21-Year Old Programmer Is Unscrupulous and Proud Of It

14 October 2001, 17:37 GMT

21-year old programmer Frederic Burns proudly admits that his CV (aka resume) is filled with "the most untrue garbage imaginable," but that it is virtually guaranteed to land him a highly paid senior job nice and early in his career.

"Your CV is a really important part of who you are," Frederic explains. "It's your curriculum vitae, your 'voyage through life'. Whatever it is you do, you must create a good impression via your CV."

"Been in jungle," his CV begins; "saw elephants. Shot a tiger."

"Actually," Frederic explained sheepishly, "that was something from a previous life. But it's still my personal experience, so I saw no reason not to include it."

In fact the CV segues into a short (five-page) description of his jungle expeditions in the closing stages of the Nineteenth Century. "I was called Blaggard in that life," burbles the CV, "William H. Blaggard the Third. I explored jungles, discovered lost civilisations, encountered a strange monkey man who continually bounded around as if caught up by a terrible fever. And there was a funny little chimp boy who had befriended a curious dancing, singing bear that ate lots of bananas and pretended to be an ape. I shot it, of course, with my big elephant gun. I also shot a tiger..." (the CV describes the tiger hunt for another two pages) "... and then, I was so excited that I shot several elephants, and then I ran out of ammo. Then I had a cup of tea."

The CV goes on to describe Frederic's "extensive" experience with Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), and the other J2EE APIs. "Most of that experience was gained in a previous life as well," Frederic told us. "It means I have over sixty years of EJB experience. In fact I first worked with EJBs as an Internet consultant during the Second World War. I lost my life during an air raid, when a particularly heavyweight transaction just rolled back suddenly, crushing me against the bunker wall."

So what has Frederic actually achieved in his current, remarkably short lifetime?

"Nothing much," he admitted to us in a surprising disclosure. "I guess I've just arsed around for a few years, got drunk a lot... but I'm sure as hell not going to admit that on my CV!" he laughed, winking at us.

"See, the problem," he explained, "is simply that employers nowadays expect people to exaggerate their outrageous claims. So you have to exaggerate further in order to compensate. In my case of course, I haven't done anything relevant, so the sky's the limit. In fact, most employers actually expect candidates to lie. If you don't put a heap of lies on your CV, they think there's something wrong with you - that you're not ambitious or something. Ergo, I see a CV as an advertisment for where you want to be, not where you currently are. By filling your CV with things that you feel you ought to have done, you are demonstrating an astute grip on current IT market trends. And that makes you a desirable candidate, in my book."

"Yes, " he confirmed, "my CV is a glorious testament to all the wonderful things that I haven't actually done. It describes several successful EJB projects, in which I produced highly scalable, ultra-fast web applications with back-end EJBs taking the brunt of the grunty strain. And that was back when the EJB spec had just been released, and there weren't any servers available. So I had to quickly write my own EJB server. It only took a week! And it did everything - load balancing, transaction support... I even wrote in some support for local interfaces, which has only recently been added into the official spec."

Really..?

"No, not really!" he admonished. "But I bet it'll be convincing enough to get me a highly paid job as an e-commerce consultant in a top firm! Just think, the future economy rests in the hands of lying toe-rags like me..."

Update: Frederic has just secured a new job at an unsuspecting EDS, starts Monday.

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