The Sourdough Symptom

The cursor is blinking at me like a binary heartbeat, mocking the three slices of sourdough I just ruined. I took one bite-just one-and realized the underside was a fuzzy, grey-green map of a continent I never wanted to visit. The bitterness of that single moldy crumb is currently competing with the absolute absurdity of the PDF on my left monitor. It is a job posting for a Senior DevOps Engineer, and it is a work of pure, unadulterated fiction. It asks for 13 years of experience in a cloud framework that was released exactly 3 years ago. It’s not a typo; it’s a symptom of a deeper, more systemic rot than whatever was living on my bread.

The Wish List Committee

We have reached a point in corporate evolution where the job description is no longer a tool for recruitment. It is a collective fantasy document, a wish list written by a committee of 13 people who have never actually performed the task they are trying to hire for. They want a candidate who can code in 13 different languages, manage a budget of $400,003, and perform deep-tissue massage on the server architecture, all for the salary of someone who still has a student meal plan. It’s an organizational disconnect that has reached the level of a fever dream.

Daniel E. sat there, looking at the HR manager, and asked if they also wanted him to perform open-heart surgery in the lobby during happy hour. The manager didn’t laugh. They just pointed to the requirement for ‘cross-functional agility.’ That is the phrase we use now to describe the slow execution of the human soul. We expect people to be entire departments wrapped in a single skin, and then we wonder why everyone is burning out before they hit 33.

Liar or Rockstar?

This isn’t just about high expectations. High expectations are fine; they drive excellence. This is about a fundamental misunderstanding of what a specific role actually entails. When you ask for 23 years of experience in a 3-year-old technology, you aren’t looking for a ‘rockstar’ or a ‘ninja.’ You are looking for a liar. You are signaling to the world that your internal communication is so fractured that the left hand doesn’t even know the right hand exists, let alone what it’s holding. It shows that the person writing the requirements has never spent 13 minutes talking to the people actually doing the work.

Precision requires boundaries. This is why I find myself increasingly drawn to the way things are handled in the legal world. There is a clarity there that the tech and corporate sectors have completely abandoned. They don’t ask their lead trial lawyer to also fix the copier and write the firm’s SEO metadata between depositions.

[The job description is a map of an island that doesn’t exist, drawn by people who have never seen the sea.]

The Accountability Shield

When a company publishes one of these impossible postings, they are effectively admitting they have no idea what the problem is that they are trying to solve. They just know they have a hole, and they’re hoping to find a human-shaped plug that also happens to be a Swiss Army knife. I’ve seen postings that require a ‘Marketing Coordinator’ to have a Master’s degree, 13 years of experience in Adobe Creative Suite, a background in statistical analysis, and the ability to lift 53 pounds. Why 53 pounds? Is the marketing coordinator also moving the office furniture? Probably.

She sighed and told me that every time she sent a draft to a department head, they added two more ‘must-haves.’ By the time it cleared HR, it was a Frankenstein’s monster of a document. It was a safety net for the managers… It’s a shield against accountability.

The Cost of Dishonesty

But the cost is real. It’s not just the $503 spent on job board postings that yield zero qualified candidates. It’s the talent that never applies because they are too honest to lie about their experience. It’s the high-performers who see the job description and realize immediately that the company is a chaotic mess. A bloated job description is a massive red flag. It tells you that the person you will be reporting to has no idea what your day-to-day life will look like, which means they will have no idea how to support you when things go wrong.

Daniel E. didn’t take that hotel job. He’s back to doing private tastings for people who actually value the fact that he knows everything about 13 different types of Norwegian spring water. He’s happy. He’s specialized. There is a profound dignity in being exactly what you say you are, and nothing more.

The Core Pillars

We need to stop treating the human resource as an infinite container. A person is not a bucket you can just keep pouring skills into until they overflow. We need to get back to the 3 core pillars of a real job: what is the problem, what are the tools, and what is the fair price? Anything beyond that is just a fantasy.

[The most valuable skill in the modern economy isn’t knowing how to do everything; it’s knowing exactly what you shouldn’t be doing at all.]

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find someone who actually knows how to do the job, rather than someone who is just really good at pretending they can do 43 jobs at once.