Getting hired for a job is supposed to come with a basic understanding between you and your employer about what the role actually involves.

The typical process goes something like this: you agree on the scope, the experience level, and the expectations, and then you show up and do the work. But some managers treat that agreement like a rough draft they can rewrite whenever it suits them.

In the following story, a junior employee was brought on with little experience for a straightforward research role, and his boss fully agreed to those terms during the interview.

But just a few months in, the expectations shifted dramatically. He’s now being asked to deliver the kind of deep industry insights that require a decade of experience, with no training, no clear direction, and no acknowledgment that what’s being asked of him doesn’t match what he was hired to do.

Then came the thinly veiled threats.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one.

My boss hired me as a junior, but expects a decade of experience and just threatened my job.

I just need to vent about my manager because the expectations at my job right now are driving me crazy.

I started this new role a few months ago. I was brought on as a junior with hardly any experience, which my boss totally knew and agreed to during the interview process.

From the start, he thought this job would be one thing, but it turned out to be something else entirely.

My day-to-day was supposed to be doing the groundwork — basically scavenging the web for data that’s already out there and curating those insights. Simple enough.

Except, my boss has completely lost the plot.

His boss is now expecting him to behave as if he’d been at the company for years.

Instead of letting me handle the tasks I was actually hired for, they are suddenly expecting me to pull deep, industry-level insights out of thin air.

We are talking about the kind of stuff you’d only know if you had 7 to 13 years of experience in this specific field.

This employee is working his hardest to comply, but there’s only so much he can do.

I am trying my absolute hardest. I spend my days tracking down the four or five people in the company who actually have the historical context for these projects, trying to piece things together.

It’s hard enough doing that when you’re new and getting zero clear direction on what the actual goal is, but nothing I bring back seems to be enough.

Then things went from bad to worse.

Then the other day, my boss just casually dropped this on me: “We don’t know if we need you, we might just tell you that we don’t need you.”

Honestly, it stung. It hurts to put in all this effort just to be told you’re disposable because you aren’t performing like a senior strategist when you literally just started.

The conditions of the job are growing more and more taxing by the way.

I don’t even know what my actual job description means anymore.

I’m walking a tightrope every single day, and I absolutely cannot afford to lose this job right now.

It is just incredibly frustrating dealing with a manager who expects a 10-year veteran on an entry-level salary.

What an awful boss.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman whose HR department advised her to quit if she was that unhappy, so she did and found herself in a role reversal years later.

Redditors chime in with their thoughts.

The boss clearly needs to re-familiarize himself with the job description he agreed to on day one.

With matters like these, it’s best to keep your long-term prospects in mind.

This user sees it all as part of a troubling trend on the rise.

This boss hired a junior employee at a junior salary with junior experience and is now upset that he isn’t performing like a senior. That’s on him entirely.

This employee is only doing the best he can trying to hit a target that just keeps getting moved.

At the end of the day, it’s unlikely this employee will succeed at meeting these expectations because the expectations weren’t designed to be met.

Maybe being fired from a job this toxic would be a blessing in disguise.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who works fast and helps her coworkers, but is met with disapproval from her supervisor because of this practice