I was quoted this week in a story in the Guardian about the Tate Modern accidentally posting mine and 110 other people’s applications for a software developer job on a public website.

Your guess is as good as mine as to how such a “rigorous organisation” (as I wrote in my cover letter) could do something so incredibly stupid and illegal. Is an employee using a private server for work files and doesn’t realise it’s on the internet, à la Hillary Clinton? Were they hacked and the attacker used an abandoned webserver to publish a sample of the exfiltrated data? Perhaps the Tate will enlighten us after the weekend.

I won’t link to the website, which is still online at the time of this writing, but I couldn’t stop myself, sleepless at two in the morning, from reading many of the leaked applications. Here’s a quick review:

A surprising number of people write in a warm, conversational tone, strewn with half-sentences and parentheticals, while others remain in the earnest register of your correspondent, a downwardly-mobile MA holder. The remainder are all business, responding to the Tate’s questions in bulleted lists and tersely asking the reader to “please review my enclosed CV”, or some mixture of the above.

Under “Education, training & membership”, the writers list a total of forty-one Bachelor’s degrees, twenty-three Master’s degrees, all manner of British high school diplomas, litanies of coding certifications, several apprenticeships, and one pilot’s license. Many are recent graduates earning “£11/hour” or a little more as shop assistants or hotel clerks, others boast of salaries “over £100,000” and “20 years” of industry experience. Almost everyone is on a fixed-term contract.

There are dozens of touching stories about childhood visits to the Tate, dreams of one day being part of the team and reconnecting to long-abandoned artistic ambitions, and hundreds of more-or-less convincing narratives about “working in an agile environment”, “championing the user” and “building engaging web products” in various small businesses.

Hundreds of referees from all walks of life are listed with names, phone numbers, and short missives sketching the applicant’s relation to them (“we used to work at a restaurant together”, “he is my flying instructor”, “he managed me for a year”). Most list one or two referees, I’m the only person to give four. One writer rendered the word Tate in all-uppercase letters throughout their submission, perhaps as a sign of reverence.

All together, the leaked applications (for one job alone) constitute about 150,000 words — a novel’s worth — of what JG Ballard termed “invisible literature”, that sprawling field of unrecognised narrative production encompassing “technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers”¹, from which, he suggested in 1971, emerges the “intact reality of our time”.

My application to the Tate, like most people’s applications to most jobs, was rejected without comment. Reading through the leaked materials, I was looking for some hint as to why I didn’t make it to an interview — maybe there was a slate of PhDs in Updating Museum Shop Websitology ahead of me, or I had make some fatal error, like misspelling my own name. I found neither. Applying for work remains an costly shot in the dark.

The story adds to the growing body of literature on the bizarre humiliation ritual (as Sarah Thankam Mathews fittingly put it in New York that is the contemporary job application. Other recent entries include:

• Annie Lowrey: The Job Market Is Hell, on the escalating arms race between job seekers and companies over who can out-automate the other
• The Economist: How AI is Breaking Cover Letters, on AI-generated cover letters ruining the whole concept, mostly at the expense of more competent applicants.
• Seyed M. Hosseini and Guy Lichtinger: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change, a much-covered study showing a measurable decline in entry-level employment when firms adopt AI tools