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.
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“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.
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“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.
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“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


