I have slightly puffed up the names of positions I’ve held, though. For instance, I worked for a petition circulation company last year. My bosses liked my work, and I was one of the top producers, so they asked me to help out on turn-in nights – organizing petition sheets, supplying fellow circulators, training new recruits. I wasn’t actually promoted or anything, but for a while I termed myself a “manager” on my resume. It was sort of true, but not enough that I was comfortable with it, so I changed it to plain old “Petition Circulator” a while back.

This is your geek-concience calling.

Your penance for calling yourself a programmer?

1 Rosary
2 Hail Marys
3 define and demonstrate different programmatic approaches to traversing a binary tree

My biggest problem is how depressed I get when I look at job postings. In the Computer Science field it seems like everybody wants Allan Turing, but I’m just a simple Ray Phelps.

OTOH, I have never yet gotten a job off resume but, rather, more a temp to hire thing. Where people get to know ME and discover how valuable I am to them. I am terrible at selling myself by anything other than action.

I’m not judging people who’ve done it, but I AM questioning why so many people today consider it okay (I’m not saying you think it’s okay, LaShawn. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t do that today). That’s the part that concerns me. I have a feeling it’s more prevalent today, and I seem to have heard of surveys where far more people than I’d have thought considered it okay to lie on a resume.

Big Boss: Well we can do the whole thing in Java.
My Boss: Who will we get to do the programming?
Big Boss: You will.
My Boss: I don’t know Java.
Big Boss: You said on your resume you knew Java.
My Boss: I lied.

That was sven years ago and she is still there. So either her boss is very forgiving or it wasn’t that important.

Most of the inmates I have visited know the generalities but not the details of my life. I have not mentioned my employment situation because it would sponsor abuse. I do not have the power of discernment to tell if an individual is going to turn his life around, but when speaking on a general level the term “cons” owes as much to con men as to convicts.

As to proper “use” of a lie. If the individual doing it has a stake in gain, it is a lie. I was concerned for my wife and children, that is not to say that I did not get something out of it as well.

The spirit of the law is more important than the letter of the law. Accepting that does not change the fact that the law was given to us as a guide for our own good.

My only regrets about these posts are that I am not fully able to express myself as well as I wish I could, and the post I lost while trying to post on Mr Wegener’s blog.

In my experience, managers hiring consulting services don’t have a lot of time and often want to know only the things that answer the question “How well can this person do the job?” I would tailor a resume to include only the things the manager wants to know about and cut everything else down to the minimum. In this case, information should be omitted because it is so much clutter, and can be a distraction. I favor bullet points, with the strongest qualifications first. I think managers should be concerned with your job qualifications now rather than with an unbroken job history. Managers should definitely be very diligent about checking references and resume information for a critical position.

I also found that there is real age discrimination going on out there, but that I love working with very experienced professionals. You don’t have to hold their hand, they’re very dependable, and they know their limitations.

Great topic! There’s lots to say about this.