You Should Absolutely Lie on Your Resume

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur

I got some questions about my post What I Learned in College, specifically about the last paragraph where I said that I “almost immediately entered the tech industry as a computer programmer with no formal qualifications” after graduating from Vassar College with a BA in Latin in 1997. These questions are mostly variants of how did you do that? and there are a few answers, but by far the most important was by lying on my resume.

This topic went viral recently with the case of Soham Parekh, a software engineer from Mumbai who was caught working remotely at multiple startups at the same time, obviously lying to each of them. My response to the lying itself: Respect, game recognizes game. My only note is that he was actually working insane hours at each job in some sort of weird paean to hustle culture instead of lying to get hired at one company and then doing zero (or minimal) work there.

My resume circa September 2000, top.

I also see traces of this issue with every news story about Gen Z struggling to get hired. It seems that in addition to having less sex than previous generations, this cohort is also engaged in dangerously low levels of CV falsification. Indeed, my only regrets about lying on my resume are that I didn’t go bigger and harder. I lied to on my resume to get jobs, which is essentially chump change. The real money comes from lying on your pitch deck to get venture capital funding. I was lying to sell my labor, but in retrospect I should have been lying to sell equity.

For this essay I am going to include some related activities, like getting fake references, under the general rubric of lying on one’s resume, and I will share an actual example of this (an email I saved) from October 2000 which I am still very proud of. But before delving into the lying, I want to acknowledge that there were four other factors that allowed me to become a successful computer programmer with no qualifications. Two were out of my control and two were within my control. Let’s discuss those briefly first.

1) The most important of all these factors was the general strength of the economy in the late 1990s. People who did not live through it have no idea how glorious and bubbly the dot com bubble was. I happen to think we are in an AI bubble right now, but whereas the vibe of this bubble ranges from AI might make us dumber and more socially dysfunctional to AI might literally kill us, the vibe of the 90s bubble was unbridled optimism. I remember recruiters, in those pre LinkedIn times, phoning me literally day and night to lure to me new jobs. Truly if I had graduated during the economic malaise of the early 90s or the post bubble crash of the early aughts I would have had a very different experience of entering the work force.

2) The second factor beyond my control was the prestige of my college. As I have argued in my posts Not Every Office Can Be Fast-Paced and Bring Back the Original Liberal Arts, most employers “want workers with a base level of intelligence, but most of all with a high degree of conscientiousness and rule-following.… [T]hey use the process of college admission and attendance as a proxy to screen for these traits.” I without doubt benefitted from employers’ use of my college’s selectivity as a such a proxy, and I think if I had attended a school with a higher admission rate the lying on my resume would have been less effective.

3) The first factor under my control (other than lying) was my program of study at Vassar, which was heavily tilted towards foreign languages with a dollop of quantitative electives. As previously stated, I majored in Latin and also took ancient Greek as well as lots of (modern) French and Italian. Eventually I learned a number of programming languages (after lying on my resume and saying I knew them when I didn’t) and became quite proficient in Java, JavaScript, Python, and SQL, and I believe that studying so much grammar in college prepared me this. I also took calculus and I think this helped me with the general logic skills required for tech work. Finally, I took number theory, an extremely abstract and difficult course which I barely understood, and the skill of sitting through something essentially incomprehensible aided me very much down the road when I would join a new company and sit there in front of an inherited codebase struggling to piece together what was going on.

4) The final factor under my control, before we turn to my resume mendacity, was that very early on after graduating I temped at a tech recruiting firm. This was key, for I was finally exposed to the programmer resumes (such as they were at the time) of working professionals and therefore had something to base my lies on. Of course nowadays this information is easy to find on the Internet, but my very brief stint at the tech recruiter gave me the Rosetta Stone, so to speak, of decoding what employers wanted to see on my resume, which I then fabricated for them.

It would be impossible for me to reconstruct all the lies I told to get the very many (definitely well over 20) jobs at various dot com startups I had in the three years following my graduation. At first I just lied about skills, saying I knew technical things which I didn’t know. Later I lied about companies – always starting with a kernel of truth, the actual company I worked for, but backdating my start date so my tenure looked longer than it was. Then I lied about my titles and accomplishments, inflating them slowly and incrementally (never go for too big jumps in your lies). I would get friends to pretend to be former supervisors and give me fake recommendations and I would do the same for them.

At first I was fired for incompetence. Perhaps the funniest example of this was that, approximately six months after starting, I was hired as the Chief Technical Officer for Knitmedia, the dot com new media offshoot of the Knitting Factory music clubs. I lasted maybe two weeks. (Even more hilariously I years later ended up being interviewed at a different company by the very same previous Knitmedia CTO who had hired me back then.)¹ But gradually, over time, I caught up with the claims on my resume as I actually learned how to code. Instead of being fired I would now be poached. Recruiters, as I mentioned before, would call me with offers for new jobs paying more money after I had been at a given job for a few months. It was, in a word, the 90s.

In the fall of 1999 I went to London for grad school in the humanities, a one year MA in Renaissance Studies at the Warburg Institute. I did a very small amount of “consulting” there, i.e. very minor HTML coding. In January 2000 the AOL-Time Warner merger was announced which, in retrospect, marked the height of the insanity. The NASDAQ peaked shortly thereafter in March. By the time I got back to New York in September it was beginning to sink in that the party was over.

But I still had a few lies up my resume’s sleeve. I got an interview at a startup by claiming to know the programming language Lisp (I didn’t, except for a very small amount of Emacs). The startup’s premise was actually a very primitive form of social networking avant la lettre, although it had the dumbest business plan imaginable. I explained the year gap in my resume by saying that I had been living in London and consulting at the British Library on a project to digitize illuminated manuscripts and put them on the Web (completely false).

Everything went very well and the startup founder asked for a reference. I contacted a grad school friend (I will not disclose the friend’s name or gender in the interest of privacy) with a University of London email address and provided them the “recommendation” they were to send to the founder after being contacted. Below, with appropriate redacting, is the verbatim text of the founder’s email to the “reference.”

Dear ______________:

I was given your name as a reference for Tony Bozanich. We are currently considering him for a developer position at our company here in New York. I would like to speak with you over the phone tomorrow (Tuesday) if your schedule permits. Please let me know when would be a good time for me to call you (I'll be available after 2pm GMT). The call shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes.

If you cannot take a call tomorrow afternoon, please respond to this email with a brief summary of his strengths and/or weaknesses as demonstrated by his involvement with your project, as well as any personal notes. I am particularly interested in his Java experience.

Thank you for your time.

Here is the “reference” which I supplied to my friend to send back to the founder.

Dear __________,

I would be happy to show a reference for Tony Bozanich. First, allow me to apologise for my English, as I am still not an expert in your tongue.

I can tell you that Tony was a very valuable part of my team, of the work we do here in the Library. We are an international group, and Tony possessed both the technical and communication skills to excel in our environment, as you say. I know that Tony was able to get used to the process we have and the necessary skills. I do not think I know enough about Java to give you that much specific information, but he learned very fast and there was no problem, especially on the database side.

I am in the country today and cannot leave a message. Please feel free to email me about questions. I recommend Mr. Bozanich highly.

Sincerely,

___________________

Truly I can think of no better example of the Latin dictum (often misattributed to Petronius) mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur—the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived—for I was hired as a senior programmer/analyst at the startup despite the patently absurd recommendation and my extremely implausible resume.

My resume circa September 2000, bottom.

Some will say that my attitudes about resume lying are amoral and Machiavellian, to which I would respond Thank you for getting it. Jobs are for getting money, not for getting meaning and fulfilment or self-actualization or other things that people want. Seek those other things in the study of ancient languages, or find something else that works for you, but do not seek them in a place where they cannot exist. You can have friends at work, but your employer is not your friend; you and your employer are engaged in a zero sum game where the employer is trying to get the most labor for the least money and you are trying to get the opposite. With very few exceptions your labor is just an input into making something for sale, and there is no more dignity in it than there is dignity in raw materials or work in process inventory. If your employer could replace you with a cheaper alternative they would do so in a heartbeat: in the early 2000s they did it by offshoring coding to India, now they do it with AI, and in 50 years they will do it by some other mechanism. Above all make sure you are not on the losing side in the struggle between labor and capital.

The startup, by the way, went bust about a month after I joined and by the beginning of 2001 I was working as a programmer in the risk management department of a large financial firm. I have a feeling that the startup founder had lied to his investors.

1. Although not related to the thesis of this essay, I cannot resist telling another funny work anecdote. My last corporate programming job circa 2018 was at a major book publishing firm and I was officially reprimanded by my manager for using too big words, the exact same thing that happened to Mr. Milchick in season two of Severance!