The Thirteen Year Ruse

Not every story can be told in a timely fashion. Some must complete themselves and only then can they be revealed. This ruse began about thirteen years ago, working in a dying programming language and desperate to hop my career into another. I was managing a software division at the time, and preferred to go back into coding. Too much time, energy, and resources were spent (it seemed), so I was struggling learning a new language whilst still performing adequately at work.

The solution? For the first time ever, I lied on my resume, and lied in interviews, claiming to be knowledgeable in a language I knew little about. I shopped my resume, went to many interviews, picking up key words along the way. I finally landed a job at a small Boulder branch of a seemingly unsuccessful company. Not only was I hired to perform in this new language, I was hired to train the existing staff, who were also converting to the new language. What could go wrong?

How do you train staff in a language that you don’t know? All I could do was turn the tables; for lesson one, we introduced ourselves, our strengths, etc. and what projects we were about to embark upon. I put the onus on my students to tell me what they would like to learn, what they wanted to cover, what they thought was helpful. Every day, we made an agenda for the following day’s training session. Every night I would go home and work upon their lessons, teaching myself, and writing sample code, for what I was going to teach my students the next day.

Some nights I didn’t sleep at all. Some nights I only worked until midnight, but every morning, I would walk into the office with two thoughts in my head: 1. today is the day they find out I’m a fraud and 2. at least I know enough now to get a job elsewhere. This pattern repeated, every week day, for several months. (They never did find out, and sorry, Julie, that’s why our first project was such a mess.)

At three months in, I was sent to other offices to start training others on Design Patterns (again, learned only in the middle of the night). At my six month anniversary, I got promoted to the framework team to help design software for the company’s developers, nation wide. Several teams, jobs and titles later, I retired from this company earlier in the week. Thirteen years older (and hopefully wiser), I still say it was a great ride, a scary jumping off point, but it all worked out in my favor, even though I am still saying that lying isn’t good.

Career success, however, I can readily deem more valuable than telling a company a fib or two.