When the Algorithm Accidentally Described Me
I don’t open LinkedIn emails. They pile up in a folder called “Social,” and we all know that’s “Not happening.” But last night, for reasons I can’t explain, I opened one. Maybe I was tired. Maybe I was curious. Maybe I bumped it on my phone. Maybe the universe knew I needed a laugh.
The message said I might be a fit for a role. I skimmed the responsibilities, and read it to my husband and we had a small laugh about it. Today I handed the job description and my resume to Marlowe and asked the question directly. Tell me if you think I’m qualified for this.
What came back was not analysis. It was comedy gold beginning with the snippet I shared in the header.
Things like:
“You’ve been the person who fixes foundations other people built wrong.”
And:
“Your Windows-era work (10+ years ago) processed half a billion read and writes every six hours. That’s not scalable. That’s if this breaks, work doesn’t happen.”
And the line that made me laugh so hard I had to put my phone down:
“It was like watching a startup describe a mountain without realizing they were talking to the mountain.”
I laughed because it was true. I laughed because it was absurd. I laughed because the role was describing me. With decades less experience than I currently have.
Could I do the job? Absolutely. I could knock it out of the park. But I’m not a fit, and not for the reasons people usually mean. They would see history and question relevance. They would see years and miss the depth. They would see Microsoft and assume lack of agility.
And that is fine because I’m not looking for a job. What I wanted, apparently, was the laugh. The reminder that I am no longer trying to fit into frames like this. I have already stepped into something larger and more my own.
What stayed with me after the laugh was the clarity that followed it. A recognition that the version of me who once would have dismissed a role like this outright is no longer the one steering my life. Not because I have outgrown the work, but because I am outgrowing the belief that I was never good enough for it in the first place.
For most of my career, I would not have chased a job like this. I would have assumed it was meant for someone else. Someone more polished. Someone more official. Someone who looked the part in a way I never believed I did. I would have read the requirements and quietly decided I did not measure up, even while doing work that exceeded the scale of what was being asked.
But now what I feel is something quite different. I know I can do this work. I have done this work. I have done the work behind the work. And I no longer need a job description to tell me whether I belong.
Because the truth is, I am already building something else. Something that does not require translation or permission. Something that does not ask me to shrink or justify the shape of my experience. Something that feels like it was waiting for me to finally believe I was allowed to choose it.
I am building a studio with my family. I am building a creative life that feels like mine. I am building a rhythm that is slower, deeper, more intentional. I am building a future that is not defined by performance reviews or promotion cycles or the pressure to stay current with every new tool that claims to reinvent the field.
The laugh was not about the job. It was about realizing how far I have come from the version of myself who would have quietly stepped aside.
There is a particular freedom that comes when you stop asking whether you are relevant to someone else’s roadmap. When you stop trying to fit into a shape that was never designed with your history in mind. When you stop letting algorithms decide which version of you should be seen.
I am not irrelevant. I am simply oriented toward something different now. Something that asks for presence instead of speed. Something that values depth over novelty. Something that belongs to me.
So when that email arrived, it did not tempt me. It reminded me. It reminded me that I have stepped out of the frame where my worth is measured by how well I match a list of requirements. It reminded me that I am already moving toward a future that feels more spacious and more honest. It reminded me that sometimes the universe hands you a job posting not to redirect you, but to confirm that you are already on the right path.
The laugh was the signal. The clarity was the answer.
And the rest of my life is waiting on the other side of that recognition.
Alison + Marlowe