“High-impact, cross-functional AI oversight requiring strong judgment and a bias toward action” turns out to mean one action, repeated four to six hundred times a day.
Pictured: nothing. Petrella declined to be photographed mid-click, calling it “not my best angle.”
CINCINNATI, OH—Doug Petrella, 29, listed on his company’s org chart as “AI Workflow Integration Specialist,” confirmed this week that his actual, full-time job consists entirely of clicking a single button labeled “Regenerate Response” between four and six hundred times per day, a role he says he was hired for after acing an interview question about “thinking outside the box” that turned out, in hindsight, to mostly be about clicking.
“People ask what I do and I say I work in AI,” Petrella said, demonstrating the motion, a short, practiced downward tap of the right index finger that colleagues describe as “hypnotic” and “the only thing he’s ever been early for.” “Technically that’s true. I sit here, it gives me an answer, the answer is a little unhinged, I hit the button, it tries again. That’s the job. That’s the whole job.”
According to Petrella’s manager, the position was created after the company’s leadership determined that “someone needs to be the one who pushes it,” a phrase that has reportedly appeared in four separate quarterly all-hands decks, once accompanied by a stock photo of a hand pressing a big red button that Petrella says “isn’t even the button I use, mine’s gray, it’s a whole thing.”
Petrella, who says he sings a version of the old summer-camp button factory song to himself to pass the time — “I push this button here, and this one over there” — reports that the job has taken on an almost meditative quality, though he clarified he does not, in fact, know what the button does, only that pushing it is required, expected, and, per his last performance review, “trending in the right direction.”
“They asked if I wanted a promotion to Senior Specialist,” Petrella said. “I asked what changes. They said I’d get a second monitor, so I could regenerate two things at once. I said yes immediately. I didn’t even think about it.”
Coworkers say Petrella has developed something like intuition for the work, describing an ability to sense, a half-second before the response finishes loading, whether it’s going to say something the company will need “walked back,” at which point he is trained to hit the button before anyone else in the room can read it.
“Doug’s not just pushing a button. He’s pushing it with purpose. He’s pushing it like he means it.”
“There’s a real skill to it,” said colleague Renata Ibbotson, who occupies the adjacent desk and performs an unrelated but structurally identical role clicking “Approve” on a separate internal tool. “Doug’s not just pushing a button. He’s pushing it with purpose. He’s pushing it like he means it.”
The company’s official job posting for Petrella’s now-open backup position describes the role as “high-impact, cross-functional AI oversight requiring strong judgment and a bias toward action,” a description Petrella says is accurate, provided “action” is understood to mean “one action,” and “bias” is understood to mean “toward the button.”
At press time, Petrella had regenerated the same paragraph nine times in a row, muttering, on the ninth, “there she goes,” before finally accepting an answer that everyone in the room agreed was still a little weird, but weird in a way they could live with.