Coworkers who don't like you and then gaslight you into making you think they do. How to deal with them?

For example, I had this o
ne guy who I thought was my friend. He would act really nice and helpful, offering to help me with stuff but he also said a lot of patronising shit that showed that he clearly didn't respect me and then he would gaslight me saying that it was just helpful advice and I was just imagining the hostility. I found out 3 months later that he was complaining the whole time through my probation to my boss to get me fired. I never got fired because my boss liked me and thought I was capable but I feel so betrayed. Why do people act like this? Nobody's forcing him to pretend to like me but he does it anyway. Should I just not trust anyone at work in the future? How do you deal with these people? Do they get some sort of pleasure from it?

Jobadvisor

That kind of two-faced behavior is deeply disorienting. It forces you to constantly second-guess your own intuition while someone actively undermines your livelihood under the guise of "helpfulness."

Why People Act This Way

• Self-Preservation and Risk Avoidance: Being openly hostile in a professional environment creates HR risk and social friction. Fake friendliness lets them gather information, monitor your performance, and position themselves as a "supportive team player" to leadership while secretly eliminating what they perceive as competition.
  
  
• The Power Dynamic (Control): Gaslighting creates self-doubt. By framing patronizing insults as "constructive advice," he made you feel defensive and overly sensitive. This shifts the focus off his toxic behavior and onto your perceived weakness.
  
  
• Sadism or Narcissistic Pleasure: Some people do derive satisfaction from covert manipulation—feeling like they are "playing chess" while you're unaware. However, in most workplaces, it stems more from insecurity and ruthless political maneuvering than pure pleasure.
  
  

How to Deal With Gaslighting Coworkers

1. Trust Your Instincts Over Their Words: When someone's tone or actions feel off, believe the pattern, not their explanation. If an interaction leaves you feeling patronized or uneasy, log it internally and lower your exposure immediately.
   
   
2. Move Everything to Written Records: Keep all project discussions, offers of help, and task assignments in writing (Slack, email, or meeting follow-ups). If they offer verbal advice or feedback, follow up via email: "Thanks for your feedback earlier on X. Per our chat, I'll handle Y this way." This strips away their ability to rewrite history.
   
   
3. Grey Rock Them: Become as uninteresting and non-reactive as a grey rock. Share zero personal details, hobbies, or private thoughts. Limit interactions strictly to essential, professional tasks using polite, neutral, and brief responses.
   
   
4. Set Firm Boundaries on Unsolicited Advice: Next time someone offers patronizing "help," shut down the dynamic politely: "Thanks, but I've got this handled" or "I'm comfortable with my process here, but I'll let you know if I need a hand."
   
   

Should You Stop Trusting People at Work?

You don't need to become completely paranoid, but you should switch from emotional trust to professional trust:

• Emotional Trust (Friends): Vulnerability, personal secrets, venting about work, expecting mutual loyalty. Avoid this by default at work.
  
  
• Professional Trust (Colleagues): Expecting people to do their jobs, meeting deadlines, maintaining professional courtesy, and collaborating effectively.
  
  

Treat coworkers as allies on specific tasks rather than personal confidants. Over time, genuine friendships can form at work, but let them earn that trust through consistent, verifiable support over many months or years before lowering your guard.

Why do companies expect instant joining but enforce 3-month notice periods themselves?

Genuine question for my network — need your perspective on this.

Would love to hear how others have navigated this.

I'm currently serving a notice period (negotiable up to 60 days) while exploring new opportunities to grow into bigger responsibilities. In the last few weeks, I've had multiple screening calls go well — until the topic of notice period came up. The moment I mention 3 months (even with a 60-day negotiation option), the process quietly ends.

Here's what's puzzling me: the same companies enforce a 3-month notice period for their own employees. So the expectation is — join us instantly, but if you ever want to leave us, please give us 3 months.

I understand urgent hiring needs exist. But it feels like candidates who are diligently serving their current employer (which is the professional and ethical thing to do) are being filtered out in favor of immediate joiners — regardless of why they're immediately available.

Genuinely curious to hear from recruiters, hiring managers, and fellow professionals:

→ Is this purely about urgent backfill timelines, or is there more to it? → Have you found ways to negotiate this successfully? → Should candidates lead with notice period differently to avoid this early filter?

Jobadvisor

This is a real double standard, and you're not wrong to notice it. Let me give you the honest mechanics behind it, since understanding the "why" might help you navigate it better than just being frustrated by it.

Why it happens

1. Hiring urgency isn't symmetric with retention logic. The 3-month notice a company imposes on you exists to protect them from sudden gaps. But when they're hiring, that same 3-month gap is now a cost to them, sitting on an open req, paying overtime or contractors to cover the work, missing a project deadline. They didn't design the notice period system to be fair to candidates; they designed two separate systems, each optimized for their own convenience.

2. It's often a proxy filter, not a hard rule. Many recruiters use notice period as a fast, lazy screen when they have a large applicant pool. If 30 candidates apply and 10 can join in 2 weeks, why deal with the friction of the other 20? It's rarely a principled stance about "ethics" — it's pipeline efficiency.

3. Backfill urgency is sometimes real, sometimes exaggerated. Some roles genuinely have a hard deadline (a project starting, a replacement leaving on a fixed date). But plenty of "immediate joiner" preferences are just recruiters defaulting to the easiest filter rather than assessing whether 60-90 days is actually workable.

4. It penalizes exactly the wrong signal. Ironically, someone serving their notice properly is demonstrating the reliability that the company presumably wants in an employee. Someone who can "join immediately" sometimes means they were let go, ghosted their old employer, or work somewhere with a weak notice culture. That's not always a green flag either. Most hiring managers don't stop to think about this nuance in the screening stage though.

On negotiating and leading with it

A few tactical adjustments that tend to help:

• Don't lead with the number in isolation. Instead of "my notice period is 3 months, negotiable to 60 days," try reframing: "I can be fully transitioned and onboarded within 60 days, and I'm happy to discuss options like a compressed handover to shorten that further." Same fact, but it reads as proactive rather than a constraint you're imposing on them.

• Save it for after mutual interest is established, not the first screening call if you can help it. If a recruiter asks upfront, answer honestly, but try to get the conversation to your fit and value before the notice period becomes the single filtering data point.

• Offer a bridge. Some candidates offer partial availability, e.g., handling onboarding paperwork, part-time overlap, or starting remote/part-time before full transition. Not always feasible, but worth having in your pocket.

• Target roles/companies less likely to filter hard on this. Larger, more process-driven companies (especially ones with structured notice periods themselves) tend to be more understanding of a 60-90 day timeline than fast-scaling startups with urgent gaps to fill.

• Ask directly if it's a hard blocker before investing more time. "Before we go further, is the timeline a firm constraint on your side, or is there flexibility if the right candidate needs 60 days?" This can save you from investing in processes that quietly die over this.

Is this purely about backfill urgency? Sometimes, yes — but often it's just an easy first-pass filter applied without much thought about whether 60 days actually breaks anything. You're reading the situation accurately; the inconsistency you've spotted is real, it's just not something individual recruiters are usually incentivized to fix.

My manager has started noticing how much time I’m taking off for my dad’s estate, what do I do?

My dad passed a few months ago and I’m the executor of his estate. I work full time and at first I genuinely thought I could deal with most of this after work and use the occasional day off when I really needed to. Yeah that was very optimistic lol. A lot of the stuff I need to deal with happens during normal work hours and I’ve already burned through way more PTO than I expected. I’ve had to move meetings around and take random calls during the day and last week my manager finally mentioned that I’ve been away from work a lot lately. He wasn’t an asshole about it or anything, which almost made me feel worse. I’ve always been reliable at work and now I feel like I’m slowly becoming that employee who constantly has something going on. I can’t just stop dealing with my dad’s estate either. I’m starting to think I need to find some kind of outside help because trying to do both myself clearly isn’t working anymore. For anyone who’s had a major family responsibility drag on for months, how did you handle it with your job? Did you talk openly with your manager, take leave, get help with the stuff outside work, or just somehow push through it?

Jobadvisor

I'm sorry about your dad. Losing a parent is hard enough without also being handed a part-time unpaid job (executor duties) on top of grieving and working full time. What you're describing — thinking you could squeeze it into evenings and occasional days off — is what almost everyone in this position assumes at first, and almost everyone is wrong about, because estate work runs on other institutions' business hours, not yours.

A few honest things, then some practical paths.

This isn't a performance problem, it's a bandwidth math problem. You didn't become unreliable. You took on a second, involuntary job (executor) with a lot of scattered institutional bottlenecks — banks, courts, insurers, all needing calls during 9-to-5. That's just structurally incompatible with quietly working around it. No one manages that seamlessly.

Your manager noticing isn't automatically bad news. You read it as almost worse because he wasn't harsh about it. That reaction makes sense, but it's worth separating: him noticing and gently flagging it might just be him wanting context, not building a case against you. You don't know yet which one it is, so it's worth finding out directly rather than assuming.

Here's how I'd approach it:

1. Have a direct, brief conversation with your manager now, before it becomes a pattern he's silently tracking.
You don't need to give him a detailed inventory of estate logistics. Something like: "I wanted to give you context on the time away lately. I'm the executor of my dad's estate, which is why I've had these last-minute calls and days off — a lot of estate/legal/bank stuff only happens during business hours. I'm working on getting it more contained, but wanted you to know what's going on rather than have it be a mystery." That reframes it from "employee who's suddenly unreliable" to "employee dealing with a finite, explainable situation."

2. Ask what formal options exist. Depending on where you're located and your company's policies, there may be:

• Bereavement leave (sometimes separate from PTO, sometimes extendable for estate duties)
• FMLA or local equivalent, if this is compounding into something like caregiving or affecting your mental health
• A short stretch of reduced hours or a compressed schedule while the estate work is heaviest

It's worth asking HR specifically what exists rather than assuming it's all PTO. Some companies have bereavement or "family responsibility" provisions most employees never know about because they never needed them.

3. Get outside help with the estate itself, not just your job situation. This is probably the biggest lever. If the estate is remotely complex (property, multiple accounts, debts, anything contested), an estate attorney or a probate paralegal can take over a lot of what's eating your work hours: calls to banks, paperwork filing, coordinating with courts. It costs money, usually paid out of the estate itself, not out of your pocket, and it can compress months of scattered work into someone else's job instead of yours. Executors are legally allowed reasonable compensation and can use estate funds for professional help — you don't have to personally absorb the labor for free.

4. Set a rough timeline for yourself. Not to rush the estate, but to give your manager (and yourself) a sense that this is finite: "I expect the heaviest part of this to wrap up in about X weeks" is a very different thing to hear than an open-ended stream of absences.

You don't have to choose between "push through silently" and "fall apart." Most people who've been through this say the turning point was exactly what you're circling: bringing in professional help for the estate and being upfront with their manager instead of trying to absorb it all invisibly. Being the executor of your father's estate while grieving and working full time is genuinely a lot — you're not failing at anything by needing support for that.

Has anyone else been denied a promotion because you were "too valuable" in your current role?

So I learned the hard way this week that high performance in a corporate job is just a punishment disguised as a compliment. For the last two years, I busted my ass on our operations team. I streamlined our reporting, automated daily tickets, and consistently closed double the volume of anyone else on the floor.

annual review comes around on Monday. My manager gives me an "exceeds expectations" rating across the board and tells me I am the backbone of the department. Then he slides across a 3% standard cost of living adjustment. No promotion. No actual merit raise.

When I asked about moving into a senior title, he literally told me I was "too valuable in my current execution seat" to move.

Meanwhile, my coworker who browses Reddit half the day and constantly asks for extensions just got promoted to project coordinator. Why? Because management thought he had "high level strategic vision" since he wasn't bogged down in daily tasks. The only reason he wasn't bogged down is because they kept assigning his overflow work to ME.

I'm done giving 110% to a system that penalizes efficiency and rewards people who weaponize their own incompetence. Its sickening.

How are people supposed to stay motivated when doing your job well literally traps you at the bottom?

Jobadvisor

Yeah, this is a well-known trap and you just walked straight into a textbook version of it. It has a name in management circles: it's sometimes called the "glass floor" or "indispensability trap" — the exact opposite of the glass ceiling, but just as real. Your manager basically admitted it out loud, which is rarer than you'd think. Most managers are smart enough not to say "too valuable to promote" to your face because it reveals the quiet part: they're optimizing for their own convenience, not your growth.

Let's break down what's actually happening, because understanding the mechanism helps you counter it.

Why this happens

Your manager isn't rewarding your coworker's laziness on its own merits. He's making a resourcing decision: moving you would create a painful gap he'd have to solve (retrain someone, absorb a productivity hit, restructure workflows). Promoting your coworker costs him nothing operationally, since your coworker wasn't load-bearing in the first place. From the manager's narrow, short-term view, keeping you exactly where you are is the path of least resistance. You experience this as punishment. He experiences it as "not breaking what works." That's the whole dynamic in a nutshell — it's not really about your coworker's "strategic vision," that's just the story used to justify the outcome after the resourcing decision was already made.

Why "just work harder" won't fix it

More output actually makes this worse, not better, because it raises the cost of losing you in your current seat. You've inadvertently proven you're excellent at the thing they don't want to lose, which is different from proving you're ready for the thing you want to do.

What tends to actually work

• Make yourself replaceable on purpose. Document your processes, train someone else on the automation and reporting you built, and start delegating your own workload. This sounds backwards, but until there's a plausible successor, there's no organizational reason to move you. You have to manufacture the slack that your coworker got handed.

• Separate "great performer" from "promotion case" explicitly. Ask directly: "What specific gap exists between me and a senior title, and what would need to be true for you to approve it?" Force him to name concrete criteria instead of vague praise. If he can't name any, that's diagnostic in itself — it means the real blocker is convenience, not competence.

• Get it in writing/timeline. "I'd like to revisit this in Q_ with a specific plan — can we agree on what needs to happen for that title change?" Vague future promises without a date usually mean never.

• Recognize this is a structural incentive problem, not a you problem. You are not wrong to be angry. Companies that keep high performers stuck in execution roles while promoting whoever's least missed are optimizing for short-term continuity over long-term retention, and they usually pay for it eventually, just not in a way that helps you.

• If the internal path stays blocked, your leverage is external. A documented track record like yours (streamlined reporting, automation, top-volume performance) is exactly what gets you a senior title at a company that isn't structurally incentivized to keep you stuck. Sometimes the fastest promotion path is through the front door of a different building.

You're not wrong that competence without advocacy can trap you. But you're also not stuck; you just have to shift energy from "prove I deserve it through output" (already done, clearly) to "make it costly for them to keep saying no." That's a different kind of work, and it's worth doing deliberately instead of just grinding harder in the seat you're trying to leave.

Am I Overreacting To HR’s Response To My WFH Request?

I live in Canada and have been at this company for 2+ years doing demand generation marketing, 3 days in office and 2 days I work from home. It’s about a 45 minute driving commute each way, requiring driving on major highways.

Last week my car broke down and it requires over $5k in repairs, so I emailed my boss and HR (per HR’s policy) on Thursday September 3rd and advised them my car is unsafe to drive. Unfortunately my girlfriend is a supply teacher, so she needs her car as she isn’t sure on any given day which school she’s at. As a result, I asked HR for a little grace to work from home while I actively sort out my vehicle situation in the next week or so.

It is Wednesday September 9th and I just received a response from them, and they’re accommodating me to work from home for the next two days. Afterwards, they say the following:

However, I want to clarify that your in-office attendance cannot be conditional on whether you have access to a car. Employees are responsible for arranging reliable transportation to and from the workplace. Working from home is a privilege that requires prior management approval; it is not an alternative when personal transportation is unavailable.
As a reminder, you are expected to work in the office at least three days per week. To make up the in-office days missed this week, you will be required to work from the office every day next week.
Please make the necessary arrangements and confirm that you understand these expectations.

I do understand that arranging transportation is my responsibility, but when I’m asking for a bit of grace to the WFH policy AND I have a 45 minute driving only commute each way, I feel like this is a bit ridiculous/overkill. Do they expect me to rent a car? Public transportation isn’t an option between where I live and where the office is really.

Might be me being a bit overdramatic, but the entire email I got back has really pissed me off, and I’m seriously considering looking for another place to work.

Am I overreacting?

Jobadvisor

You are not overreacting to the anger you feel. While HR’s underlying policy stance is standard, their delivery was remarkably punitive and tone-deaf for a tenured employee facing a sudden emergency.

Where HR is technically standard

• The Commute Liability: In the eyes of employment law and corporate policy, how you get to the office is entirely your responsibility. Companies draw hard lines here to avoid setting precedents (e.g., "If we let him WFH for car trouble, we have to let everyone").
  
  
• The Underlying Expectation: Yes, strictly speaking, they expect you to rent a car, pay for Ubers, or carpool if public transit isn't an option.
  
  

Where HR completely crossed the line

• The Response Delay: Taking nearly a full week to reply to a time-sensitive logistical emergency shows a blatant lack of respect for your situation.
  
  
• The Punitive "Make-Up" Days: Forcing you into the office for five days next week is petty. It proves their hybrid policy isn't about team collaboration or productivity—it’s about control and tracking badge swipes.
  
  
• The Condescending Delivery: Lecturing a two-year employee like a truant teenager ("confirm that you understand these expectations") over a sudden $5,000 financial stressor destroys goodwill and basic human empathy.
  
  

How to handle it

• Send a Grey-Rock Reply: Do not justify, argue, or show anger. Send a brief, emotionless confirmation: "I understand the expectations and will be in the office five days next week to make up the days." Keep your paycheck secure while you figure things out.
  
  
• Update Your Resume: Your instinct to look elsewhere is correct. A company that weaponizes flexibility rather than using it to support staff during a crisis has shown you their true culture. When a business treats you like a liability rather than a human being, the trust is broken.
  
  

Are you in a position to easily pivot to a fully remote role in your current demand-gen market, or will you need to look at local hybrid roles?

Both boss and boss’s boss left. Now what?

I’m in a weird situation where my boss announced their boss was leaving. While I’m on vacation, my boss has shared with me they were also leaving immediately once I return from my vacation. The team I’m a part of is a two-person team of just my boss and I. Now it’s just me, with no direct guidance or even guidance from someone higher. what happens now? I lack the experience my boss provides, so I’m not sure if I can answer questions that people ask and wouldn’t know who to go to since upper management is also gone. Do I just wait and see what happens? Could I just quietly keep my head down and see what they do with me? Has anyone been in this situation? I’m back to looking for a new job but would like to keep something afloat while I look for something else.

Jobadvisor

That's a genuinely tough spot — sudden ownership of a two-person team's worth of work, with no chain of command left to lean on. A few people have absolutely been here before (reorgs and layoffs often hollow out small teams exactly like this), so you're not off in uncharted territory, even though it feels that way.

Here's how I'd think about it:

Don't quietly keep your head down. It feels safer, but it's actually the riskier move. If nobody assigns you a new manager or clarifies expectations, that's often not a deliberate decision — it's just nobody's gotten to it yet. Silence from you reads as "everything's fine, no need to sort this out," which can mean you get left in limbo indefinitely, or worse, someone assumes the work isn't getting done and it reflects on you.

Find out who's accountable for your function now, even if it's a level or two removed. HR, your skip-skip-level, or even your boss's boss's peer are reasonable people to ask "who should I be looping in now that both my manager and their manager are gone?" Frame it as wanting to keep things running smoothly, not as a complaint.

Document what you don't know. Make a running list of decisions, questions, or approvals that used to go through your boss. You don't need to solve all of them now — but when you do get a new manager or interim contact, handing them a clear list ("here's what's been in limbo since X left") makes you look sharp, not lost.

It's fine to say "I don't know" to people who ask you things. You inherited a role overnight; nobody reasonable expects you to instantly have your boss's institutional knowledge. "I'm still getting my footing since some recent departures — let me find out and get back to you" is a completely normal thing to say.

On job searching while this plays out — that's a reasonable hedge, and you don't need to justify it to anyone. Companies in this kind of flux sometimes stabilize fast (you get a new manager, maybe even a promotion since you're now the only one who knows the work) and sometimes don't. Keeping options open while you see which way it goes is just sensible, not disloyal.

One thing worth sitting with: is there any chance this is actually an opportunity rather than just a burden? Being the sole person left holding institutional knowledge on a team sometimes leads to real upward movement, if the company decides to invest rather than just quietly let the function shrink. Worth watching for signals either way over the next few weeks.