My Resume Is Total Fiction (opens in new tab)

"I used to go to the gym and pretend in my head I had already died, and it was 100 years into the future, and I was dreaming of some guy who wrote a database. I didn't know how the story ended yet, I hadn't gotten that far."

-- Damien Katz, http://damienkatz.net/2014/10/tank_man.html

I'm also reminded of the Amazon "write the press release first" approach to product development.

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backward...

I highly doubt that Steve Jobs 'kept his fucking mouth shut' about his vision(s) for iPhone iterations. After all, if he didn't share what his goals were with his close team, then surely he would have had to have built the phone himself in order to not 'list all the things a nonexistent iPhone did' to at least a few other people.

Sorry for the refute, but I couldn't help but call-out your highly inaccurate (to your first point), and also false choice of analogy.

The point of telling people about what you are going to do is to put some pressure on yourself to do it. This is similar to selling something you have not yet created. A secret plan easier to quit because no one will ask you about your venture. It becomes easier to lie to yourself about the progress or lack thereof.

Of course everyones personality is different and this particular technique may not work for you. For many people though, peer pressure is a major driving factor in their lives for better or worse.

Different strokes. The more I stare something in the face, the more likely it becomes reality.

This is like people who go to parties with the overarching goal of meeting their future spouse. Concentrating too hard on that goal, rather than just enjoying themselves, can make them miss great opportunities to meet new friends who could be useful later in their personal or business lives.

The downside of not having a plan is that it's easy to just do what life presents you, instead of thinking about how you can take steps forward in your career.

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.

One of the things that bothers me about resumes that cross my desk is the emphasis on skills over projects. I blame linkedin since it allows HR (generally, not the most innovative or thoughtful people I've dealt with, especially at the banks) to half-ass their job to the Nth degree with filters begging to be reverse engineered by a job seeker.

I think there is value in building towards a goal skillset (I do the author's resume goal setting myself, actually), but I generally never share my resume and if I do, I am completely legit in what I present).

There are certain times of the day when thin content makes a strong showing on HN. Normally that isn't Friday @ 9am, though, so a little surprising to see this. Perhaps it appeals to the "be a better you!" noise that appears following each New Year.

As an unrelated aside, I'm currently suffering under a slow-ban, presumably imposed by dang. A slowban, for those who don't know, is when HN becomes oppressively slow. It is a comically cowardly, ignorant means of suppression, and it helps lead to an HN where a "write your goals" Facebook-style post tops HN.

People can change if they really want to.