hack jobn.
/ˈhak ˌdʒɒb/, U.S. /ˈhæk ˌdʒɑb/ 1. A piece of writing by a hack writer, esp. work that is of poor quality or poorly remunerated.
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1837 Lit. Gaz. 27 May 329/1 In these days, when one hack job succeeds another..it almost seems..as if we had read only one huge hack work.
1852 Literary World (N.Y.) 25 Sept. 195/2 It would not have been possible for him to make an ordinary hack job of it [sc. a biography of Franklin Pierce].
1905 Virginia Mag. Hist. & Biogr. 13 57 They copy from the old registers, for which venerable records they do not have the least reverence, covering them with their own scrawls to mark off their hack jobs.
1949 D. Thomas Let. 13 Oct. (1985) 721 I want to be able to return to England with some money so that I won't, at once, have to chase again the hackjobs by which..I live.
1992 Spy (N.Y.) Oct. 29/1 Any screenplay written in less time than it takes for one of Joe Eszterhas's to be sold is a turgid hack job.
2011 A. D. Frankforter Word of God/ Words of Men iv. 112 They treat the Bible as if it were an inferior piece of work, a hack job in need of a good editor.
2. A mundane job requiring little or no skill or experience. Also: a job done by a person with inadequate skill or expertise; a clumsy, botched, or amateurish piece of work.Sometimes coloured by hack v.1
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the world > action or operation > ability > inability > unskilfulness > [noun] > unskilful action or working > clumsy or bungled work
bodge1589
bodgery1592
Paul's work1602
botchery1608
by-work1615
botch1648
hob-job1857
spoil1892
botch-up1915
hack job1918
bodge job1924
bodge-up1959
bodge-up job1994
1918 Estherville (Emmet County, Iowa) Enterprise 20 Feb. 2/4 It is merely a case of ‘letting George do it’ on a hack job which nobody wants to bother with.
1928 Jrnl. Educ. Res. 17 322 Research is not a hack job to be carried on by following a routine set up by some superior authority.
1977 Newsweek (U.S. edition) (Nexis) 14 Mar. 10 They learned that their grime-darkened portrait was nineteenth-century hack job by a provincial Englishman.
1983 N.Y. Times (Nexis) 25 Oct. c1/1 Most scientists do fairly hack jobs in large commercial research establishments.
2009 R. Warden & S. A. Drizin True Stories of False Confessions 455 Ward's blond hair had been cut very short, a hack job that was uneven and obviously unprofessional.
3. = hack n.1 7a.
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1996 Network World (Nexis) 16 Dec. 1 ‘This Active Directory is a hack job,’ said one developer.
2000 S. Bykofsky et al. Compl. Idiot's Guide publishing Mag. Articles iv. 188 Will visitors be impressed if the site is a hack job done by your 12-year-old nephew?
2015 FierceBiotech (Nexis) 13 Feb. Whether that was an unrelated hosting glitch, an internal joke gone awry or, as some suggested on Twitter, a tongue-in-cheek hack job, is up in the air.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, December 2016; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1837