me an annual salary of $1 million dollars and I still would not want to work for that company.

        1. JustaTech*

          This is why I think all tech companies could really use a strong board that has some teeth so the billionaire tech bro has *someone* to keep them lightly tethered to reality.
          Zuck, dude, go build your treehouses and statues of your wife and bunkers and stuff, but don’t set your company on fire for your pet projects.

      2. Quill*

        As far as I understand it, the usefulness of the electric vehicle increased (with the technical difficulty of the batteries and having enough range decreasing) while the idea was sitting on the shelf. Skeptical the same will happen for bitcoin, as the things preventing it from getting traction aren’t “it’s cheaper and more robust to use gas vehicles right now” it’s “it’s a technological boondoggle that doesn’t solve any extant problems.”

        1. TigressInTech*

          While the technology behind cryptocurrencies is fascinating, even the professor of my grad class about blockchain did not have a good reason in favor of cryptocurrency (and admitted that fully). Blockchain itself (the underlying tech) can make it easier to solve some problems, but cryptocurrency is not more useful than government-backed currencies.

    3. Uh Oh HR*

      I highly recommending Folding Idea’s youtube videos on the metaverse – I believe that one’s titled ‘The Future is a Dead Mall.’ It’s a fascinating look into the failure of one of the vaunted and venture capital’d metaverse projects.

      And a great speaker to have on in the background while crafting.

  4. Observer*

    you confirmed my suspicions and gave me the courage I needed to stand up for myself.

    This makes me happy!

  5. Nicosloanica*

    Oh my lord the relocation (that they didn’t want to give you a raise for) was from the Midwest to California?? You could hardly picture a greater cost of living hike. That’s not even a raise that’s just a cost of living adjustment! Thank goodness you didn’t accept that OP.

    1. Industry Behemoth*

      Yes. I heard of an instance when a recruiter found a unicorn candidate in the US Midwest earning $150K, for a job in the Northeast where the going rate was $225K.

      The recruiter was a newbie who made the mistake of telling his client the unicorn’s current Midwest salary. Then the client was willing to offer only $180K, the $30K being the difference in COL. But they would have offered a local candidate the $225k.

  6. Pair of Does*

    Wow, I missed that metaverse letter the first time around! Obligatory plug for Folding Ideas’s “The Future is a Dead Mall” video on youtube for anyone curious about the [delicious and spectacular] failure of the metaverse concept.

    1. Mister_L*

      Using this comment to also plug Folding Idea’s “Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs”, because I think it might contain some background information that helps understand “The Future is a Dead Mall”.
      And also just because it’s awesome.

  7. Project Maniac-ger*

    #1 I just… how did B think this was going to play out? Nobody can make you come to work. Audacity doesn’t feel like a strong enough word for whatever B has. I’m surprised B is still employed because if they don’t care about boundaries enough to call an employee’s new supervisor to force a different start date than they’re definitely violating some law somewhere.

    1. LCH*

      i love that their bananapants action did not work out how they wanted. like.. ok, my new start date is later. that has no bearing on my quit date, you big banana!

      2. Analyst*

        Actually, it would have bearing on my quit date- that would be this moment, instead of serving my notice. Wow….

  8. Wilbur*

    Incredible to think someone bought into having meetings into what looks like the Nintendo Wii-verse. Can you even bowl in the metaverse?

  9. OMG! Bees!*

    LW3 congrats! Glad to have you here in (looks out window) not-quite-sunny California, but it’s a big state. Hopefully the raise includes an increased cost of living!

  10. IT But I Can't Fix Your Printer*

    I’m a little disappointed that LW2 did not find love and/or magic on their impromptu trip to Ireland but it sounds like it turned out okay anyway.

  11. MassMatt*

    #1 I would check LinkedIn and with contacts at the old company to see who’s reporting to B and target them for recruitment. I once staffed a new place with several great employees who were miserable under the awful manager of my old job.

  12. Boof*

    Thank you everyone good news all around, but I am especially happy number 3’s employers saw reason!!

  13. AJ*

    OP #1, just a couple months ago, my brother’s boss did nearly the same thing. There was a snafu with his start date and he could only give one week of notice. His boss called his new workplace to demand an explanation! (And since regional headquarters were who had the snafu, calling the local branch was just ridiculous.)
    He dropped off his key the next day and told them he’d be in never. And then there was an additional start date snafu and he ended up having three weeks off, so he would have been willing to work another week. But his boss had to get their underthings in a twist.

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