My friend admitted he lies on his resume, and it’s working out for him.

I caught up with an old colleague from my first IT job last week. He’s doing contract work in the cloud space now and is pulling in an insane amount of money. I’m also in tech, so I straight up asked him how he’s landing all these cushy, high-paying gigs. His answer kind of blew my mind.

Turns out, he pads his resume. A lot. He’ll add a couple of years of experience with some in-demand skills, then throw in the names of a few impressive sounding startups or a well-known tech giant. To be clear, he’s genuinely competent at what he does. He’s just smart about it and never applies for roles that are way over his head. He targets contracts that value solid, reliable execution over groundbreaking complexity, which means he always delivers what’s asked of him without breaking a sweat.

The guy has the most incredible work-life balance I’ve ever witnessed. I had to ask if he’s ever been called out on his BS. He just laughed and said, “Yeah, a couple of times during the interview process, but never once I’ve actually started the job.”

And get this, when they catch him, he said he doesn’t even care because there are a hundred other companies that will bite. His references? They’re just his buddies who know how to play along. He told me that if a contract ever ends badly or he gets fired, he just scrubs it from his work history as if it never existed. Pretty wild, right?

So now he’s making bank, taking multi-month breaks between jobs to travel, and whenever he wants to get back to it, he just polishes up the resume and sends out a handful of applications.

Honestly, a part of me was pretty envious hearing all that.