From my earliest days of work, I was warned about an affliction that might threaten my career.

This affliction was known as the hole in the CV or the gap in the résumé.

Anyone who contracted this dreaded disease, I was told, would likely never get a decent job again.

As a coder in my early twenties, I calculated the consequences of this admonition. If I were to be allowed no gaps in my résumé, then I’d have to spend my entire life working. I’d be coding every day, every year, every decade until I dropped dead.

It was as if I were being warned never to do anything interesting with my life.

So I did what any self-respecting twenty-something would do. I quit. I left my decent job as a coder and didn’t get another one. I wrote a book. I went to Antarctica.

I’ve spent the decades since peppering my CV with as many holes as I possibly can.

Here’s how one technology has entrenched the idea of job after job after job, and how another technology promises to explode that convention.

Mark