Workplace Nightmares·
THE ICON AI LISTING
A desperate applicant encounters a founding engineer posting whose tone clashes with the duties, prompting edits that name Icon AI ad maker and launch a subreddit post about the listing.
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A founding engineer job posting left one applicant staring in disbelief.
"I really have no words," the poster wrote after coming across the description, which they pointed out was "Job description for founding engineer btw." The company, they said, seemed to use "the same requirements for every opening," which only made the listing feel stranger.
Even so, they applied. "I did apply since I was desperate for job but anyway," they admitted.
The posting kept sticking with them long after that. About a month ago, they found another job, but this one listing still bothered them. "I found a job a month back but this one job description kept bugging me and thankfully I found this subreddit 😭," they wrote.
The poster then jumped in with edits to make one thing clear: the post was real. "Edit: This IS NOT an ad for the company nor is it fake," they said, adding that they had "applied to this a few months back and its still an active opening."
In a second edit, they finally named the company: "Icon - AI ad maker." They added, again, "(IM NOT PROMOTING IT!)."
What set them off was not just that the listing existed, but the mismatch between the title and the tone of the requirements. A founding engineer role usually suggests a startup's earliest technical hire, the kind of person meant to help shape the product from the ground up. Instead, the poster found a description that felt so off they had to share it with strangers online, hoping someone else would see what they saw.
The post began with frustration, circled through desperation, and ended with the company name attached. The job was still up. The applicant had already moved on to another role. But the screenshot, the wording, and the fact that it remained an active opening kept the whole thing alive long enough to make it onto the subreddit in the first place.