The job market can be tough—and no one knows it more than Peter.
For years now, when mobile developers update their apps, they usually include a paragraph or two explaining to users what's in the update, and why it's needed. While the language in these App Store updates is usually generic, some have started to include an ongoing joke about a man named Peter.
"Peter," a fictional engineer, was originally mentioned in an update from Wallapop, a virtual flea market app, in early April.
Two days later, the company notified users that Peter had been "let go" from the company following a major bug.
After Peter was "fired" from Wallapop, Medium said it had decided to "riff off the joke" and "hire him."
"We all thought it would be really funny if we hired Peter," said Nick Fisher, community manager at Medium who is responsible for writing the company's changelogs.
While working at Medium, it seems Peter had some contact with his previous employer when Wallapop mentioned Peter in a new update stating, "Peter has let us know he's starting a frozen banana stand. We support this. #petesbananastand."
Two weeks later, Medium's changelog read "We're happy to report Peter has set up his banana stand in the corner. We think it will do well there."
But, as things seem to go for Peter, he was dismissed from the company after letting "a couple nasty bugs" make their way into Medium's system. "I wanted him to hang around for a while ... but I was waiting for another bug fix to fire him," Fisher told CNBC.
Peter apparently didn't let the news keep him down, though. His most recent employer, QuizUp, a gaming app, announced Peter's hire on June 15, along with the news of Peter being fired, following—shocker—more bugs and stability issues.
"We just felt that we needed to give Peter a chance after all that he had been through in the tech industry," said Thorsteinn Fridriksson, founder and CEO of QuizUp. "We're really bummed that it didn't work out, but we're sure he'll land on his feet."
This isn't the first time a mysterious man named Peter has taken the heat for things gone awry. In the early days of Time magazine, a seemingly imaginary man named Peter Mathews was included in the masthead for the sole purpose of taking the blame for any reader complaints.
"When a Time reader complained, an official of the magazine would dash off an apologetic letter to the reader, say that the whole dreadful business was the fault of an editor named Peter Mathews, who would promptly be fired," a 1947 issue of The Milwaukee Journal reads.
While Peter may show up in June's unemployment report, chances are, we haven't seen the end of him.
—CNBC's Matt Hunter contributed to this report.