Deleting the '90s

My years as a junior editorial doofus (typing Updike, getting scolded by DFW) were crucial. But would pretending they didn't happen on my resume help me get a job?

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

She had a point. That was undeniable. Still, I wasn’t sure I would take her advice. What she was suggesting was pretty drastic. Omit an entire decade of work experience? Simply go ahead and delete it from my history? Just pretend it didn’t happen?

As my job search dragged on I grudgingly contacted a resume consultant to optimize my CV in an attempt to appease the algorithm gods I’d clearly failed to impress in the first few months of online applications. Whatever I was doing wasn’t working, so like a newbie at an AA meeting, I took the first step. I admitted that I was powerless to the applicant management systems, that resume-screening software the cool kids in HR call the “AMS”.

So I asked for help on how to play the game, a concession to conformity that should have made my generational skin crawl. But I set this aside, sent her my resume, and braced myself for the feedback. She was kind but resolute. “The first thing you need to do is lose the ‘90s. Any employer is going to see work experiences from then and move on.”

“Really?” I asked. “All of it?”

“All of it.”

“But that’s like, a lot of it.”

Polite silence.

Looking at my resume on screen, I highlighted a swath of text with my trackpad. Deleting anything from the last century would mean effectively deleting a third of my professional life. Look, I know resumes aren’t real life (see above: “game”) but this seemed harsh. I worked pretty hard in my 20s. Who would I even be without the sum total of my experience in those ten years: the skills I’d picked up, the screw-ups I’d made, the stupid things I’d pursued.

I was no wunderkind, to be sure, and so that first decade of work—at Playboy, then Details, then Rolling Stone—was mostly about dues-paying, mentorship, and being told no. “No, your idea is not a good one.” “No, we’re not letting you write that story.” “No, you can’t expense a rent-a-car to go to Lollapalooza.” But also, yes. “Yes, that lead still needs work.” “Yes, office dinner is curry again.” “Yes, that was Ron Wood in the men’s room.” There was typing — lots of typing — faxes to send (and resend), copiers to unjam, travel to book, and other people’s receipts to tape to blank paper, attach to corresponding expense reports, that were then photo copied and filed in triplicate.

It wasn’t all grunt work. There were brushes with greatness, like the time I typed a John Updike short story into the whirring office PC or the time David Foster Wallace shushed me when I tried to explain a travel expense form I knew I’d ultimately have to fill out for him. (In retrospect, I guess I was kind of petty.) One Saturday morning I awoke to John Waters leaving me a mean voicemail on my home answering machine. My wife, a native Baltimorean with a long, uncomplicated love of John and his sweet, twisted movies, heard the voicemail and hasn’t really looked at me the same way since.

I did not want for humility.

But did the algorithm care about that? Could it possibly appreciate my personal growth, my thickened skin? Did it know that rocket fuel is made of two-thirds resentment? What about all I’d learned? My phone manner, perhaps, or the proactivity I embodied as an assistant, or the myriad office skills I’d amassed? Proficient in faxing, use.net, and Microsoft Word.

No one cared. Even I didn’t care.

Look It’s not that I wanted credit for the editorial grunt work I’d done, but to me, it mattered because I’d still be useless without those years of dues-paying, and to the people that collected the dues. Everything they gave me — their patience, their lessons, the time wasted in making me rewrite a 100 word item for the 17th time instead of just rewriting it themselves — that was all gone. Invisible, like a bay leaf fished from a stew after simmering for six hours. A secret MVP whose rich contributions faded over time.

And so I hovered there with a decade of professional experience highlighted in that ubiquitous computer blue and thought about John Updike’s 16 onion skin pages and the two (two!) minor corrections he’d made in White Out™. I thought about the first email I ever sent, stumbling through my first Google search, and that time I got to go onstage with Beck at the inaugural Coachella. So very ‘90s. And no one cared.

So I hit delete, fudged a few other dates, and effectively sacrificed a decade of my work in the click of a button. I immediately felt lighter, stronger, and ten years younger, but it still didn’t help me in my job search. About a year after I dropped the decade, I got a job; they didn’t even ask for a resume.