Lever's bare array makes the naive jobs[] parser return zero roles forever

The one-liner ships because it is right three times out of four. Greenhouse, Ashby and the Workable widget all wrap their list in a `jobs` key, and Lever hands back a bare array ^[10]. Test `data.jobs ?? []` against whichever vendor your first customer runs and you have a three-in-four chance of never meeting the defect ^[13][1]. Against a Lever board the same expression returns an empty list on every request, permanently, because the response has no `jobs` key to read ^[14].

That empty array has four preimages ^[14]. The company is not on that ATS. The board is real and has no open roles today. The endpoint is returning 502. Or the board is Lever. A 404 is overloaded in the same direction: it reports a wrong vendor guess or a wrong slug guess, not a company that stopped posting ^[16].

The remedy in the post is a discriminated result instead of a list, described as four outcomes ^[17]. The snippet actually emits five distinct state strings, because `not-json` is broken out for a 200 that carries an HTML error page ^[19][2]. Keep the fifth one. `res.ok` is true in that case, so a status check will not catch it. The fetch is wrapped in `AbortSignal.timeout(20000)` ^[18], twenty seconds ^[3], and the catch branch returns `fetch-failed` with the exception message ^[17].

The slug layer is where the sillier failure lives. `notion` on Ashby returns 200 with 134 jobs, the first titled "Software Engineer, Developer Platform" ^[21]. `notion` on the Workable widget also returns 200, with `name` set to Notion, zero jobs, and a description for a luxury lifestyle agency in Shoreditch ^[22]. Stop at the first 200 and you have traded 134 live rows for 0 ^[5]. The author checked the obvious counter-explanation: `zzqqxxnotarealcompany` 404s on both Workable and Greenhouse, so those 200s are real registrations rather than a catch-all ^[25]. A single-letter Workable slug returns 200 with `name: "a"` ^[24], which is about what that namespace is worth as evidence.

The counts are someone else's boards on a single day, and the author notes they move daily, so yours will differ ^[28]. Nothing in the parsing argument rests on them. What transfers is the container shape, since that is a contract rather than a measurement, and the shape is what the copied snippet gets wrong.