Your Job Description Is The Company’s First Lie

The paper feels cool and unnervingly smooth under my thumb. Across the table, the candidate-let’s call him Alex-is leaning forward, radiating the kind of earnest energy that makes you want to both hire him and protect him from what this place will inevitably do to him. My eyes drift from his hopeful face down to the document sitting between us: the official, HR-approved, bullet-pointed scroll of duties for the role I currently hold. The role of Senior Systems Architect.

And that’s when the cold wave hits. It starts in my stomach and rushes up, a silent alarm. I scan the ‘Key Responsibilities’ section.

“Spearhead cross-functional quantum-state integration projects.” I have no idea what that means. I’ve never heard the phrase “quantum-state integration” spoken aloud in my 36 months here. My primary cross-functional activity is arguing with Frank in marketing about server access.
“Maintain 99.9996% uptime through proactive algorithmic threat-modeling.” We had a server go down for six hours last Tuesday because someone spilled coffee on it. My “proactive threat-modeling” was a frantic call to a third-party service while using a stack of napkins to soak up a latte.
“Must be fluent in Go, Rust, Python, Haskell, and Clojure.” I am fluent in Python and passable in Go. The last time I saw Haskell was in a university textbook that I promptly sold back to the campus store for $16.

I don’t meet half the requirements for my own job. The job I have been doing, and by all accounts doing well, for the last three years. The document in my hand is not a description. It is a work of fiction. A piece of corporate fan-fiction written by someone who has never done the job, for people who will never have to do it.

I used to get angry about this. I truly did. I’d see a job description and feel that same kind of low-grade, persistent frustration as when you’re trying to open a pickle jar and the lid simply will not budge. It’s supposed to be simple. You’re supposed to twist it and it opens. The description is supposed to describe the job. But it doesn’t. It’s sealed shut from reality, and no amount of grunting or running it under hot water will change that. It feels like a failure of the system, a stupid, preventable error.

I’ve changed my mind. I was wrong.

It’s not a mistake. It’s the point.

The job description has nothing to do with the job itself. Its purpose is entirely different. It’s a legal shield, a marketing brochure, and an automated filtering tool rolled into one. It’s a wish list sent to the universe, a spell cast by a committee hoping to summon a mythical beast: the perfect candidate who requires no training, has no inconvenient questions, and is willing to accept a salary 26% below market rate. This document isn’t for the person doing the work; it’s for everyone else.

Confession: Part of the Problem

And I have to confess, I’m part of the problem. A few years ago, I was asked to help write the description for a junior role on my team. I fell right into the trap. I wrote something that was, in hindsight, completely unhinged. I listed requirements for software we hadn’t even licensed yet. I included language about “leveraging synergistic paradigms,” a phrase I had read in an article and thought sounded impressive. Why did I do it? I convinced myself it was aspirational. That it would attract people who were ambitious. The truth is, I was just mimicking the fiction I’d been fed. I was adding another chapter to the lie. It’s an easy, lazy thing to do. The real work-defining what someone will *actually* do every day-is much harder. It’s messy.

Reality vs. Abstraction: Iris B.’s True Job

Consider my friend, Iris B. Her title is Municipal Playground Safety Inspector. Her job description is a dry litany of compliance codes and reporting standards. It probably mentions things like “ASTM F1487-21 compliance” and “quarterly risk assessment reporting.” It gives you the impression she walks around with a clipboard and a frown, measuring things with a laser.

That isn’t her job. Her real job happened last week. She was at a park in the suburbs and saw a kid, maybe 6 years old, hesitate at the top of a new, very expensive corkscrew slide. The specs were perfect. The clearance was fine. But the kid was scared. Iris went over and asked him what was wrong. He pointed to a small gap between the plastic tube and the final exit ramp. It was tiny, less than an inch, but to him, it looked like a canyon. She realized that the specific angle of the sun at that time of day made the shadow in the gap look like a deep, dark hole.

The playground, while technically safe, was emotionally terrifying for a 6-year-old. Her real job isn’t just about making sure a bolt is tightened to 46 ft-lbs of torque; it’s about understanding the chaotic, unpredictable, and often irrational experience of a child. She ensures the world makes sense from three feet off the ground. None of that is in the job description.

We are drowning in this kind of abstraction, where the map not only isn’t the territory, but it’s for a different continent entirely. We crave things that are exactly what they promise to be. It’s a surprisingly rare commodity. We want the service we pay for to just work, without a list of hidden requirements or an instruction manual written in a dead language. When you sign up for something as simple as an Abonnement IPTV, the expectation is that you will get TV channels over the internet. The promise is the product. The description is the reality. The profound relief of something just *being* what it says it is, is something we’ve lost in the professional world.

The real damage of the fictional job description is what it does to people on Day One.

A new hire walks in, clutching their offer letter and a head full of bullet points. They spend the first 6 months in a state of quiet panic. They feel like a fraud. They are waiting for the tap on the shoulder, the moment someone realizes they have never, in fact, “spearheaded a quantum-state integration project.” They’re suffering from imposter syndrome, but it’s not their fault. They aren’t an imposter. The job is. They were hired under a false pretense. The company told them a story about a neat, orderly, predictable role, and then dropped them into the messy, chaotic, beautiful reality of the actual work.

236

Hours Per Employee Per Year

Wasted reconciling fiction with reality

It is the first lie a company tells you. And it’s a powerful one. It implicitly teaches you that what is written down, what is official, is not what’s real. It teaches you that the language of the business is not the language of the work. It creates a culture of doublespeak from the very beginning. You learn to nod along in meetings when someone uses a term from a job description you’ve never seen in practice. You learn to translate, to read between the lines, to navigate the chasm between the org chart and the way things actually get done. Imagine the collective energy wasted, the 236 hours per employee per year spent just trying to reconcile the official fiction with the lived reality.

The Choice: Honesty Over Script

Back in the interview room, Alex is waiting patiently for my question. The polished gleam on the table reflects the fluorescent lights above. I look at the fictional document. Then I look at him. I could ask him to tell me about a time he demonstrated proficiency in Haskell. I could grill him on algorithmic threat-modeling. It would be easy. It would follow the script.