It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager, featuring updates from people who had their letters answered in the past.

I was planning on having an update much sooner, but then the situation just continued to snowball. I finally have a mostly-happy ending to share.

I did end up signing the contract, about a week after I had originally sent my letter. I hadn’t gotten Alison’s advice back yet, but I think I already knew what she and the commenters affirmed — it was almost certainly a bad idea. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like I could turn down the contract without really jeopardizing my relationship with my job (and particularly with our very hot-and-cold CEO). I did get them to agree that I would be paid biweekly — so my contractor payment would be added as a bonus to my hourly paycheck — instead of as an end-of-year bonus.

That probably would have been the end of an unsatisfying story, except that later that week, someone made a post online accusing our CEO of a major personal scandal. (For anonymity’s sake, I won’t say what kind, but if you just think of the most horrible thing a person could be accused of … yeah.)

After a week of board meetings and uncertainty, our new C-Suite came forward to announce that we would not be moving forward with the planned project (which was designed by our old CEO). Instead, we would be creating and executing a new from-scratch concept — with about five weeks before the project launch. (We had been working on the old project for several months and had already spent a lot of our budget on it.) I got brought back on in the same hourly-plus-contract fashion, but with the scale of the project very considerably changed. Everything was moving so quickly that there was no renegotiating or discussion of how things would change — we all jumped into working on this new project feet-first.

It was an incredibly hectic month of working 70–80 hours a week (with half of it as an “hourly employee” and half as a “contractor” — which is to say, working at my regular rate with no overtime), but it was also one of the most exciting moments in my career. After working for someone who was so ego-focused and unwilling to entertain any opinions that were not his, it was great to be on a team where everything happened collaboratively. Work-life balance went out the window, but at least I was working toward something I was actually proud to put my name on. At one point I remember telling my fiancé (who was such an incredible rock during the whole thing), “I’m really having a great time being taken advantage of.”

This was going to be the end of my update — “hooray, my terrible CEO has left and I’ve reconnected with the passion I have for this work, even if it does suck to be paid so poorly for it.”

But!

After the project ended and we all took some time to decompress, we had a retrospective, and I asked my skip-level boss for a one-on-one. I had two goals for the meeting: (1) to make sure they knew that I knew this setup wasn’t legal, and (2) to make it clear that I wasn’t willing to enter that kind of arrangement again. In an ideal world, should I also have gone in looking for money? Yes. But I also knew that the company had taken a serious financial hit dealing with the ex-CEO’s exit, and it didn’t feel like the battle worth fighting.

After spending a fair portion of the meeting being sympathetic but sticking to her position (“I’m sorry that you feel undervalued, but there was nothing illegal with what we did”), my grandboss agreed to revisit the issue with our CFO and schedule a follow-up.

There followed a very stressful two-week wait, including a request from the CFO for the full combined time logs from those months. My boss and grandboss also put some new protocols in place for my role — lots of conversations about “having better work-life balance” that mostly equated to no working from home, less flexible scheduling, and stricter timekeeping. I suspect this was largely because they realized how little oversight my job had historically had. My boss would have been happy to focus on the non-management part of his job and let us manage our own work and schedules. Now that my timesheets were being called into question, that was no longer going to fly.

Finally, close to two months after the original project had wrapped up, my grandboss and the CFO scheduled a meeting. It started with “we want to pay you legally and fairly” — which was great — but also included “we had no idea how much you were actually working during these months” (a little difficult to believe, since I was there all the time, as were they) and “we made you a contractor so you had more flexibility to self-manage without worrying about hourly limits.” That last point was partly fair — the flexibility was pretty essential given how quickly everything was moving — but it’s not like I could have reorganized my time to fit all the work into hours that wouldn’t have led to overtime.

It wasn’t until they kept returning to that last point and going over a few specific items in my time logs that I realized they were misinterpreting California labor law — and that they had concluded they owed me significantly more money than they actually did (by an order of at least 20 times, if not more).

We googled some laws together, they realized I was not about to suddenly become the most well-paid employee at the company, and the conversation became much less tense.

How It All Ended

All in all, it’s a pretty happy ending. This place still has its fair share of dysfunction, but it’s becoming clear that new leadership genuinely cares about company culture and is open to hearing suggestions and change. I received a nice unexpected bonus from the overtime pay I should have been paid had everything been done above board. And as much as losing work-from-home and flexible scheduling felt like a punishment at first, I am learning to enjoy stepping away from work when I leave the building and letting messages and emails wait until I’m back.

It’s not the place I want to work forever — I’ve already started gearing up for a new job search — but for the work I’m doing right now, I’m pretty happy with how everything turned out. Having a sense of what is normal versus dysfunctional versus illegal has been hugely helpful in protecting myself, and in being able to assert those boundaries while still maintaining positive professional relationships. I’m not sure I would have had the confidence or knowledge to stand up for myself without the Ask a Manager community.