Charles Stross - Halting State

Mail-Allegedly-From:recruitment@DO_NOT_REPLY.round-peg-round-hole.com

Subject: Attn Nigeljob offer

Auto-Summary: A job offer, vaguely menacing.

Spam-Weighting: 70% probable, but worth a look.

Hello. Were Round Peg/Round Hole Recruitment. We want to offer you a job on behalf of one of our clients.

You didnt send us a rsum? Of course you didntthats our job! We know all about you, Nigel. You are an underpaid 29-year-old Maths and CS graduate from Edinburgh University. Youve been employed by SprocketSource for one year and four months, and youre three months overdue for a pay review. Your programming skills in Zone/Python 3000 and your expertise in distributed combat systems have generated an impressively high domain-specific reputation on WorldDEV Forums and HackSlashBurn, but does your line manager care? No. Bill does not care. He does not adequately appreciate you. And theres a reason for this.

Here at Round Peg/Round Hole, we dont just passively trawl a boring old database full of CVs for matches against our clients boilerplate job descriptions. We install a Google box on their corporate network, build a Google Directed Semantic Map of their internal dialogue, then use our revolutionary new JobInformant distributed-agent technology to search the web for potential conscripts. And when weve found them we work out how to motivate them. Like this:

Youve been wondering why your boss isnt paying attention to you, and youve probably noticed your colleague, Sonia Grissom, putting in unusually long hours recently. Shes being a little bit distant towards you, too. And theres a hiring freeze.

What you dont knowbecause you dont have access to our JobInformant distributed-agent technologyis that your lying shit of a boss is sleeping with his junior combat programmer, and hes looking for an excuse to fire you and promote her into your shoes. Sonia is a workplace player, and you are not. You have no employment tenure because you have been in the job for less than two years, and nobody hires grunts who get themselves remaindered. Youll be industry road-kill.

You might as well face it: You have no future with your current employer.

But there is an alternative.

You, my friend, are the exact person our client, a prestigious international gaming consultancy, has been looking for. (And if youre not, well pay you 2000 to spend a day with us helping us understand where our data analysis went wrong.)

Your obsession with reward feedback loop modulation and fractional reserve magic bankingwhich Bill does not understandis music to our clients ears. The rest of your skill portfolio is attractive, too. Our JobInformant SatisFactor package predicts a 72% probability that you will synergize effectively with their coevolutionary operations group, rising to 89% if you are allowed to indulge your preference for working from home and using an avatar for customer-facing situations. Thats cool with them, and on that basis they have authorized us to offer you a 25% pay rise, and a generous stock-option package. Not to mention the opportunity to stick it to Bill so hard hell be picking pieces out of his back teeth for years to come.

To claim your new job, or book your 2000 one-day head-hunting research consultancy, reply to this email