My current résumé contains this entry, in full:
Prior Experiences; Apr 2005 – Dec 2011
Software Engineer – Contracting/Employment
ENVIRONMENT Omitted for brevity; Available upon request.Three lines for seven years. Every résumé is a compression algorithm, and this is what mine emits for everything that happened before 2012.
I know exactly what got compressed, because the résumé I sent to a Milwaukee web shop in 2010 still exists in my sent mail, and it decompresses the whole thing. Seven work entries. A movie theater in Kasson, Minnesota, where I threaded film and directed one or two employees while still in high school. A consulting LLC that put me on oil rigs installing two-way satellite dishes, FCC certificates and all. A wireless ISP where I modeled radio coverage and tower locations for rural Montana. Six months answering cable-support calls for Charter. One semester of community college. A small core development team at a dot-com in Rochester. And two independent clients: the theater’s website, my first commercial project, and a scrapbooking company I was building a Python-to-JavaScript application for, using Google App Engine.
The older résumé compresses too, just along a different axis. Its cover letter measures me in a ladder of year-counts—“8+ years Linux use,” “6+ years PHP (since PHP3)”—the units I used to describe experience. It names none of the things I would now consider the era’s real accomplishments, because they hadn’t become legible as accomplishments yet. Nobody’s résumé says “learned what a recovery path is” or “spent two years inside a codebase nobody outside the building would ever be shown.”
What compression costs is the connective tissue. The current résumé preserves that I existed before 2012; it cannot explain how any of it happened. The explanation was in the dropped entries: the theater site was the portfolio that got me the dot-com interview; the dot-com is where Python entered; the oil-rig LLC is why I could claim network engineering at all. Each rewrite kept the qualifications and discarded the causality, until the record that explains the career no longer appears in the document that represents it. And absence invites invention—machine-assembled profile pages have filled my missing decade with things that never happened, including a college degree I don’t hold.
The two documents even end differently. The older résumé closes with a references block: a developer from BrokerBin’s four-person team, a small-business owner, and the two sisters who owned the theater—four people who had watched me work, phone numbers included. The current one closes with an environment list and “Available upon request.” Both are true. Only one of them remembers who vouched for me when there was nothing else to go on.
I’m not going to pretend the compression is a mistake. Nobody hiring a staff engineer today needs the Charter call-center entry, and the short entry is the correct interface for its consumer. But a résumé is the only autobiography most working lives ever produce, and mine now begins in the middle. The first draft—the one with the theater in it—survives only because I happened to email it to a stranger, and my sent mail happened to keep it.