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Comment by oldspiceman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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