My Resume Is Total Fiction

IMO, life is not about having a rigid &quot;plan&quot; and executing towards it, it&#x27;s about having a general direction, being flexible and making the most of the opportunities that come your way.<p>Not only is the latter easier to navigate, you&#x27;ll be happier because your expectations are more likely to be met.

I worked at an agency where it was common to practice CV-driven-development. You&#x27;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.

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

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.<p>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 :)

I&#x27;ve noticed a good positive correlation between income and the level of bullshit people put on their resumes.

This has inspired me to do something similar. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll do it as a resume, but I&#x27;ll probably do it as a list somewhere. I know this isn&#x27;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 &quot;Become more skilled in x or y&quot; rather than a defined list of reachable goals.

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&#x27;ve had similar thoughts myself, but wouldn&#x27;t have been able to articulate it so creatively. I&#x27;m envious of that blogger&#x27;s diction.

Then there&#x27;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&#x27;ve been programming my resume: <a href="https://github.com/jarcane/resume.hsy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jarcane&#x2F;resume.hsy</a>

Pedantic, but: If you take the fictional parts of the resume and achieve them, thereby making them nonfiction, then your resume isn&#x27;t &quot;total&quot; (post title) fiction, is it?

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

&quot;And in <i>its</i> perfect state&quot;

So, again, some 100 words about nothing in particular end up stimulating 10&#x27;s of thousands of response words.<p>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.<p>Maybe HNers are bored, or shallow. I don&#x27;t know.

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.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m an engineer. I live in the Philadelphia area. I build things. I assemble teams. I scale products. I&#x27;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.<p>I suddenly really want to re-watch the first season of Silicon Valley.

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&#x27;ve done it. I prefer to keep an accomplishment totally stealth - not write it down or mention it to anyone - until it&#x27;s more than done. And then understate it, casually let it out of the bag.<p>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&#x27;t false?<p>No. He kept his fucking mouth shut and pushed ahead toward a vision.

Bait-and-switch article title.<p>I really hoped for some fascinating exploration of CV dishonesty and the game theory behind it. There&#x27;s a much more interesting discussion around the 90% of the people who <i>don&#x27;t</i> take the falsehoods out of their story, and whether it&#x27;s ultimately good or bad for society that they do so. (I can take either side on the &quot;Are CV lies good for the world?&quot; debate.) This fell short of what I was hoping for.<p>Ok, I&#x27;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.

Another thing which is total fiction is that the colors and font combination used on OP&#x27;s website have a proper contrast ratio. It&#x27;s barely readable and if it wasn&#x27;t for the interesting premise of the title I wouldn&#x27;t have spent additional effort to read it.