A Brutally Honest Version of My Résumé

The following is a less polished version of the resume for Peter Saint-Andre.

High school

• I'm a member of the class of 1984 at Maranacook Community School in Readfield, Maine, but I don't receive a diploma because I refuse to take a required course on "Consumer Skills" (you know, important material like how to sign up for welfare -- and yes, we did call this school either Bananacook or Marijuanacook).
• Therefore I'm rejected by every college to which I apply.
• My first semi-real job, working at the Maine State Law & Legislative Research Library, makes me realize that I never want to be a lawyer.
• Among other activities, I take some computer programming classes at the University of Maine, complete a statistics course at Colby College, participate in a statewide seminar for "gifted" young writers, and get my driver's certificate from Mack's School of Offensive Driving (!).

High school continued

• Needing a high school diploma, I attend the tiny and now-defunct American Renaissance School for a year, graduating #2 in my class but in the bottom 50% (you do the math).
• Through a work-study program I get a part-time job at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory under IBM Fellow Jerry Woodall, where I waste lots of chemicals but create a few useful techniques in molecular beam epitaxy. (Because there is already another Peter in our lab, Jerry nicknames me "Saint Peter", which I use to this day in IRC rooms and various chat programs.)

College

• High school diploma and asymptotically-approaching-perfect SATs in hand (double 790, if I recall correctly), I'm accepted at Columbia University intending to double-major in physics and philosophy.
• Because the physics department won't let me test out of basic classes and I don't want to go back to inclined plane problems, I quickly drop the physics in favor of Ancient Greek, basically majoring in Aristotle (which seems useless at the time but later comes in handy for object-oriented programming!).
• Continue to work at IBM for a while, as well as at an iconoclastic investment bank and an arts journal (both now defunct -- do I sense a pattern?).
• Complete a summer's worth of research on Aristotle's epistemology of value as an NEH Younger Scholar, which despite my enthusiasm for a Ph.D. in philosophy sours me on an academic career (my advisor to me: "it doesn't matter what's true, it matters what you can get published").
• Contract a strange mono-like virus for about 18 months and get a lot of incompletes, although why I was taking 5 graduate courses a semester I don't know.
• Need an extra semester to graduate, but squeak through.

Post-college

• Utterly lost with a useless degree in the short but painful 1990 recession, I head off to Czechoslovakia to teach English as a second language to engineers at the Temelin Nuclear Reactor Project in southern Bohemia.
• Learn Czech, but I'm not sure that my students learn English.
• Return to the States and stay unemployed for 9 months until an older friend calls me down to Atlanta to help him with the management training company he is starting.

Early career

• I'm not really into my new job (still suffering from Ph.D. envy), but I work hard and learn a little about the real world.
• Get in debt and take a second job working customer service in the evenings and on weekends (great experience!).
• After 20 months I get tired of Atlanta and head north to the NYC area.
• Initially I'm unemployed but at least I get a job working in the evenings (again in customer service) so I can job-hunt during the day.
• After six months I land a semi-decent job doing writing, editing, and instructional design for a sales consulting company in midtown Manhattan, but again I'm not really into it.
• The company turns out to have revolving doors and it's a bad scene, so I find an editing job at a consulting company in scenic New Jersey.
• It's a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire, especially when a jealous peer becomes my boss.
• After calling him to account for a highly questionable performance review, I get fired for insubordination and escorted from the building (another great experience!).

Internet time

• Luckily by this time (1996) I've discovered the Internet and have already been looking for employment in this budding field.
• The folks at Logical Design Solutions take a chance on me and I don't disappoint: finally I'm working at something I like and that matches my core skills.
• I work more 80-hour and even 100-hour weeks than I care to admit but knock the socks off the client, going from writing to business analysis to systems analysis/programming.
• Eventually my wife gets transferred to Denver and LDS lets me telecommute, but I get lonely working at home all day with just the cats for interaction (this was in the days before IM), so I start looking for something local.
• The good people at Webb Interactive Services make me an offer I can't refuse, and I reluctantly leave LDS (the CEO cries at my last company meeting and they even fly me back for the company Christmas party despite the fact that I'm no longer an employee).
• For a little less than a year I work with XML, XSL, and Java on Webb's local commerce initiatives, but increasingly I feel the pull of...

Jabber

• OH MY GOD! Is this a dream job, or what? Starting in late 1999, most of my waking hours have been devoted to Jabber / XMPP, an open protocol for streaming XML whose first application is an instant messaging and presence network that is widely acknowledged as "the Linux of instant messaging". For a few years I contributed by night to the Jabber open-source community and worked by day as a systems analyst, product manager, and such at Jabber Inc. But it gets better...
• Since early 2002, Jabber Inc. has paid me to work full-time on standards initiatives (e.g, the XMPP RFCs) and on the business and technical affairs of the XMPP Standards Foundation.
• Although my role in the Jabber community has been compared to that of the Secretary General of the United Nations, and I actually receive mail that lists my title as "Patron Saint and Chief Evangelist" (!), I like to say that my job is "Conductor of the Jabber Community Orchestra" because mostly I wave my hands around and good things happen. Well, I also do a lot of work on the Jabber/XMPP protocols, so maybe I'm conducting from the piano. :-)
• In any case, I have more fun than anyone probably should in their job, which may be why I typically work 12 to 14 hours a day. ("Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a workaholic...") So yes, I am living proof that a philosophy major can make good in the world (even if in fact I'm just a glorified tech writer). It truly is a gift that people pay me so well to help build out the next-generation Internet, and I appreciate that fact every day. That's a sappy way to end to a brutally honest resume, but what can I say?