Okie-Dokie, let's dive back in.

I got my start as a recruiter during the dot-com boom. Back then, Java programmers were the most in-demand people in the country. To be the early bird that caught the worm, I had to be in the office by 6:30. That allowed me to get to the handful of new Java programmers that had posted their resumes overnight on Monster.com before the other recruiters, especially those 29 other piranhas in my office. At that point, if you could code in Java and fog a mirror, everyone wanted you. You could have a prison stint in your background and not be able to pass a drug test, EggsByMail.com would still have a riveting career path waiting for you. (It's tough to imagine why that bubble burst.)

It's March of 2001. I'm in a midtown Manhattan office on my "bat phone," convincing an unsuspecting recruiter that I'm a 40-year-old Java programming expert, while in fact, I'm an 18-year-old kid who had posted a fake "perfect" resume on Monster.com as bait. You see, I was also a recruiter, and instead of working hard to find companies that were looking to fill a job, I was trying to fleece my fellow recruiters of that intel and then swoop in myself. It worked like a charm. I was in my eighth month on the job. I had observed by then that results were the only thing that mattered. Ethics weren't on the radar. For my ingenuity, the CEO and my team leader took me out to dinner, gave me a raise in my commission payout, and put me in charge of what we would come to call the "Black Ops" department.