Normal thought generally fits normal language.
In normal language, the subject of a sentence, as in “my job needs me to do X”, is considered to be a person, place or thing. Given that a job isn’t apparently a person or a place, “thing” is the category remaining in which to hold it.
To think of a job as a “thing” is to set up a very poor relation to what is possible in the “job”. It also calls on you to be slave to the concept or idea of the “job”– concepts and ideas go readily with the thing-like territory. Imagine dealing with people as “things” and note how fixated, narrow, and conceptual one’s relation with them would be. (This does indeed happen — as in dealing with a waitress as a “waitress,” or a CFO and a “CFO.”)
Once the negative alchemy of turning a job into a “thing” happens in normal thought, there is a cascade of grammar and concepts that turn you into “the kind of thing that would do a ‘thing-like’ job.” There are “things to do” to satisfy the job. There are qualities to have to satisfy the job. There are models for how to do the job well, and models for how to fail at the job. There are standards you can have for how you ought to measure up to the job, and you can succeed or fail at those. You can suffer about what is and isn’t getting done in the job. You can even suffer needlessly (not necessarily helping the “job” to get “done”) about aspects of the job no one has asked you to do nor even expects you to do.
Our normal language and our normal culture asks you to “Do Your Job”. And that seems like a common sense intention and a rightful expectation. After all, you do get paid for just that, apparently.
What if this is all superstition? What if the job is neither “there” to be “filled” nor a “thing”? And what if the best relation to have with it is not “get ‘er done”?