Unqualified employee pretends to do job for 8 months, fears she'll get caught when her boss asks her to lead a meeting: 'I've been surviving entirely on confident nodding.'

She's in too deep; she needs to ride this out as long as she can.

Would you rather be hired for a job for which you're overqualified or underqualified? If you can do your job perfectly by the end of your first day, you might be in for a lot of days of boredom ahead of you. But if you still can't get a grasp of the basic tasks of your job six months in, you might need to get out before you get fired. Ideally, our jobs will challenge us intellectually without stressing us out too much, but we all know that such positions are rare. Most jobs are either boring, easy, and pay poorly, or stressful, time-consuming, and pay well. You have to choose which devil you'll live with five days a week from 9 AM to 5 PM, and you'd better choose wisely.

Sometimes you can get away with not knowing how to do your job for a really long time. Maybe your manager is totally checked out and barely pays attention to any of the work you do, so you can sneak by without doing it the proper way! Your job might have a big learning curve for most new hires, so leadership might give you more leeway than you think you deserve. But eventually, push comes to shove, and you either need to know how to do your job or get a new one.