My Resume Is Total Fiction | Hacker News Reader

My Resume Is Total Fiction

chrisbaglieri.com

228 pointschrisbaglieri90 comments

IMO, life is not about having a rigid "plan" and executing towards it, it's about having a general direction, being flexible and making the most of the opportunities that come your way.

Not only is the latter easier to navigate, you'll be happier because your expectations are more likely to be met.

The other reason the latter is a better plan is because when executing to a rigid plan, people tend to miss or ignore the opportunities that present themselves.

This is like people who go to parties with the overarching goal of meeting their future spouse. Concentrating too hard on that goal, rather than just enjoying themselves, can make them miss great opportunities to meet new friends who could be useful later in their personal or business lives.

If I could find a party full of female scientists - then perhaps I could enjoy it.

If you can't even enjoy yourself on a party with regular people, I doubt a party with female scientists would go very well for you. (as someone who has went to parties with female scientists..)

I live abroad and peers I have access to are working class people. There simply isn't much to talk about, just get pissed drunk/drugged.

I've recently started disconnecting them I found network of smart people to which I can enjoy conversing with.

This is one cause of the current global urbanization trend. Consider relocating to a major city.

You're right, categorising women based on what they do for a living doesn't sound very enjoyable.

Don't know what scientists you know, but most of them love what they are doing instead of doing it for a living.

Yes, but your advice is reactive. The original poster's advice is interesting because it's very proactive. It's an interesting way to 'dream big'.

I think you're agreeing with the OP. He changes his plan once a year - hardly rigid. Sounds a lot like a general, flexible direction to me.

Author here. To be candid, my plan changes all the time. My resume simply offers me a direction to start in.

Exactly what I thought too. The falsehoods added can be general. Serving the purpose of giving direction along with motivation.

He's not espousing having a rigid plan. The way I read it, it's about putting major goals ("launched X") and doing something along those lines.

The downside of not having a plan is that it's easy to just do what life presents you, instead of thinking about how you can take steps forward in your career.

I worked at an agency where it was common to practice CV-driven-development. You'd decide what bullet points you wanted on your CV at the end of a project - be they new languages, frameworks, responsibilities etc - and manipulated the project (often disastrously) to make them true.

I have worked at companies where this happened some one wanted to get promoted to a first level manager) so to tick the required experince boxes they burned 10 man years and £1,000,000 to re impliment an existing perl system in Oracle as orace was teh prfered solution in our company.

I'm guessing this tactic was a means to an exit for individual developers looking for the door?

One of the things that bothers me about resumes that cross my desk is the emphasis on skills over projects. I blame linkedin since it allows HR (generally, not the most innovative or thoughtful people I've dealt with, especially at the banks) to half-ass their job to the Nth degree with filters begging to be reverse engineered by a job seeker.

I think there is value in building towards a goal skillset (I do the author's resume goal setting myself, actually), but I generally never share my resume and if I do, I am completely legit in what I present).

Gah -- now that I know the phrase "CV-driven-development", I can't unsee it!! This happens everywhere :-/

Perhaps you could try the same with your obituary. Less work bound but perhaps a touch morbid.

With the major caveat, of course, that you can't read your obituary when it's 'realised'.

Unless you fake your own death! :)

Wouldn't you basically be realizing it every year, hopefully getting closer and closer to your goals. In fact, on any particular day you would know "if I die today, i know what my obituary would be".

exception: the obituary for the man who created a time travel device.

:) interesting idea.

I'm also reminded of the Amazon "write the press release first" approach to product development.

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backward...

Press Release Driven Development is a thing.

It works! (n=1)

"I used to go to the gym and pretend in my head I had already died, and it was 100 years into the future, and I was dreaming of some guy who wrote a database. I didn't know how the story ended yet, I hadn't gotten that far."

-- Damien Katz, http://damienkatz.net/2014/10/tank_man.html

This is awesome advice. I think among other things, it helps you focus on what you really want out of your career and where you want to go.

I know that for some, this resume idea will work brilliantly, for others, a blog post or just a list in a notebook will suffice :)

Author here. Your first point is my precise thought of what a resume should be, a personal road map.

I've noticed a good positive correlation between income and the level of bullshit people put on their resumes.

But the author specifically states the resume he shares with others is the truth, and not the same as the false resume only he sees.

The BS other people put in the resumes they share with others has nothing to do with the author.

Some people would simply call that Sales and Marketing, which is pretty much what the OP was discussing.

Of course, S&M has a place in everyone's, even engineers, lives (no pun intended).

The idea of tailoring your resume to hit certain high notes that corrospond with the needs of the hiring company is nothing new, and has been promoted on job seeking sites for as long as I can remember.

It's really no different then wearing particular clothes to an interview...what you are doing is signalling an awareness that you know how to play the game.

The fun part is when different players are playing with different rules.

"Oh, I touched Python once, better put it on my resume."

But that bullet point on the resume could indicate any level of skill. Whereas someone more modest might not put that on the resume because he only touched it. Now you're headed from salesmanship towards snake oil. It isn't lying outright, but it smells familiar.

I don't like putting anything on my resume because I try to learn from the best. I know what mastery of the material looks like, and I don't have it. But I can usually outperform most of my peers in anything I've seriously studied.

It is more depressing to me in that I wouldn't want to work for someone who doesn't understand that, yet that's not something they could reasonably be expected to know. So resumes just feel like pointless bureaucratic fictions... and that's exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to remove from the world.

Resumes are pointless bureaucratic fictions, but it's a small case where being good at "the game" [of forming a resume target to what you want a job doing] will seriously help you get what you want, even though the task itself is pretty stupid and contrived. It's been a long road, but I've come a long way in accepting things like this, instead of trying to fight to change every single one. The fighting path is very long and challenging, and there's not enough time in a lifetime to change even 1/10th of what I think is wrong with the world, so in my experience it's really about picking your battles.

Perhaps it's because the people who bs their resumes are also the ones who are willing to negotiate for more? After all, both activities involve trying to sell yourself.

This has inspired me to do something similar. I don't think I'll do it as a resume, but I'll probably do it as a list somewhere. I know this isn't a novel idea or anything, but I never seriously thought about setting serious goals for myself like this. I mean, in the past I have just set vague goals like "Become more skilled in x or y" rather than a defined list of reachable goals.

Author here. Do it, you won't regret it. Honestly, the resume is just the medium I chose. It's not about the medium, it's about having a direction in mind.

I like this idea a lot; I sent it to my fiancee and she liked it too so we will both be implementing it in some variation. Thank you! Btw, diction? On point.

I've had similar thoughts myself, but wouldn't have been able to articulate it so creatively. I'm envious of that blogger's diction.

Thanks Yosh, I really appreciate that. It's refreshing to write whole complete sentences sometimes rather than just a bunch of assembled if statements =)

I thought this was a well-written piece, as well, and threw it into Pocket along with my other "regular review" articles that I use to keep myself motivated. I clicked through to the blog and it looks like that's your first essay--hope you keep writing.

Then there's RDD, resume-driven development, wherein you choose your stack for the new app based on what you want to add to your resume.

I can understand the thinking, to some extent; it was the motivation behind my unusual resume. I want to be a programmer, so I've been programming my resume: https://github.com/jarcane/resume.hsy

Pedantic, but: If you take the fictional parts of the resume and achieve them, thereby making them nonfiction, then your resume isn't "total" (post title) fiction, is it?

More pedantic, but: If he removes the fictional parts to produce a truthful resume when someone asks for it, then it wasn't "total" fiction to begin with - so you're actually describing his resume becoming even less fictional.

It's a neatly crafted bit of rhetoric intended to be didactic not pedantic. Of course someone could just list things they want to accomplish in the coming year, but I rather liked the notion of starting with a fictional résumé and working toward making it true.

Impostor syndrome, meet fake it till you make it culture.

The only thing between the person you want to be and the person you are is a year.

People can change if they really want to.

Some things are out of your reach.

Some things, sure. But you'll never know what those things are until you try and acquire them and fail.

That failure hurts, but you probably made it closer than you originally thought possible.

If you don't try

"And in its perfect state"

I'm a diction nut, leaving that would have driven me to madness. I broke down and changed it, thanks!

So, again, some 100 words about nothing in particular end up stimulating 10's of thousands of response words.

Why? Maybe its like some carte blanc, where each reader sees part of themselves in the words, and they strike some inner chord that demands response. Maybe great ideas can be contained in only a few lines, distilled to some essential truth.

Maybe HNers are bored, or shallow. I don't know.

Or maybe me, the author, just wanted to share a little piece of himself, and a practice he finds helpful, and it resonated with a few others out there. Not everything has to be something more than that.

Sorry! Wasn't criticizing you; of course you are not responsible for the large response and #1 ranking. That's all on the readers.

Maybe HNers are bored, or shallow

There are certain times of the day when thin content makes a strong showing on HN. Normally that isn't Friday @ 9am, though, so a little surprising to see this. Perhaps it appeals to the "be a better you!" noise that appears following each New Year.

As an unrelated aside, I'm currently suffering under a slow-ban, presumably imposed by dang. A slowban, for those who don't know, is when HN becomes oppressively slow. It is a comically cowardly, ignorant means of suppression, and it helps lead to an HN where a "write your goals" Facebook-style post tops HN.

Fake it till u make it - old skool NYC phrase.

This is OT, and no offense, but this post and your homepage make you sound like an exaggerated parody of a techie.

> I'm an engineer. I live in the Philadelphia area. I build things. I assemble teams. I scale products. I'm inspired by minimalism and order. I am a co-founder of my kids. I dig plaid, chucks, and loud music. I want to dent the universe.

I suddenly really want to re-watch the first season of Silicon Valley.

The Silicon Valley show exists because the stereotypes are true. Sure, they're annoying for some - but they're reality for others.

This is true. I watch that show and laugh my ass off because so much of it is true. I hope it never ends.

All we are is a copy of a copy.

All in all, we're just another brick in the wall.

Author here. Thanks so much for your kind and encouraging words. Happy New Year!

The problem is thus: one should, when found to be in alignment with the mainstream, or in other words, part of a monoculture, ask themselves whether they have probed deeply enough into the question of how one should live a life, for true wisdom is rare by nature, and if one follows common wisdom, one is most likely in error.

I do not believe I am in error. I've run a diagnostic and all of my sub-systems are functioning correctly.

I appreciated the blog post, your about-us page, and this comment.

You should consider what he said though, because your description does read like delusions of grandeur.

Everyone in America is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Everyone in the startup world is a temporarily embarrassed Steve Jobs.

Not everyone. Generally those who are not temporarily embarrassed become the millionaires and Steve Jobs.

I would bet this is a successful strategy even with as tongue in cheek as it sounds.

Cheers. Look out for Season 2 in April!

I use my CV the same way as you. I enjoyed the post, but don't appreciate you sharing the technique with the rest of this lot. :-)

How can you possibly say "no offense" and then proceed to make fun of somebody? Simply using that phrase doesn't make it any more ok.

Because I think he's trying to help him. No offense (i.e. just trying to help you by telling you that), you're coming off as strongly part of the bad cliche.

If it weren't for the spelling, i would assume bvanslyke was a British English speaker. In British English, "no offence" means "I am going to offend you now". It's generally felt to be the decent thing to do to warn people, you see.

http://www.bellenglish.com/EnglishBlog/2012-09-04/No-offence...

TDD for resumes. Clever.

So I disagree with this advice, because I think there is an effect that talking about something feels as good as if you've done it. I prefer to keep an accomplishment totally stealth - not write it down or mention it to anyone - until it's more than done. And then understate it, casually let it out of the bag.

This is how Apple did products in their heydey. Did Steve Jobs list all the things the nonexistent iPhone did, and then selectively publish a version that wasn't false?

No. He kept his fucking mouth shut and pushed ahead toward a vision.

Well, I'm sure he gave that list to the people designing the hardware, software, OS, marketing materials, etc...

Actually, he didn't:

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2014/10/05/apple-skankphone-buil...

"Apple had two teams working on the iPhone in complete isolation from one another. One on the real iOS platform with fake hardware and the other on the real hardware with fake software; AKA the ‘skankphone’."

That is the closest you can get to having no such list.

I think you're misunderstanding the difference between listing goals to yourself privately (be it mental or physical), and sharing it with a wider audience.

I highly doubt that Steve Jobs 'kept his fucking mouth shut' about his vision(s) for iPhone iterations. After all, if he didn't share what his goals were with his close team, then surely he would have had to have built the phone himself in order to not 'list all the things a nonexistent iPhone did' to at least a few other people.

Sorry for the refute, but I couldn't help but call-out your highly inaccurate (to your first point), and also false choice of analogy.

That was mainly after Jobs had expectations put on him. Was early Apple Jobs super secretive? From my reading it doesn't seem so because he was out overhanging the market with sales and then trying to meet them.

The point of telling people about what you are going to do is to put some pressure on yourself to do it. This is similar to selling something you have not yet created. A secret plan easier to quit because no one will ask you about your venture. It becomes easier to lie to yourself about the progress or lack thereof.

Of course everyones personality is different and this particular technique may not work for you. For many people though, peer pressure is a major driving factor in their lives for better or worse.

Author here. The only one who ever sees the resume I spoke about in this post is me. I'm the audience.

Different strokes. The more I stare something in the face, the more likely it becomes reality.

Yes, different strokes. I still feel the opposite. I explicitly keep from staring at non-existent accomplishments in the face (even in my private papers). If I want to see it, I have to get it done. That simple.

A better example would be Jobs's philanthropy; not only did he keep his mouth shut but after his death people actively disparaged his memory for not sharing his wealth.

Bait-and-switch article title.

I really hoped for some fascinating exploration of CV dishonesty and the game theory behind it. There's a much more interesting discussion around the 90% of the people who don't take the falsehoods out of their story, and whether it's ultimately good or bad for society that they do so. (I can take either side on the "Are CV lies good for the world?" debate.) This fell short of what I was hoping for.

Ok, I'm going to go back to leading my team of Level 27 ninja-pirates and saving the world with a 468-node Spark cluster now.

Not sure why you got downvoted - his resume is not a lie. Some other aspirational document, that he calls a resume (but which is never used as a resume) is full of stuff he wants to be true.

Ugh yeah I had the same reaction. Clickbait is not what I expect on hacker news.

Another thing which is total fiction is that the colors and font combination used on OP's website have a proper contrast ratio. It's barely readable and if it wasn't for the interesting premise of the title I wouldn't have spent additional effort to read it.

you delicate flower.

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