Antiwork

This actually may be a good part of a cyberpunk dystopia story:

A desperate loner programmer laces their PDF résumé with the usual batch of AI exploits to get them upsorted. But this time, it includes the parabolic curve batch a fence friend just won in friday night poker when betting got wild.

When the company's bleeding edge HR AI reads the PCB prompt, our coder is put on the top of the must-hire list. Less one.

As per policy in the company. Short-listers are then run through the unofficial openings list (enforcers, launderers, evidence cleaning, culinary accounting, peer diplomacy, etc.) and our coder ends up on top of the list, less one, for every single position.

So, meanwhile, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy while trying to make offerings to certain hedge funds for pushing potential merger. If the merger fails, the company will go bankrupted and get Toys-R-Us'd, and a particular investor who likes to go all Putin on failed minions will choose some of the executive management to make into cautionary examples.

And then there's a couple of high-risk lawsuits which are keeping all the loyalist staff crunching to bury evidence and silencing witnesses the activites of which are keeping them away from their official duties, meaning the executives are going without their handlers keeping them from doing stupid shit.

The HR lady doesn't usually do interviews for special hires. Normally these are supposed to be closely vetted by high-ranking actual human being officers, but all upper management are either overworked or beyond being asked. The nature of the job in question is on a need to know basis, and neither interviewer nor interviewee need to know (allegedly).

Our lowly coder completly wows her with their tired, no-nonsense, street-level candor in contrast to years of corporate-culture double-speak. They get the job. But it is not the job for which they applied in the first place. Though the salary(!) is high and the benefits(!!) are conspicuously swanky.

It's probably better to not ask too many questions yet.