Well, blatantly lying in the very first meeting / discussions is a huge red flag... If they were so knowledgeable / likable, why the ruse? Why all the extra effort to create a fake past?
I partially agree, but at the same time there is a certain level of cargo culting going on in tech hiring, and if you didn't work at the right places or get the right degree from the right school, the deck is stacked against you even if you are fully capable of doing the job.
I imagine these actions are the logical conclusion of someone who can pass an interview but doesn't have the credentials to get their foot in the door interview.
The tech industry has a similar problem in over relying on the school you've graduated from to filter out candidates.
If you're going to outright lie to my face & get caught, you'd better have a proof that you had discovered a brain tumor after having told the lie, pictures of the tumor being removed, and a doctor's note explaining "healthy now - no more liar liar pants on fire".
it sounds like they were trying to get a sales job. maybe the doctor's note should read "healthy now - much better at lying, won't be caught next time"?
It is all a game in which everyone pretends to be honest, but walks a fine line of acceptable lies. I'm only reacting to the "feel good" line that everyone is honest. This is not the way it works and we should not be duped to believe that.
Believing that honest > dishonesty is not the same as being duped into believing that there are no dishonest people... This article is proof enough of that, and nobody is making that claim.
I've been told that management is serving the best interests of the company, and therefore anything they do is justified. However, as a mere employee, it is wrong to apply the same logic to my own best interests.
> I've been told that management is serving the best interests of the company, and therefore anything they do is justified
Maybe. I can say I want to work for a company where management feels acting in the workers' best interests is in line with the company's bests interests.
It's good (profitable) for the company for management to lie to their employees. It's not good (profitable) for the company for employees to lie to managers.
I don't know a potential employer. Why would I respect them to start? I have expectations, they have expectations and we try to meet in the middle. That's society.
Do you think management at this company respects their employees? Or maybe they refer to them as "resources", treat them as disposable, fungible, commodities, and deserve no more respect in turn?
Not saying that is the case, but the question deserves asking. Respect is a two way street.
Interesting. In my experience the vast majority of companies consider their employees disposable commodities.
See: micromanagement, use of the term "resource" to refer to people, layoffs as soon as there is a bad quarter and the stock price takes a little dip, shoddy "open plan" working conditions, and all the other things companies tend to do. If you have found a better situation, hang onto it with both hands and don't let go!
Impersonating people has crossed the line into fraud. The odds that this is the first and last time a person commits fraud for the job are fairly bad. You don't want that kind of drama.
You'll never be able to trust a candidate who lies.
Blatantly lying to a potential employer will never work out well in the long run. Just don't do it.
Programmers are lucky in that they can take code they've written, and say "see, here's my proof that I can do the job".Other types of jobs (like sales), however, are reputation based, and you damn well better make sure the opinion of the person who is vouching for your candidate is legitimate.
"You'll never be able to trust a candidate who lies."
This also goes the other way. I have had companies lie to me about salary structure or working conditions and it definitely hurt my loyalty when I found out that I had been lied to.
>> companies lie to me about salary structure or working conditions
That is the rule rather than the exception unfortunately.
What recruiters need to watch out for is the candidate (like the one described) that can't control their lies as they can do lasting long-term damage. Everyone else is just tuning their risk-reward calculation.
You're supposed to lie in socially acceptable ways. Preferably ones where both parties know the other is lying.
Your boss lies to you that he can't give you a raise, you lie to the hiring manager that you won't take the job without a 10% bump in pay, your VP lies that the merger won't affect headcount, etc.
As soon as an employer starts lying or doing anything remotely wacky with a paycheck, you gotta bounce asap. Happened to me several times, and I find lying companies always keep lying, and honest companies rarely start. That only gets worse, never better, so either learn to live with it or get the hell out of Dodge.
> Programmers are lucky in that they can take code they've written, and say "see, here's my proof that I can do the job"
Most of the code I write ss closed source and owned by my employer. I never get to show off the cool things I've done. As for doing side projects to show potential employers, I have very little 'personal' time on any given day between work and family life. I no longer code for fun. Now I do chores, read, and maybe sleep a little.
Maybe the author should evaluate _why_ they got catfished.
Recruiting processes are so convoluted and hard to break through, that someone who apparently otherwise would have been a great candidate, had to lie to get an interview. Was a good candidate really only one that had worked at the managers previous employer?
How many great candidates are companies missing out on because of arbitrary filters?
Yes. This particular candidate should definitely not be hired, but there are probably some other great candidates who can "discuss the pros and cons of MEDDIC" or whatever but aren't getting an interview.
This doesn't hold up. Unless a candidate is single-mindedly targeting the author's company -- like, they get rejected and come back with a fake resume -- then they decided to fake a resume before talking to the author. The author can't fix the societal experience the candidate has been having, and you have no sign that they filtered unfairly.
I am sympathetic to candidates who feel they have skills but lack credentials, but it is no excuse for falsifying info. Make the strongest case you can about your true history, and you'll eventually connect with a company that values the actual you instead of a fake that will eventually break down.
> Unless a candidate is single-mindedly targeting the author's company -- like, they get rejected and come back with a fake resume -- then they decided to fake a resume before talking to the author
You think it was just a coincidence that the fake job/reference the catfish had listed was one of the hiring manager's past employers?
> Make the strongest case you can about your true history, and you'll eventually connect with a company that values the actual you instead of a fake that will eventually break down.
This is definitely true and the right advice for candidates who are considering lying to get through the recruiter filter.
I don't know about you, but I couldn't finish the article. From the beginning, something irked me and it didn't feel like the author is completely innocent here. One thing that irked me a little is seeing the candidate worked at her previous company made her instantly like him. Once I got to the unnecessary admission the manager uses what even they consider as "unkosher" tactics to learn about the background of potential hires, I immediately closed the tab. I finished it later, but this is the same attitude we see from many managers: they set up poor systems, and get upset when those systems fail, like in this article, and there is no introspection on their part.
There is nothing wrong with considering a shared previous employer a "plus"; the hiring manager knows the employer so if a candidate was good enough for them, there's some reason to think they're good enough for you. If the work environments are similar it could also mean getting them up to speed more quickly.
There's nothing wrong with asking the opinions of people other than those a candidate directs you to. With both the references and the others, you need to understand what experience they're speaking from and what their motivations might be for telling you what they do. Anything that seems like gossip (not the speaker's direct experience) should be treated with suspicion, either ignored or backed up by corroboration from others who can speak independently; discussing it with the candidate themselves may be important. I'm more concerned about hearing only good things from official references or not.
Asking people who weren't listed as references can cause all kinds of trouble.
In this case the candidate said they left on good terms, but given the author's willingness to go beyond what is "considered kosher" says to me that they likely do this all the time.
Even if you're not asking people at a candidate's current employer, if you start poking around asking all of your contacts about someone and it gets back to their current boss, there can be serious consequences for that candidate.
The author even said that one of their contacts said he would discretely ask around about the candidate. Are all of the people the contact talked to going to keep discretely asking their coworkers as well?
In America it is incredibly easy to fire someone--stop being so paranoid.
Checking references is one of the last things we do and insist that one be their a current manager so being "outed" by someone else isn't an issue. If I talk to a non-reference who I think is in a position to know about a candidate's performance, I would make it clear that discretion is called for; that's no guarantee but again, reference checks are the end game, they're either "the one" or maybe one of two if it's a really hard choice.
>Checking references is one of the last things we do and insist that one be their a current manager so being "outed" by someone else isn't an issue.
What kind of positions are you hiring for where people are OK with this? The vast majority of managers aren't OK with employees who are actively looking for other work, despite what they may say.
Managers don't have to be OK with it, they just can't retaliate. I'm a manager and I'm totally okay with it, they're employees, not slaves. I've seen no indication from my fellow managers that anyone had a big problem with people looking.
I work in higher ed. There are plenty of people with other workplace problems, mental health problems, but maybe university staff are generally more humane (our benefits are compared to the American average).
>but maybe university staff are generally more humane
Yeah I would say that's probably true.
In private industry this wouldn't work at all. Because most managers will retaliate. Mostly they'll just do things like giving you short term grunt work because they don't want you on anything long term. The worst managers will just flat out fire you.
That's inviting imposters. Most regular people applying for a job wouldn't provide their current boss as a reference, but the people who would provide fake references? No problem! You can talk to my current boss, or even my boss in 5 years time, whatever you want!
Having a friend pretend to be your boss for a reference would be risky. I could look up the contact information you provide to see if it matches the manager's name, I could call a general number at the business to be connected to them. Is the friend supposed to answer the phone pretending to be someone else for an unknown period of time? There are many ways in which they could screw up their performance. This is real life, not TV.
If a candidate attempted that, I would definitely look into what options there are for consequences beyond not getting the job.
> I could look up the contact information you provide to see if it matches the manager's name, I could call a general number at the business to be connected to them.
I've never done this when checking references, and I've never known anyone who does it regularly. It seems that there is a disconnect here between your sector and private industry. Your hiring practices seem a bit off to people coming from private industry, so you're seeing people here trying to come up with ways around it.
>If a candidate attempted that, I would definitely look into what options there are for consequences beyond not getting the job.
If you mean legally, no one is going to prosecute this even if their technically could be criminal penalties.
You could sue the person to recover damages, but you don't really have any damages beyond a bit of wasted time. The person they are impersonating could sue the person for defamation, but they'd have a hard time proving damage as well.
You could also try calling up their current employer, but then you're opening yourself up to defamation claims that would have a very clear damage component. Truth is a defense in defamation cases, but you're going to need to prove it and it's not going to be pleasant.
I don't automatically mistrust reference contact information provided, I'm just explaining some of the risks. The risk wouldn't end after the reference checks, the truth could come out at any time and could result in dismissal.
> Your hiring practices seem a bit off to people coming from private industry
I don't care what handful of people think, especially when they seem to be just thinking adversarially and not speaking from experience. None of us are in a position to speak about what practices are prevalent in any sector. But you can now say you've encountered someone who claims to have been a hiring manager that, on at least one occasion, didn't just go by the contact information provided for a reference check.
> If you mean legally
I don't mean anything beyond that I'd have a strong emotional reaction to such a large deception and would wish for there to be consequences so they would regret it and never do it again. Courts didn't cross my mind but in then little that I have thought about it, my guess has been that there wouldn't be anything to do.
>None of us are in a position to speak about what practices are prevalent in any sector.
I don't think that's true. I've been around long enough to know that insisting on getting a reference from someone's current manager is not a common practice for developer jobs in private industry.
Like I said, it may be common in your sector, but it most definitely is not in mine.
> If I talk to a non-reference who I think is in a position to know about a candidate's performance, I would make it clear that discretion is called for
This is America so anyone can sue for anyone for anything but what exactly do you think the grounds would be for a suit? I won't call without your consent, I have no intent to cause you harm, if the reference calls go well you'll even likely get a job offer.
The way you wrote it, it seemed you were going to just call the employee's current manager.
I would NEVER give you consent for that. I don't know what kind of screwed-up industry that would ever be the norm in. Doing this is grounds for a lawsuit because it will most likely result in termination of the employee from his current job.
>if the reference calls go well you'll even likely get a job offer.
That's a big "if". The reference call almost guarantees the person will lose his current job.
As for the grounds for the suit, getting someone fired from their job is pretty good grounds for a lawsuit. There's expectations of privacy that go with job-hunting, and willfully getting someone fired from their job will not sit well with a jury.
> The way you wrote it, it seemed you were going to just call the employee's current manager.
I wrote, "Checking references is one of the last things we do and insist that one be their a [sic] current manager". I thought that made it clear we ask the candidate for references and that one be their current manager.
> The reference call almost guarantees the person will lose his current job.
Not everyone is like you, I wouldn't fire someone for applying for a job. If you wouldn't fire someone for it either, why do you assume almost every manager is not like you or me and would fire them?
> There's expectations of privacy that go with job-hunting
But by giving me consent to call your manager, that expectation is gone.
Take it with a grain of salt but this post [0] addresses "outing" a candidate.
Q: can a prospective employer tip off my boss that I’m job-searching?
A: It’s legal, but it’s really, really crappy.
"In America it is incredibly easy to fire someone--stop being so paranoid."
^ uh, that is very often not the case. Well I guess it is if you are willing to live with any legal consequences that are the fallout of firing someone.
I have a close relative that did a lot of hiring and a decent amount of firing (for legitimate reasons -- they were the type to give people a lot of chances, and genuinely wanted to help people better their situation). Their caution in the firing process was driven by years of experience (both theirs and other manager's experience) where some fired employees that were clearly in the wrong would try to pursue legal action against the employer (even though they had no case whatsoever). Attorney's fees aren't cheap, even if you are in the right.
So it often is not true that "In America it is incredibly easy to fire someone".
Neither of those things is relevant to the point I was making. The legal costs often incurred by firing someone (and they are very real) makes it more difficult to fire them. Also, the time spent by employers dealing with legal issues is very expensive also.
The fact that it isn't unique to the firing process doesn't change the fact that it often makes it more difficult to fire someone (again, even if the case goes nowhere the employer often has to deal with it anyway - costing both time and money).
>Neither of those things is relevant to the point I was making. The legal costs often incurred by firing someone (and they are very real) makes it more difficult to fire them.
Here's why that's relevant. Because you're trying to reduce the amount of frivolous lawsuits from firing employees, you decide to be more hiring averse. You interview more people and turn many people down than you otherwise would have.
Each additional person you interview but turn down, exposes you to the possibility of a frivolous lawsuit. If you turn down 50 extra people, you've now opened yourself up to 50 extra frivolous lawsuits.
Hell each additional person who you accept a resume from could result in a frivolous lawsuit.
>The fact that it isn't unique to the firing process doesn't change the fact that it often makes it more difficult to fire someone (again, even if the case goes nowhere the employer often has to deal with it anyway - costing both time and money).
You keep using the term often. Wrongful termination lawsuits aren't common. Lawyers know they are very hard to win without a clear evidence of wrongdoing by the employer, and lawyers generally don't want to file frivolous lawsuits that they know will be almost immediately dismissed.
Lawyers who are willing to file lawsuits that they know they can't win definitely don't do so on contingency, and most people who've just been fired don't have thousands of dollars lying around to pay a lawyer to file a frivolous lawsuit.
Don't fire someone on FMLA, don't fire someone in retaliation for whistleblowing, don't fire someone because they're in a protected class etc... and the chances of being sued are very small.
Firing someone in the US is incredibly easy compared to most of the rest of the developed world. Stop being so risk averse. If you don't do anything stupid, The chance of a lawsuit is very small, the chance of a lawsuit that makes it past an initial hearing is smaller, and the chance of losing is smaller still. The amount of extra time you spend on interviews, the additional risk exposure from interviewing additional candidates, and the lost opportunity from additional false negatives is going to far outweigh any potential risk.
If you are speaking on experience, yours is much different than the person I was speaking of.
I've heard of plenty of cases of legal action taken because someone was fired. I've never heard of a single case of someone taking legal action because they were not hired. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I just have never heard of a single case.
And personally (and I'm sure the same is true for the relative I was speaking of), I would be never be afraid of frivolous lawsuits from someone who did not get hired (again, because I've never heard of anyone ever filing one). So in my view the point is still irrelevant. However knowing about multiple cases of people bringing legal action due to being fired, I'd still argue that it isn't as easy as people think it is.
And no, I'm not referring to the employer doing any of those stupid things you listed, though some of them were cases where the employer was accused of doing something illegal in firing, but it was unfounded.
I'm talking about relatively small companies for which the hassle of having to deal with these things is expensive - in time lost and hassle dealing with it, if nothing else.
> One thing that irked me a little is seeing the candidate worked at her previous company made her instantly like him.
I think that's a really hard bias to get over, even if people don't readily admit it like the author did. Presumably you have feelings about previous places you worked at, and thoughts about the general culture at them ("everyone was great!" or "that place was a dump!").
If you have strong feelings about a place, it's pretty hard not to let those feelings influence decisions like this. It's a bit like trying to be unbiased about hiring a friend: Even if you never admit it, how could you possibly be totally unbiased?
Of course, in an ideal world the ethical thing to do is to remove yourself from the hiring process because of a conflict of interest. That, also of course, can be impossible in some places (no one to take your place, rigid processes that insist you interview or decline the candidate, etc.).
I don't know that I've ever worked at a place that would bias Mr towards a candidate one way or another unless I worked with them. Either it was a small enough place that I knew everybody and could rate them based off of personal experience, or it was a big place and I don't know if this guy was on the team that wrote Project A which held the whole team back, or the guy on project B which had us getting new clients every week because it was made so well.
Just going, "oh he wored at the same company as me so I should like him" seems like a frat/sorority mentality
> who feel they have skills but lack credentials, but it is no excuse for falsifying info.
Why is it no excuse? Because we work in a system where the majority of employees and employers are trying to do the right thing.
But that's becoming less and less true - I've interviewed with plenty of companies who have no problem with wasting days of a potential employees time with large take home tests and I've got no qualms about outsourcing those tests.
It's not just unethical, it's impractical, and the same reason applies to your take-home tests: if the first thing your employer asks you to do is something you want to outsource, what makes you think the tenth thing they ask you to do will be better?
It's fair to be annoyed when hiring managers shift costs of filtering over to candidates. If it really bothers you, might be a sign to avoid that company culture entirely.
Ok so there is a work environment you respect and want to be part of, but there is an interview process in the way that you feel has nothing to do with the work environment and wastes your time, so deceiving them is self defense. Is outsourcing the take home test the only version of that which is ok, or is resume pumping etc ok too?
(This is meant to be pointed, because I disagree, but not rhetorical - I'm genuinely interested in understanding the happy path end to end for this strategy.)
If they don't realize that they could just outsource the ten things, he's adding value, managing the overhead, and should get paid for doing that. Believe me, people do get paid to do that and it's considered a good career. People even get paid to sit on reddit for 6 hours of a day for $100k+.
Let's not pretend candidates have equal recourse if a company lies to them about the culture or the job.
His work history is materially important to his evaluation as a candidate. He wasn't great in spite of his lies, he was great because of them.
Answering a few questions in an interview is just a gut check. The real yardstick is how well a candidate worked for other companies in the past.
Anyone who's tried to get their foot in the door of an industry with an entry level position can attest to this. Even the smartest, most charismatic candidates give employers pause when they're untested.
Yes, work history is almost always materially important, however, if you're using it as a gatekeeper, you're going to have a hard time hiring; especially if it's work history at a specific company.
I would have a hard time believing this candidate was the only one who wasn't entry level. The fact that the catfish progressed so far with that specific fake reference had to be materially important, especially when complaining about difficulty hiring prior to this candidate.
I wholeheartedly agree. The behavior itself should NOT be condoned but it is arguably understandable. Given the increasing pickiness of employers, candidate screening based on keyword and credential filtering, focus on who you know over what you know, and opaque/arbitrary hiring processes, I’m surprised we don’t see more of this. It’s no longer enough to be a good candidate. One needs to check every checkbox, AND be a star showman/orator under pressure in order to get past the multitude of gates blocking one from gainful employment.
In any other profession I would agree with the complete nonsense going on with hiring, but at least in IT (and at least in the bay area), there is such a demand for engineers that I don't see this going on too much except at some of the big shops (Google, Facebook etc) which are frontended with incompetent recruiters that only look at keywords.
Outside of Silicon Valley, there are many ridiculous hiring practices. On the east coast I have applied to multiple companies where I knew enough of the employees to get dinner with the team after. When we talked about hiring policies and practices all but one of those dinners ended up with a fight between the coworkers that fell into two teams of whether they should fail candidates over not wearing a suit because it showed they weren't professional or whether they should fail a candidate for wearing a suit because they valued looks over ability.
Hell every single job I've worked at had multiple people whose requirements to hire someone were so difficult that they, themselves wouldn't have been hired
A lot of the software worlds application process out of a few tech hubs is just shotgunning applications so that you get your resume in front of enough hiring managers who are having a good day that you get an interview.
I think this is a product of the relative immaturity of our industry, and the problems exist inside SV companies as well as outside.
We tend to cargo cult interview practices from whomever the big player of the week is (IBM, then MS, now Google).
Then we justify these awful hiring practices by convincing ourselves that programming is so hard that of course we need to put candidates through 6 rounds of interviews and treat people with 20 years of experience like new grads.
Agreed on the immaturity of our industry being a cause for problems. The industrial revolution took nearly 100 years to permeate through society and create standard practices for many industries. Computer technology and science has only been around for a little over half of that, and the fact that the majority of it is abstractions that our brains didnt evolve for as opposed to plain physics which we do have instincts for, appears to be making it harder for us to come to a consensus as to the right way to solve these problems
>someone who apparently otherwise would have been a great candidate
Dishonesty is an intolerable trait. This person clearly wasn't a great candidate. Lying at work is just about the only thing I'll always fire somebody for.
You've walked into work and told your boss that he was a fucking moron when you saw something that angered you immediately? Lieing about feelings is a basic human skill. If you never lied you would be a constant stream of unsociable behaviour that would get you shunned
Minor lies are such a part of human society that it's a sign of some disorder if a child is actually incapable of lieing
A lie is saying something that's not true. It's not suppressing the a compulsion to act like a total jackass, no matter how much you really want to. If my boss asked me for an opinion on something I thought was a bad idea, I'd express my thoughts (with empathy). Honesty is not immediately blurting out every thought that passes through your mind, and it's not dishonest to withhold information that people aren't entitled to. You're (perhaps intentionally) confusing honesty with openness. Sometimes it takes courage to be honest, but in my opinion, there's more dangers in dishonesty.
I've never thought my boss was a "fucking moron". While there have been things that have made me frustrated or irritated, I believe I have enough maturity, and so does he, that we can talk like adults and either come to a compromise or better understand their actions/decisions and them understand mine.
I don't know what kind of world you live in where not blurting out the first insulting comment is considering lying...
Everyone is lying at work to some degree. That's what office politics is all about, even though it is not straight lying.
How many times did my managers not "lie" to me by telling me that it is impossible for the company to give a raise or anything as a policy right now, while my colleague gets one one week later (sharing salary information is beautiful!)
This is really a reductio ad absurdum. But if you think your boss is dishonest with you, then go find a new boss. Dishonesty instantly destroys trust, and unless it’s about something entirely trivial, it’s almost impossible to restore it.
A trustless workplace cannot be functional. You can point to examples of workplaces that are dysfunctional if you like, but it’s something I refuse to contribute to, or even tolerate. I don’t feel an ounce of remorse for any person I’ve fired for dishonesty, and it’s a practice I’ll continue with.
Perhaps other employers are more tolerant of it than I am, but all people hate being lied to. Some people do use lies to get ahead, but it comes at the expense of integrity, and youre equally capable of getting ahead with honesty and integrity (qualities that most people like, unsurprisingly).
I think what you are really saying is that you will fire people for lies bigger than a specific "threshold", which I understand and agree with.
What I'm saying is that in the social work environment everyone lies to some level and it is actually widely accepted so. I googled exactly for 5 seconds and found this article to give you a couple examples:
That’s not really what I’m saying at all. Every lie you tell jeopardises the trust you have amongst others. You might not get caught, and if you do, you may not damage the trust irreparably depending on the magnitude of the lie.
I’m also saying that a workplace cannot be functional without trust, and that a workplace that tolerates dishonesty will invariably erode it. So unless you want to exist in such a workplace, you should not tolerate dishonesty either.
Finally I’m saying that dishonesty is not a prerequisite for success, and that you can be successful with integrity and honesty, and that people value those traits.
I’m not saying there’s some magical threshold, which below, lies become justified. Dishonesty is not a justifiable personality trait, and trying to defend it demonstrates a lack of integrity.
You’re also confusing dishonesty with a lack of 100% openness. If somebody asks your for personal information, or information they’re not entitled to, there is no moral requirement to disclose it to them. This is the reductio ad absurdum I was talking about.
Some people seem to think that people will lie about small things, but not big things. I kind of think that if you are willing to compromise your integrity for something small, you are definitely going to lie on the big things when the stakes are higher.
I'm generally inclined to agree with that sentiment. But I do have a much stronger reaction to a lie when it directly undermines trust I have placed in somebody. If a colleague or employee tells me a lie about their personal life, I'm not going to feel as strongly about it as if they were to lie to me about something related to work. I don't trust my colleagues to tell me detailed and accurate information about their personal life, but I do trust them to do their work with honesty and integrity. Although any lie is still going to undermine trust in general to some extent.
Plenty of people lie, often unnecessarily, about tiny things like making excuses for being late but would not lie to cover up anything that has serious ethical implications.
The first person people lie to is themselves. For a person that doesn't have a personal commitment to integrity, when they are placed in a position where they are incentivized to lie, they will first convince themselves that this lie is either harmless (we are going to lose the account anyway, what is the point of getting everyone mad at me) or the lie is for a good cause. Once that is done, usually unconsciously, then they can tell the lie.
I used to own a business, and I hired people that I knew, nice people. I learned that I should never hire anyone who was not trustworthy, to myself or others, it's just not worth it. One of my friends attended part of the hiring process by telling his current employer that he was sick. This raised red flags in my mind, but I thought, surely he wouldn't do that to me, his friend? Later he did sloppy work and hid it from me with lies, the company almost fell apart. One of many similar stories.
If you have a habit of convenient lies, when the pressure is on and the fear is in your gut, you're going to lie. Don't lie to yourself about it :)
I didn't make that claim. What I am implying though, is that in order to be a person of integrity I do believe it takes some forethought. In the heat of the moment, when you are very incentivized to lie, everything is going to be pushing you to take the easy way out and you will. If, however, you have thought about it, and made a decision before these moments even occur, you have a chance. Even then I don't think you will always be successful.
Certainly people can change and improve themselves. I don't believe "once an x always an x" for anything I can think of.
"Here we provide empirical evidence for a gradual escalation of self-serving dishonesty and reveal a neural mechanism supporting it. Behaviorally, we show that the extent to which participants engage in self-serving dishonesty increases with repetition. Using functional MRI, we show that signal reduction in the amygdala is sensitive to the history of dishonest behavior, consistent with adaptation. Critically, the extent of reduced amygdala sensitivity to dishonesty on a present decision relative to the previous one predicts the magnitude of escalation of self-serving dishonesty on the next decision. The findings uncover a biological mechanism that supports a 'slippery slope': what begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions."
So exactly how do you think your friend should have handled it? Tell his employer he was checking out a potential new job? How do you think that would have gone? You think someone of "integrity" needs to ruin their current employment every time they even think about finding a new job?
This is another problem with people who lie, it actually takes practice to be both truthful and tactful, and they don't even know how to do it. It's crazy to me that I have to say this, but as has already been stated in this thread, being truthful doesn't mean you have to constantly spew everything you are thinking, stream of consciousness style. You just don't mislead people.
What he should have done was a) coordinate a time with me when he was off work anyway or b) ask for a day off. He doesn't need to explain why, he could have said it was a personal day, it's not his bosses business. I don't expect someone to work two jobs simultaneously, we'd have easily worked it out.
I no longer run my own business. When I am looking for new employment, I do my current job, and do my job search when I can fit it in. If I need to take time off I take it. That didn't even occur to you?
>being truthful doesn't mean you have to constantly spew everything you are thinking, stream of consciousness style. You just don't mislead people.
We're not talking about spewing all your private thoughts to people, we're talking about responding to questions. You take a day off from work to go on an interview, and your boss asks you if you're interviewing. What's your response? People like you apparently spill the truth, and get fired. People like me find some way of lying about it ("I wasn't feeling well", "my kid was sick", etc.) so we don't get terminated before we're actually ready to make a move.
>What he should have done was a) coordinate a time with me when he was off work anyway or b) ask for a day off. He doesn't need to explain why
Wrong. Maybe you wouldn't ask why, but another manager might. You cannot guarantee that all managers are like you. Unless you can guarantee that no boss anywhere on the planet will ask invasive questions in this scenario (following your own advice about asking for a day off, which is exactly what I've done when I went on interviews), then you have no right to expect anyone to be honest. People lie because other people have bad behavior, and those people have greater power. Lying is the proper response to protect yourself.
>If I need to take time off I take it. That didn't even occur to you?
That's exactly what I do too. What makes you think I don't? The problem is if your boss pries, and asks why. I'm not going to tell the truth here, and not I'm sorry if that offends your morality. Luckily, I've had good bosses in recent years who didn't ask, so I didn't have to resort to this, but I can certainly see how someone might have a crappy boss who is nosy and asks improper and invasive questions like this. For those people, lying is the proper response. The boss is obviously bad, which means they obviously need to find a better job, but they're also working on that, and it's unreasonable to demand that they quit their job (or risk being fired) while doing a job search. My most recent job search took about 3 months (though I didn't get really serious until the last ~1.5); it can take some time to find just the right opportunity that you want to jump ship for.
You ever politely laugh at something you really didn't find all that funny?
Human social interactions are built on small deceptions. Some amount of dishonesty is required if you want to avoid being an awkward social pariah. If you are incapable of any social dishonesty whatsoever, you will quickly be labeled an inappropriate, self righteous asshole.
Of course there is a limit to those social norms. Dishonesty that exceeds those limits moves from being polite to what most of us consider lying.
Surely you've had this conversation numerous times throughout your life with people who hold this opinion. You clearly disagree with it, but it's common enough that you shouldn't be surprised by it.
Philosophers have debated this question for millennia--it's nothing new.
"Some amount of dishonesty is required if you want to avoid being an awkward social pariah."
Actually that's not true. It is possible to be completely sincere, yet tactful. And you can do it in a way that doesn't come off as self-righteous. I will grant you that it is definitely more rare than it should be, but that doesn't make the opposite a requirement.
>Actually that's not true. It is possible to be completely sincere, yet tactful
I completely and utterly disagree with this. There are too many social interactions centered around a shared expectation of dishonesty.
If your partner's grandmother asks you how the food was, if you answer with anything less than "great", regardless of how tactfully you do so, there will be negative social consequences.
Even in the rare case that the grandmother wants your honest opinion, the rest of the family have expectations about how you are supposed to respond.
Avoiding answering a question directly does not make you dishonest.
If my wife's grandmother had asked me how the food was (assuming the food was awful), I might say "it was very much appreciated" -- and I could say that with 100% honesty, because she would have put a lot of effort into it, and even if she failed, I appreciate that she tried.
Or let's say she didn't try very hard (which would have been unlikely for either of my wife's grandmothers), I could answer with "thank you for making it", or something else like that, and my response could be 100% sincere.
I think the fundamental argument being had in this portion of this thread is that if you don't say everything you think about something then you are being dishonest. I and many others in the thread totally disagree with that assesment.
Your statements can be 100% truthful, and yet not reveal all of your thoughts about a subject or situation. Having a filter doesn't make you dishonest. Some of your thoughts are unkind, some can be even downright evil at times. The fact that you don't reveal these things is often a sign of self control. Words have power, and they affect others around you. There's a reason everyone can't hear every thought you have.
Again, the fact that I don't reveal everything I think does not make me dishonest. If that's your definition of "honesty", then I'm glad I don't live in a world where everyone is "honest" -- it would be a miserable experience.
>Your statements can be 100% truthful, and yet not reveal all of your thoughts about a subject or situation. Having a filter doesn't make you dishonest. Some of your thoughts are unkind, some can be even downright evil at times. The fact that you don't reveal these things is often a sign of self control. Words have power, and they affect others around you. There's a reason everyone can't hear every thought you have.
Absolutely 100% true.
>I could answer with "thank you for making it"
You are carefully crafting a response to the question to make everyone believe that you liked the food without directly stating that. I believe this is completely morally equivalent to leading everyone to believe you liked the food by directly stating it.
I believe that neither one of these things is immoral in any way in the particular case.
Let's say she doesn't accept your dancing around the question? Are you going to keep crafting answers that are technically correct in attempt to make everyone think you liked the food?
I don't think it's wrong if you do so, but I do think that the effect is completely the same as if you'd just said it was great.
> You are carefully crafting a response to the question to make everyone believe that you liked the food without directly stating that.
NO -- see that's the problem. You're making a huge assumption that is incorrect.
"thank you for making it" does not mean "I liked it". And no, it won't make everyone believe that I liked the food (especially since that would not have been my intention in the first place). People aren't stupid. Most folks I know would realize in that situation that I wasn't directly answering the question. "thank you for making it" would not have been dishonest, and it would not mean "I liked the food".
> "Let's say she doesn't accept your dancing around the question? Are you going to keep crafting answers that are technically correct in attempt to make everyone think you liked the food?"
Firstly, you are wrong in your assessment that I would be attempting to make everyone think I liked the food -- in that situation that would not be my intention at all.
Secondly, if I was pressed I might try to move on with the conversation in a different way (without answering) -- which, again would not be dishonest. Not wanting to answer a question is not the same thing as dishonesty. I am not required to tell everyone what I think about everything in order to be honest.
If she kept pressing the question, I might try to answer the question nicely, like "It wasn't my favorite", or "I didn't care for it". Both of those answers would be honest. Being kind is not dishonesty, either. Even if it was one of the worst meals I'd ever eaten, both of those statements would be truthful.
"the effect is completely the same as if you'd just said it was great." -- No, I totally disagree with that. "It was great" would be a lie, "thank you for making it" expresses genuine gratitide for the effort made toward the meal.
You make it sound as though it is impossible to be tactful and truthful/honest at the same time. I disagree.
In my opinion, answering with "thank you for making it" should be equivalent in everyone else's brains to "well, that wasn't very good".
Social consequences will ensue regardless of you stating it or not. In this situation, as in many others, a lack of positive reaction is considered a negative reaction.
It all boils down to ego and believing others don't have a reason to look down at you just because you didn't directly state that the food was bad, while in reality you actually maneuvered your way out of the question to willingly avoid this, which is even more selfish.
Maybe something is being lost in the lack of tone, but I don't in any way believe that anwsering "thank you for making it" could be construed as being selfish.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with ego, it's about being kind to others.
It's not selfish at all, however anyone who isn't a complete idiot will realize that it's a dodge to answering the question of whether you liked the food. You risk an uncomfortable exchange and negative social consequences with a move like this. It's much easier to just lie and tell granny that her crappy food was good and move on to another topic. And really, saying "it was good" isn't a complete lie: it could have been worse, much worse (assuming the food didn't give you food poisoning or kill you outright), and "good" is a relative term.
Tone has nothing to do with the fact that you were asked a question and you responded with a non-answer. And anyone can notice that, and the intention there-in.
There is simply no way anyone could perceive this as not dodging the question in order to not state what you truly think. This is why I consider it a worse behavior (and with a certainly worse outcome) than just simply lying and saying something along the lines of "it was good, thanks".
In the end, you could either
a) Lie directly ("it was great")
b) Lie by omission ("thank you for making it")
c) Be ruthlessly truthful ("it was pretty bad")
d) Be truthful, but tactful ("it was alright / I've had better, but it's very much appreciated")
In my opinion, b is definitely a worse social behavior than a. Yes, you blatantly lie in case a, but that is a lie with a justifiable goal: making someone else feel better.
Case b is still lying to some degree, and here you are half-lying in your own selfish interest: you want to think high of yourself because you didn't say an outright lie, while still trying not to hurt someone else's feelings. In other words, it's the response someone with needs for self-justification would choose. The worst/best thing is that this behavior is easily perceived, and its motives inferred: worst for the respondent; best for others, who can see her/him for what she/he is.
There's a difference between avoiding answering a question to prevent hurting someone's feelings, and doing so just to put yourself in a positive light (for selfish reasons). The scenario I was envisioning was the former.
Yeah I understand that some people try to spin everything their way, and I know it's annoying. My point was that just because someone doesn't answer a question or doesn't tell you everything they think in a situation, that doesn't mean that they are being dishonest.
In this scenario you were asked one question, but answered another when saying "thank you for making it", because you didn't want to deal with the social fallout of actually telling the truth to the original question.
I don't see how that's not mental gymnastics to say it's not lieing, which seems like a big divide in this thread
Talking to people is not computer code. In this admittedly contrived situation, they are looking for you to say it's good. You give an answer _to a different question_. Either people realize and you've violated the social expectation or they don't realize and you've misdirected them. Avoiding the question in a way that's misleading people has the same result as a lie even if not technically the same thing
If you refused to answer the question in this statement that's not lieing. If you said "no, it wasn't good" that wouldn't be lieing.
The entire camp of people in this thread with your viewpoint are acting like a stereotypical genie where as long as everything you say is technically accurate you have done nothing wrong even when you are will full disregarding the extra layers of meaning that are part of human to human conversation
Also, saying "thank you for making it" isn't answering a question at all, so it isn't "answering a different question".
"The entire camp of people in this thread" with my viewpoint simply disagree with you. You attribute dishonesty to things we would say, when we know that saying those things would be honest.
So you can keep reiterating the same viewpoint over and over again, and I'll keep disagreeing with it every time (regardless of whether I spend the time to reply again).
You didn't say that talking to people was like computer code, you are describing talking to people like it's computer code so it is relevant.
>Also, saying "thank you for making it" isn't answering a question at all, so it isn't "answering a different question".
Saying that you're not lieing because you are haven't said something that is false out of context, but is still misleading _on purpose_ is the most pedantic thing I have heard all year.
And just don't reply if you are going to be done with a discussion, telling people you might not bother replying to them is condescending and uncivil for this board
> You didn't say that talking to people was like computer code, you are describing talking to people like it's computer code so it is relevant.
That's your opinion, which I disagree with. So from my view it is still irrelevant. I'm willing to agree to disagree on that point.
> And just don't reply if you are going to be done with a discussion, telling people you might not bother replying to them is condescending and uncivil for this board
There was nothing uncivil, nor condescending about what I said. I just said I would continue to disagree even if I didn't continue the conversation.
I think we've pretty much beaten this disagreement to death, and it's time for me to move on.
>That's your opinion, which I disagree with. So from my view it is still irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant just because you disagree with it. That's not what irrelevant means. It would be irrelevant if the truth or falsehood of the statement had no impact on the rest of the argument.
>I think we've pretty much beaten this disagreement to death, and it's time for me to move on.
Then just move on...stop trying to get the last word in. (I'm not the person you were replying).
Dishonesty is about misleading somebody, regardless of what you say. You can say 100% truthful things and still mislead people, which is still dishonest. A common method of dishonesty is by omitting important things. We are saying that we feel that your response is sidestepping the question asked of you, which is dishonest by omission, because this omission misleads. Communication is about more than the words you say.
While it is true that you can mislead by omission, every ommission of information is not an attempt to be dishonest.
Sometimes you just don't want people to know one way or the other. That is the scenario I described.
Many in this thread say that not answering is dishonesty, and ascribe my not answering the question to intending to lead my wife's grandmother to believe that I liked her food.
As I believe I pointed out earlier, my intention would not be to lead her to believe that I thought it was either good or bad -- I was not going to reveal the answer at all.
Leaving someone in the dark with no intention of pushing them to incorrect assumptions is not dishonesty.
Also, people can make incorrect assumptions about what is meant by what is said, even when the speaker has no intention of them making those assumptions.
It is the intention of the speaker that makes omission of information honest or dishonest.
My point is that some people will always see avoiding answering questions negatively, no matter what way you feel it should be seen. You can’t control how other people interpret your acitons or intentions, they may not match up with what you want, and in my personal experience, people tend to see avoiding answering a question (either by sidestepping it or by counter-questioning) negatively, if they notice it.
Is it more of a lie to make a statement that is literally true but the meaning is incorrectly interpreted, or more of a lie to make a statement that is literally untrue but the meaning is correctly interpreted?
Phrased another way, in software, does one insist on clinging to a protocol's specification if 90% of the implementations misinterpret it, or does one violate the specification in order to ensure that 90% of the implementations interpret it the correct way?
While this debate is occasionally relevant, we know that adapting software to the implementation is the only way to be effective. This is true with people too.
There is a lot of emphasis on tone, but that itself is one of these "social lies" we're discussing. The reality is that people don't care so much about tone as they care about hearing what they want to hear. An overwhelmingly positive tone to deliver a negative message will merely make someone hate you more.
The only way to "tactfully" deliver bad news is to deliver it so ambiguously that it isn't really clear what's happening (and maybe this isn't bad, as it gives the recipient time to mull over the possibilities and gradually adapt to the negative information, rather than getting hit like a ton of bricks).
Anything else will give a negative reaction, and your careful literalist wording that is technically "not a lie" will be interpreted as pomposity, arrogance, and additional deception, despite the extra intellectual effort you dumped into crafting a literally sanitary response.
This is hard to deal with, because it's the exact opposite of the intention for people who are naturally linguistic thinkers, like you and me. We put in the mental effort to be legally and technically correct and it just gets misinterpreted, often silently because "normal" people don't want to or necessarily know how to rebut the statement verbally -- they're content that your "hostility" was conveyed by making any statement that wasn't overwhelmingly positive.
This dichotomy is why lawyers are traditionally reviled. Their profession is linguistic trickery, minutia, and pedantry.
You can approach communication at the surface level of the verbatim information exchange, or you can approach it at the emotional level of ensuring that it conveys the intended, actual sentiment to the people receiving the information. Much of the time, unfortunately, we can't have both.
>Actually that's not true. It is possible to be completely sincere, yet tactful
Concur. I was asked for a reference on a graduating anesthesiology resident who was terrible in terms of his attitude, yet competent enough to practice safely; my reference letter, in its entirety:
Is this satire? This isn't tactful at all. It comes across as a completely passive aggressive.
Communication is more than just the literal meaning of the words you write. Most people reading this are going to interpret is a "Do not hire this guy under any circumstances, he is terrible"
I think complete honesty--"Terrible attitude, but competent"--would have actually been more tactful than what you wrote.
This seems like pedantic wordplay to me. Laughing at something I didn't really find funny is not even in the same league as lying about having worked somewhere where you didn't, and providing a false recommendation in order to get a job.
> Some amount of dishonesty is required if you want to avoid being an awkward social pariah.
Not at all. When people ask "did you like the food?" they want to receive honest feedback, including a perfectly acceptable "actually not that much", at least where I live.
You can teach people that you will refuse to manipulate them and lie to them - and that this is a way to respect their dignity.
It's also unpolite to ask direct, potentially embarrassing questions that put people on the spot. There is nothing wrong in asking people not to do that.
People can find your (polite) honesty refreshing and warm.
That is completely cultural. Many culture have different expectations.
>People can find your (polite) honesty refreshing and warm.
In many cultures, including large parts of the US, politeness is often valued more than honesty--polite lies in such cases are a required a social convention. In any culture there will be consequences to ignoring social convention. Perhaps you are willing to accept those consequences. Some people have the social capital to flaunt convention, and some people choose to live with the stigma, but there is a stigma.
For example, if you were to answer "actually not that much" at my grandmother's house, you'd at a very minimum get a sideways glance from most people at the table.
I find that people who work really hard to convince people that "everyone lies" are usually the biggest liars. So my advice: Stop lying, and stop trying to normalize lying.
To address the examples in the link given:
1. "Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?". There are honest ways of answering this question, or at least not-dishonest answers, that don't entail volunteering information that won't help you.
2. "Are you hungover?". Don't get shitfaced on a work night. If they're even asking you the question, you've already lost. Jesus Christ.
3. "What do you think of Bob?". Constructive criticism is how people improve, and many companies have formal peer review processes. If you can't answer that question without coming across as an asshole, it's not because you're being honest, it's because you don't know how to be honest without being an asshole.
4. "How are you?". This is just a synonym for "hello", except instead of saying "hello" back, you say "fine". That's not lying; that's just normal social etiquette. If you really want to be literal about it, you can still be tactful about it.
5. "Why are you leaving your current job?". Usually there are lots of very good reasons to leave your current job that 95% of employers will have no problem with. The fact that there are also other reasons that you choose not to volunteer isn't lying.
6. "Was this a bad idea?". Mind point #3: providing constructive criticism without being an asshole is an important skill. If they're not even willing to accept constructive criticism, then just don't offer your opinion (and find a new place to work). I can almost guarantee you, however, that most of the time, the people who run into this problem aren't the ones who are actually being asked their opinion--they're the ones volunteering it when it's unsolicited and unwanted.
7. "What do you think of me as a boss?". That's just "constructive criticism without being an asshole" again, with an extra dose of, "I suspect no one actually asked you that, and you just volunteered that information and got in trouble for being a tactless buffoon".
8. "What is your greatest weakness?". This is a shitty interview question, and you should respond with a joke about your favorite flavor of ice cream, and if they don't laugh, you shouldn't work there. I think this (and if you actually work places that ask you trap questions that you're not allowed to answer honestly, even if you're not an asshole) is a red flag of a toxic work environment. And yeah, if you're in a work environment where you have to tell lies to get by, then you should leave because that work environment is turning you into a cynical liar who writes cynical listicles trying to drag everyone else into the mud.
9. "Were you at a job interview earlier today?". I don't really have concrete advice for this, because I'm a software engineer and I would have to take a full day off for a job interview. But try changing your clothes or something.
10. "Is Bob cheating on his expenses?". If the truth is that you don't know, then saying "I don't know" isn't lying. If you do know, or at least if you know something, then share what you know. If your office politics have reached the "snitches get stitches" stage where genuine misconduct happens all the time and people can't even report it without it damage their careers--well, then you should find a new job, and you'll have a really good answer for why you're leaving your current job. Figuring out a tactful way of phrasing that is left as an exercise to the reader.
The listicle as a whole tells a very sad story: a story of someone who is trapped in a toxic and politicized work environment where outright misconduct goes on completely unchecke...
You're completely ignoring misleading people through telling factually correct statements. If you ignore the intent of what you want people to believe, you're going to wind up being less honest than people who focus on that but don't need to have every tiny detail be exactly true.
I don't think I'm ignoring it. Most of the scenarios in the listicle where "misleading people through telling factually correct statements" is a tempting options (e.g. reporting misconduct or providing constructive criticism) are the ones where I recommend not doing that.
>That's not lying; that's just normal social etiquette.
That's the argument. Some amount of dishonesty is required to follow normal social etiquette. Saying I'm fine is expected even if you're not actually fine. We have cultural norms for what kind of dishonesty is acceptable. When you exceed those norms, you're lying.
Politely laughing at an unfunny joke, and telling someone that their food is "interesting", fall well within the realm of socially acceptable polite dishonesty. But skipping work to see a ballgame by inventing a fake funeral is considered lying by many (most?) people.
Like most things in life there is a gray area along that spectrum.
I also second what my sibling comment says about lying by omission. I think morally, both are equal.
Expressions like the American greeting "How are you?" are examples of phatic expressions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression), meaning that they are functional as opposed to communicative. Although they take the form of communicative statements, in this case an interrogative, they are really not. Understanding this distinction was very helpful for me, letting me answer "fine" with no ethical concern when asked this sort of question in quotidian encounters such as checking out of a grocery store. I don't think there is any dishonesty in that. Again, the speaker is not really asking the question, but performing a social ritual, and they neither expect nor wish a reply to its literal form.
It's quite different if someone asks a real question such as the example you give about the quality of their food. If I don't want to be honest with whatever level of tact, I may avoid directly answering. I won't choose to lie to them. I don't agree with you if your view is that my unwillingness to declare my feelings about their food (omission) is equivalent to telling a lie about my feelings about their food.
Polite dishonesty is no less a social ritual than polite laughter or mild praise for food you didn't really like. Most people don't expect you to be honest. To be considered polite, you must occasionally be dishonest because that is what is socially acceptable.
You can chose not to be polite, but you will acquire a reputation. Refusing to play the expected social game will have negative consequences.
You clearly have no problem playing the "I'm fine" game. I'm not sure why you have a problem with the "answer the inconsequential question the way people expect it to be answered" game.
> If I don't want to be honest with whatever level of tact, I may avoid directly answering. I won't choose to lie to them.
If you avoid answering, the person asking will assume you hated it. You might as well just say so.
>I don't agree with you if your view is that my unwillingness to declare my feelings about their food (omission) is equivalent to telling a lie about my feelings about their food.
A moral code that makes harmful omissions perfectly fine, but benign untruths immoral is, to me at least, very bizarre.
If it really bothers you to "lie" and say, "fine", just reflect the question back. "Hi, how are you?". You'll see how it wasn't intended as a real question.
The Sopranos version is, Q: "How you doin'?" ... A: "How YOU doin'?"
If you read the listicle I was responding to, the "how are you?" "fine" interaction is the only clear-cut example of that. Even then, there's a distinction between non-literal communication and dishonesty.
Even then, if a casual acquaintance asks me how I'm doing and I'm not in the middle of some sort of crisis that I would reasonably expect them to care about, the honest answer is to say that I am fine because my casual mood swings are not what they are asking me about. If it's a close friend or a counselor or someone like that, I should expand more. That's just normal context.
There's a weird fundamentalist notion of "honesty" that implies that anything short of continuously broadcasting all of your thoughts to everyone around you is "dishonest". Perhaps that's just innocent literalism, but I think a lot of that is, itself, a dishonest attempt to establish false equivalencies between submitting a completely fictitious resume on the one hand, and restraining yourself from barging into your boss's office to tell him he's a complete idiot every time you feel cheesed off (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079014).
>There's a weird fundamentalist notion of "honesty" that implies that anything short of continuously broadcasting all of your thoughts to everyone around you is "dishonest". Perhaps that's just innocent literalism, but I think a lot of that is, itself, a dishonest attempt to establish false equivalencies between submitting a completely fictitious resume on the one hand, and restraining yourself from barging into your boss's office to tell him he's a complete idiot every time you feel cheesed off"
Here is what I wrote that you were responding to.
>Politely laughing at an unfunny joke, and telling someone that their food is "interesting", fall well within the realm of socially acceptable polite dishonesty. But skipping work to see a ballgame by inventing a fake funeral is considered lying by many (most?) people.
>Like most things in life there is a gray area along that spectrum.
How does your response follow from my comment? There is no false equivalence on my part--there's no attempt at equivalence at all. I would place a completely fictitious resume clearly on the opposite the spectrum from polite social lie.
Again this your response was to a comment where I agreed with this previous comment of yours.
>That's not lying; that's just normal social etiquette
I even stated that this is the argument I'm making. Normal social etiquette isn't lying.
Where we seem to disagree is on what is normal social etiquette.
I think that politely laughing at an unfunny joke falls well within normal social etiquette. I think that telling your partner's grandmother that you like her food is well within normal social etiquette. I also think that telling a polite lie about your opinion of someone is within normal social etiquette.
I apologize if I misunderstood; I think the context of threaded conversations sometimes implies a disagreement when one may not necessarily exist.
I contend that there is zero overlap between what I would characterize as dishonesty and what I would characterize as acceptable behavior in a healthy professional environment.
What we seem to be focusing on at the moment is the relative honesty or dishonesty of polite social interactions, e.g. laughing at bad jokes or claiming to enjoy grandma’s cooking when you don’t. I think there’s likely an overlap between politeness and mild dishonesty in those situations, but by the same token, I don’t personally engage in many of these dishonesties—the polite “fake laugh” is more than I can pull off without coming across as sarcastic—but if you’re better at subtlety than I am, and you fake-laugh in a way that doesn’t come across as either sarcastic or genuine, and you reasonably expect the other person to be fluent and subtle enough to pick up on that, well, that’s not even dishonesty anymore, it’s just non-literal signaling, and after all, etiquette is largely a signaling dance where you show off and feel out how good each other is at subtle interpersonal signaling.
On the other hand, I also advise not dating people who unironically ask “does this dress make me look fat?”, and consider playing along with those games to be dishonest in a soul-eroding way. Although maybe that’s just because that’s a level of non-literal signaling that I just don’t have the patience for....
There is such a thing as pragmatics[1] where the same words might mean different things in different situations. For any normal human being trying to communicate honestly their speech will be full of things that are wrong or don't strictly make sense but both partners in a conversation have to interpret each other generously for a conversation to proceed. "I spent the entire day doing paperwork!" has to be interpreted as the person spending the bulk of their productive day on paperwork, it doesn't mean that they never slept or ate to any reasonable person. If an answer promotes accurate beliefs then that's a good honest answer. If someone refuses to impart information in their answer then that's their right. If they promote inaccurate beliefs in their answer that's dishonesty.
Have you ever been part of lay offs on the employer side? Any single company whose done that action has lied as they led their employees to believe that they would be working on some project for a while, while simultaneously planning to let them go. That's just a single example of a common lie in companies, and there are more like "we follow best practices", until those practices start costing money.
Every single company that more than 2 people is full of constant lies, it's just that most of them are below our collective threshold of being an egregious lie.
I actually have been. I informed people as soon as I could, and sent them home immediately without telling a single lie. To some extent this comment also tries to paint withholding information that people aren’t entitled to as lying. Which are absolutely not the same thing.
Also, do you know what happens to companies that have mass layoffs cloaked in dishonesty? They destroy their own reputations. An outcome that entirely proves my point.
"as soon as I could". That's not "as soon as I knew".
My point is that lieing isn't a binary option. If people told literally no lies our society would fall apart. White lies are social lubricant to get through the day.
This matters in the discussion because employers have made their job positings be full of lies 99% of time. When everyone can expect that a random interaction is going to be mostly lieing then it's moved into white lie category, the same way that if you ask an American "How are you doing" the social expectation is for them to say good or great, regardless of the actual reality
Edit: I think the person talked about in the article has moved way past white lie and into unhireable status, but I feel like the idea that 100% honesty is the only policy is ignoring all of reality
Lying is NOT withholding information that people aren’t entitled to. You’re trying to win an argument by changing what the words mean. If somebody confides in me with a secret, am I a liar if I don’t immediately rush off and tell it to all concerned parties? No, I’m not. You’re trying to confuse honesty with openness, and specifically in this case, as an obligation to disclose privileged information.
I think your definition of lieing allows for an unlimited amount of misdirection based on a literal interpretation of lieing.
If you are a manager, you heard the CEO say they are going to lay off the bottom 20% of the engineers next month, you know you rated employee A as your worst employee during evaluations, and you then assign Employee A to a new project that's estimated to be 8 months of work, you have not lied by your definition because your CEO didn't say explicitly that they were firing employee A.
If you were a manager and a bank called to confirm an employee worked there so that they could be approved for a home loan, which you know they check to make sure that the employee has a salary that will pay the loan for the near future, you are going to fire the employee next week, and you just tell the bank, "yes he is employeed here" you have not lied by your definition because they didn't explicitly ask if the employee was going to be employed for the duration of that loan.
If you put out a job posting for a set of skills + salary that you know no one will ever take, and then apply for an h1b slot because you couldn't get any candidates, you haven't lied by your definition.
You've made the point that I am trying to win an argument by changing the definition of what words mean, but from my view point that is what you are doing. Human communication is not run through a compiler. There are explicit definitions, implicit definitions, connotations, and even social expectations that all add meaning to our communications, and by saying that you never lied because you are following the exact definition of the words you are being disingenuous
You're constructing a fantasy reality for yourself where words mean whatever you want them to, and where I personally did a series of things that you literally just made up.
The real process for how something like happened is that the management spend some time assessing the viability of a project > decide it's not worth continuing > make a plan for how to shut it down > inform staff and help them find new roles inside or outside the company. Now, until the plan had been finalised and approved, there is no news to tell anybody, we (intentionally) didn't have any new major pieces of work kicking off during the review period. At no time in this process did anybody lie to anybody else, by omission or otherwise. If my superiors had asked me to help them do this in a way that was morally questionable or dishonest, I would have refused.
Your argument that everybody must lie by omission simply because there are always things that you can't tell certain people is complete nonsense. A lie by omission is to construct the information you present to somebody intentionally in such as way as to misrepresent the facts and mislead them. By itself, not revealing confidential or private information to somebody is not lying by omission.
I'm not going to reply to any more of your comments, because your entire argument is predicated on reinventing the meaning of words, and creating fantasy straw-man scenarios to apply them to.
None of my arguments were strawmen. The three examples I gave were things I personally saw go down at companies I worked at by people with your same viewpoint. I have not worked with anyone who stated that they never lied who did not act like they were a genie from a fairy tale and anything but a lawyer drafted contract to them was means to manipulate someone as far as possible.
I apologize if it came off as me saying that you had done these things. I am on the east coast and not in a tech hub for most of my career, and many of the stories coming from the west coast tech hubs sound like utopian fantasies compared to the way I have seen employers treat employees here.
At this point we are looking at the same painting but you see blue and I see red, so perhaps it is best to end the discussion
The line does get blurry at times. In the past I've been told to remove someone's account right away because they are being terminated and then afterwards been told "nevermind, we're firing them next week. Undo everything and make sure that you convince them it was just some computer issue". To add to it they didn't tell me about it until the user had already noticed they couldn't log into their account.
I agree with what you're saying about withholding information being different than lying but there are circumstances where you will need to flat out lie and fabricate a story to effectively withhold that information. In my case I had to pretend that it must have been a stuck key or something while I quickly reverted the changes and walked them through turning off the computer and pressing all of the keys a lot to "fix" it.
It's one thing to not tell anyone what a meeting between management is about but if you're telling people that you're in a meeting about "Regulatory compliance auditing" while planning a layoff that's not just withholding information. I'm not saying it isn't justified but a lie is still a lie.
> If you think your boss is lying to you, go find a new boss.
That statement seems completely disconnected from reality. Not the part about going to find something better, because that is (usually) possible. But managers regularly and transparently lie.
It sounds like you’re a boss, so I think you haven’t had to experience this for too long and have probably forgotten it.
Also, try not to be so gung ho on declaring who you fire and how little remorse you have / whatever the situation. It does not come off well.
There are those that do, and they have to handle the consequences of that.
>It sounds like you’re a boss, so I think you haven’t had to experience this for too long and have probably forgotten it.
I am, but I also have one myself. I am also fully aware of how dysfunctional organisations can become when they don't value honesty and integrity.
>Also, try not to be so gung ho on declaring who you fire and how little remorse you have
I don't have any issues with discussing my values with others. Especially in an anonymous online forum. Reading some of the responses I've gotten in this thread, it seems honesty and integrity are perhaps not widely valued here. Maybe I've changed somebody's perspective on that, maybe that's a good thing.
You’re ignoring that fact that honesty is expected in some contexts and not in others. In business it’s not dishonest to withhold information from you’re competitors, or to even make a bluff in front of them. In the CIA it’s not dishonest to withhold information from your adversaries, or even manipulate them to your advantage depending on the context. Although I’m sure many CIA employees practice moral relativism to some extent.
In any case, the CIA and a normal working environment have a lot of differences, so you can’t really take ordinary workplace expectations and dismiss them because they’re not compatible with the CIA environment.
No those are completely dishonest, especially when it becomes active bluffing/manipulation. It's nit less dishonest when a lie is useful to you. You might maybe morally justify it, but it's deliberately saying things that conflict with the facts, and that is the very definition of lying.
The general issue of this thread, which you lot have forgotten completely as you went nitpicking what is dishonesty and what is hiding sone facts etc, is that, the whole concept of "references" is a fucked up way to cover incompetence and discrimination at hiring, and forces people to spend time in jobs they would rather not in order to build resumes, and tollerate assholes in order to avoid bias when hirers are scuba-diving into your personal history. That seems to me to be a huge breach of privacy too.
Furthermore, those few of you who can have pleasant jobs seem to just plain ignore the fact that most businesses lie to their employees constantly. My only IT job for example, which I started out as a Python backend developer, but then was forced to, before I wrote five-six lines of python, to work on frontend instead, using JS and jQuery, both of which I did not really know? That was sth. I could have avoided if the employer did not fool me into thinking that I would do Django stuff instead. And, I havent done a survey, but generally the amount of stories employers fucking up employees far outweigh the case vice versa. The morale being, most people have shitty jobs, and you lot are being hypocritical judging them while you dont have to endure such things. Lucky for you, but have some empathy.
As for the initial point of this thread, well, while the Catfish is guilty of lying and better avoided, the circumstances that pushed him to do so are just as equally if not more messy. And also, consciously or subconsciously, we seem to condemn lies and manipulative behavoiur when we are on the benefitting side.
Dishonesty which you can detect is apparently intolerable. But dishonesty which you never catch may not be.
That's one of the points of the article, the other being that the candidate apparently showed a solid set of skills in the interviews. Dishonest people are dishonest, but they also might be lazy and thus willing to apply a skillset rather than deal with the complexity of additional, ongoing layers deceit.
That's a bit of a tautology. You first have to be aware of the existence of something in order to then tolerate it.
The thing about dishonesty (aside from the fact that a person willing to be dishonest about one thing, is more than likely willing to be dishonest about other things too), is that it tends to beget more dishonesty. You tend to have to tell more lies in the future to maintain ones you told in the past. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, you can get ahead on the basis of dishonesty, but only if you lack integrity. Keeping a lie concealed for ever seems to me like it would require luck or tremendous effort, otherwise it's probably not a very interesting lie.
> You first have to be aware of the existence of something in order to then tolerate it.
Sure, but that's irrelevant to my point. We typically have $known_small_quantity of cases where we have detected people being dishonest. But we also have $unknown_quantity of people who were dishonest to us without us realizing it-- maybe because we were naive, or because the deceit was so sophisticated, or it was so carefully contained, etc.
> The thing about dishonesty (aside from the fact that a person willing to be dishonest about one thing, is more than likely willing to be dishonest about other things too), is that it tends to beget more dishonesty.
You necessarily based that opinion on the cases of $known_small_quantity dishonesty. Which, unless you are a professional PI, is almost guaranteed to be crude and fairly easily detectable.
Again, the point of the article is that this cheat left little to no traces of dishonesty aside from choosing the same reference. Yes, the author describes the candidate as "too good to be true." But that's after the fact, and after the author admitted that they would have hired the person without the coincidence of knowing the reference chosen.
If you assume from the beginning that "dishonesty begets dishonesty," it leads you astray. For example, how many of the author's current employees are just luckier cheats than this candidate? That's a question you don't ask if you assume dishonesty is necessarily self-destructive.
> Lying at work is just about the only thing I'll always fire somebody for.
I'd like to say I second this, but I have to weigh the value of the employee and the size of the lie. For instance, calling in "sick" the Monday after the super bowl. Is 8 hours of PTO so this person can recover from an obviously self-inflicted hangover and not a random "sickness" worth losing a team lead on a project? (Yes, I consider calling a hangover a "sickness" as dishonest.)
Maybe he had the choice between the truth which would've never gotten him even to a phone interview, or lying where he apparently aced all interviews. Sounds like someone who is great but doesn't have the CV people are looking for. For those it's really hard to get in but companies can be glad when they hire them (since they're cheaper for that reason).
That door swings both ways. I'm mostly honest as a personal principle, but I don't believe my employers are all that worthy of receiving the benefit from that. They have lied to me in one way or another far more often, and with far greater magnitude, than I have ever lied to them.
Yeah, I wasn't all that sick when I took that sick day that one time, suspiciously close to a AAA video game release, but then the company told us that it was doing great, and a month later we all got laid off, and our satellite office got shuttered. Yeah, I said my subcontracted position wasn't renewed at my last job, when I was actually pushed out by office politics, but then the company told us it just had a great year, and nobody got more than a 2.5% raise, and no bonuses anywhere.
As such, I'll lie to my company whenever the benefit to me would outweigh the amount I'd feel bad about the lying, and if there were a negligible chance of getting caught, because I trust management about as far as I could kick it. I have to do a motive analysis on every official statement, and if the reasonable alternatives might result in damage to the company, such as by loss of critical employees or short selling of the stock, I can't rely on the statement in any way.
I don't have the luxury of "firing my employer" for lying to me, because all of them have done it. If I kept that policy, I couldn't work for anybody [who is likely to be hiring].
So I certainly hope you have been scrupulously honest to all those folks that you fired for lying to you, and that you never passed along the obvious bullshit from your boss to your underlings. You have to give honesty and respect it, in order to expect honesty and receive it.
I really hate the so-called term “catfished” it’s a completely contrived word that came from a 2010 movie that probably 50 people actually saw. “Ghosting” is another one, but at least you can use context to sort of figure out what people are actually talking about.
A bit off topic, but this adulteration of language — from an obscure pop-culture reference, is a bit silly.
Obviously the author agrees that most people don’t know what the term means or he wouldn’t feel compelled to explain what the heck catfishing actually means in the second paragraph.
Urban dictionary != real dictionary. I guess in another life I must have been a member of the Academie Française. Or maybe just too old to be cool.
It’s so fetch apparently that I and a large number of non-Buzzfeed aficionados just don’t get it.
In the case of this word, it's in "the real dictionary" now, by which I am assuming you mean "people's actual lexicon". Yes, it's a relatively new word, but this is how language works.
How about you comment on HN in only Old English from now on, so you can avoid these newfangled spellings people made up?
I never even knew this show existed, and was still aware of the word and its meaning. (I mean, not at first. There was a moment when someone had to explain it to me.)
But all of this is irrelevant to the main point: Language is dynamic.
The dictionary is not the definition of the language.
It's a somewhat out of date "map" of the language that is missing the newest roads. (I just learned this last year.)
"Anne, who appeared on Adam Ruins What We Learned in School, explains how grammar rules are not fixed in the English language. Language is constantly evolving and we’re the ones who get to shape it -- not dictionaries! So we can all stop correcting each other and just appreciate our different ways of speaking. On the podcast, Anne and Adam discuss how we should think of the dictionary as a field guide rather than the authority on language, how young people think about language and texting, and how Anne helped choose 2000's word of the millennium! Anne is an English Professor at the University of Michigan where she researches the history of English and lexicography. She is also a member of both the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel and the American Dialectical Society."http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins-e...
That's how language works ... enough people agree on the definition (and spelling and pronunciation) of a word, and then it's a word.
It's so fetch, your own adulteration of language! Don't speak to me about being cool, who started that? Such a silly thing, cool means one thing and one thing only: the other side of lukewarm. Please don't adulterate the language.
Probably because they couldn’t get an interview any other way, the reason this person got so far in the process was not because they were qualified for the job, but because the hiring manager liked the fact that they used to work at the same place together. Which is a crappy reason to hire someone.
In the tech world I would imagine a scenario where you don't have any professional experience in language X, you've been working only in language Y, but you've done some personal projects in language X and would like a career shift. It's hard to get a senior position without any experience.
> Rule #2: Take a long hard look at a candidate’s social profiles.
> Rule #4: Google is your friend.
That are one of the main reasons I don't post with my real name on the Internet, and I don't have an LinkedIn account. I don't want people to interpret what I put on the Internet in their own way when it comes to the decision if they should hire me or not.
Do you want to work for people that believe and actually review social profiles and google search you? So perhaps publicly posting that you disagree with such behaviors might actually be doing you a favor. No?
I think I understand not desiring to post your name with any other opinions though.
The problem is that they will need to get to page 47 on a google search to find this. The odds of this doing me a favor are just to astronomic in my opinion.
I take the opposite approach. I accept that everything I post online is public, and a chance to control my own narrative.
I would much rather fill the Internet with my own content about myself, than leave it empty for someone else to impersonate or disparage me. Additionally, I am proud of what I post publicly — otherwise I wouldn’t post it.
Public personas are a professional necessity, especially in our industry. For example, what if you want to show your contributions to open source? Or your stackoverflow answers?
If you do everything online under a separate identity, then all your positive contributions are unlinkable to yourself. Yes, you can hide any “bad things” you may post from your employers. But are you really posting anything bad? Is it worth sacrificing credit for your positive contributions?
Granted there is always the “nothing to hide” counterargument. That is, it’s not up for me to decide what’s “bad.” A potential employer could misinterpret my words, or otherwise negatively judge me based on my online profiles. But in that case it’s probably better to avoid the relationship anyway.
> Public personas are a professional necessity, especially in our industry
If I wasn't on hacker news, I would assume you were an actor or a radio talk show host. Maybe you're right, and developers need to have a public persona today. But why does it need to be that way? You aren't performers. You aren't politicians.
Aren’t we though? How is a developer on a software project different than an actor on a set? How is a product requirements doc different than a movie script?
An actor can make or break a film just as a developer can make or break a software project.
I actually think there are far more parallels than differences.
Which performers are in a movie is a major factor in who chooses to view the movie. Which developers created the software is not a major factor in who uses the software for most software. The only exceptions I can think of are software that is used mainly by other software developers.
Personas and reputations are beneficial in any human pursuit. People who are respected and acknowledged more by others have an advantage. We now have the internet and social media and other ways to market one's self. With less networked electric metal things involved, it has been that way since groups of primates started gathering together, and probably well before that with other species. Welcome to being a living being on Earth.
Then why use "chatmasta" as your handle instead of your real name, which you have provided in your profile?
The problem with you view is that there are times when your message gets caught up with your identity. Especially, when your message may be against the consensus flow and stills needs to be made, without affecting you in any material way.
Too often today, the messenger is "killed" because of the unpleasantness of the message being delivered.
If you actually want to know, it’s because when I registered on my first forum in 2004 (runevillage anybody?), I signed up with my AIM username but mistyped the password. So I had to come up with a new name, and 12 year old me thought “chatmasta” sounded pretty damn cool.
I use my real name (milesrichardson) on services where my name is featured prominently and/or I would like people to find when googling me, eg GitHub LinkedIn etc
In my opinion the only way to not lose the game is not to play it. As soon as private data is collected somewhere it will be misused. And I guess I'm prvilledged enough to use this as a natural filter.
Exactly, this person is clearly terrible at their job.
Here's my own anecdote: There's a person living in my country that has exactly the same name and surname as me, and the same degree. I don't know how this happened, as my name/surname combo is fairly unusual. When further details are not present (ie family names, tax identification etc), which is the usual case for google, you can't tell if a document talks about me or him.
I dread the day that something negative pops up about him in the first pages of Google.
Then all the self-righteous and arrogant interviewers, distant family and potential friends or lovers, they'll all think that "they got me" by searching my name on Google. They all think they're right with little proof for it. And the worst part is, that just like the guy in the article, they won't tell you. They're silently wrong, thinking they're right. That kind of attitude really pisses me off.
I deleted my LinkedIn over a year ago and haven't looked back. It might be handy for sales folks but as a developer it's a cesspool of spammy content and dark patterns.
I’ve been thinking of doing this as well. While I do occasionally get hit up by internal recruiters, which I don’t mind, that happens infrequently. For the most part it is just 3rd party recruiters seizing on a keyword hit pertaining to something I did 10 years ago (“I have a great .Net role I think you’d be perfect for”).
That's odd. The author defends his "backdoor reference checks" by saying he would have never caught the catfish otherwise. Then later on the same person he contacted for his "backdoor reference check" was given to him as a reference, which would have happened regardless.
Yes, but they might have naively used the given number rather than the number they personally had, out of convenience, which would have caused the catfish to succeed.
But no, the author knew Jim, if he had dialed that number and did a bit of small talk he would've known that's not Jim on the phone (unless the fake Jim is quick on his feet about pretending to be someone else).
The catfisher is stupid, he should've looked through the author's LinkedIn profile and saw that the author is connected with Jim, he would have not used Jim as a reference if he had done that.
You can't just fake a corporate email address. And even phone numbers for offices are usually all in one block, you can verify if that belongs to the company.
On the upside, the person who was trying to get a job seems very good at selling. Certainly, they seem good at selling themselves. If this is for a sales job, then the energy they showed should count in their favor, and the work they put in, as well as the easy social graces that charmed everyone.
I've known honest salespeople, but generally sales, as a profession, does not reward complete honesty.
The important thing would be to find out if this guy was lying to hide previous criminal behavior. That would be important to protect the current company from. But if there was no criminal behavior in this guy's past, I'd be interested in seeing if they could hook new customers as well as they hooked the hiring company.
Why? They'd eventually deceive the new customers just to make the sale, even going so far to fabricate facts and people just to do it. That's not the type of person you want bringing on new accounts at your company.
If they engage in outright fraud, then they are criminals, and they've probably been criminals in the past. That's why I emphasized the one thing to really check for is whether they are hiding a criminal past.
At one point, when I was running my own business, I worked with an alcoholic who was a good salesman. I knew that he could be toxic, so I structured an agreement such that I kept some distance between him and my company. I basically just offered him a generous finders fee. I told him if he could bring in business, I would give him a percentage. We got at least one big contract because of him.
I'm not saying that every company can or should work with such people. Every company is different. But if you know the circumstances of your company, and you think you can get useful work out of someone who has some known problems, then it is possible to structure a deal such that your company wins.
>If they engage in outright fraud, then they are criminals, and they've probably been criminals in the past.
You're assuming that they were caught and convicted.
Displaying this pattern of behavior w/o a criminal history doesn't mean they won't continue said behavior in the job. It's a terrible idea to have hired this candidate and I'm not entirely certain what your motivation is for arguing otherwise.
Out of all of the possible people to choose as your fake manager, this person chose one out of the two people that I knew from Acme Corp
Someone who I had interviewed and who turned out to be a terrible employee (we fired him after 9 months of trying to find something he could do right) listed me as a reference on his resume.
Problem for him was that the hiring manager at the next place where he applied turned out to be a friend of mine.
This is how I answered when my friend called and asked what I thought of the guy, "Do you want my actual opinion or the Corporate Response?"
He immediately knew what I meant and said "OK, that's all I needed."
For those who don't get it, the Corporate Response (that any other person checking up would receive) would be "the employee worked in Software Development from MM/DD/YY to mm/dd/yy and was assigned xxx tasks" with no further comment.
>Rule #2: Take a long hard look at a candidate’s social profiles.
That worries me if I need to enter the job market. I have no social media profile with my name attached to it. I don't enjoy the facebook/twitter/instagram style sites.
I doubt employers who search out candidates on social media are looking for good things. They’re probably looking for red flags, and potentially anything could be a red flag to some people.
> backdoor reference checks aren’t always considered kosher by everyone
?? These are the most important references. Many excellent candidates won't have a back connection but when they are possible they can make an important difference two ways: One is the way described here (or, "this person was OK but doesn't sound like they would work out for the kind of thing you want -- that was where they failed with us too."). The other is the opposite, which has happened to me twice: "Oh that person? Look, if you don't take them let them know we'd really like them back" (on a candidate who barely made it through the interview but there was enough something there that we decided to do some background checking. Turned out he was simply nervous in front of people he didn't know and gave a terrible interview.). Without the background check we might have missed an excellent candidate with poor job-seeking skills.
Whenever I get a resume with a school on it that I or one of my colleagues attended I always check. I also once had an amazing candidate with 20 years experience in the lab doing just what we wanted. Their resume said that they had a degree from my schoo in X. I of course looked them up on the alum site and saw they had a degree in Y. Now both X and Y were in the set {Chemistry, Physics, Material Science, Chemical Engineering} so clearly had they simply told the truth it wouldn't have mattered -- the 20 years of experience would have said enough for anyone who actually cared about degrees after all that time. But since they lied...the resume went into the trash and the candidate was never brought in for an interview.
How do you know that your backdoor reference doesn't personally dislike the candidate for something unrelated to their mutual work experience? Maybe hiring by hearsay works for some people, but I don't trust references, good or bad.
Or asking the candidate? You can still check if the position of the other person is relevant but it makes sense to not randomly ask people at former employers if there are only 1-2 who can really describe the work they did.
Pardon me if this is a naïve question. Isn't the point of references that they can be checked and verified? Why would you need to obtain explicit consent to contact the contacts when they've been provided? Isn't the consent implicit by virtue of them being supplied?
Yes - and most times candidates will sign some form of blanket consent allowing companies to go beyond the the supplied references, and potentially run a background credit check/investigation. Which I’m by no means saying not to do. But key is getting the candidate’s consent and doing those checks at the appropriate time in the process, so you don’t potentially damage the candidate through your actions
It is generally understood that candidates must consent to have their references checked.
That's rubbish. It's generally understood that all parties are expected to perform due diligence. What do you think people do with the connection graph linkedin displays?
I've interviewed people who were clear that they didn't want their current employer to know that they were looking - that's fine, and easy to respect. But the article describes a former job on a resume; there's no risk you're going to interfere with their current employment by reaching out to mutual contacts.
Personally, I hope people look me up through the social network... hell, that's how I find all of my employment.
I'd expect any company to get my consent before requesting references from current or past employers. First of all because I can direct them to relevant people but most importantly because it's not public information. I had cases in the past where I asked them to hold off with checks until I have signed a contract and quit the other job (under the condition that the contract would be void if the check fails). That way they could confirm that my story was correct without telling my employer that I plan to quit.
1. If you work in th US I’d suggest a conversation with HR about your current practices - this issue is frought with legal issues and liability (as the reference giver as well).
2. Passive diligence (looking someone up online) is very different than active diligence where you disclose to another party the candidate’s status and potentially receive defamatory information.
3. You say you’d “respect” a candidates desire for you to not contact a current employer, but it also doesn’t sound as if you think that is explicitly out of bounds.
4. Just out of curiousity were a candidate to lose their current job (for example), due to word getting back to their current employer due to your Backdoor Checks - what level of responsibility are you prepared to personally undertake? Seems to me that people should be exceedingly cautious that their actions don’t result in someone losing their livelihood due to a gossipy former colleague....
If they're discreetly seeking other employment, you have now blown their cover. A couple of things about that:
1. "If they're looking for another job, they can have no guarantee of secrecy." -- Sure, but is it your job to out someone?
2. "I need a second opinion on their references, just in case they're giving me bad ones." -- So.... what exactly is your threat model, here? "Catfished by a candidate" stories are interesting because they're rare.
3. "If I tell other people they're looking, I can reduce their leverage by making things awkward for them at their current job." -- Hey look! I found the sociopath!
Bonus Thing: It's a small industry, and people don't go away. You've now marked yourself as someone who can't be trusted with knowledge about someone's else career choices.
> If they're discreetly seeking other employment, you have now blown their cover.
That's a good point, and I took these as a given: the people you call should be people you know very well, and, typically, don't do this until the candidate has advanced to the reference checking phase anyway (why would you waste your friend's time either?)
The fact that they are interviewing with a particular company is private information; you have no right to make that public.
Also of note is that the article claims that "if I didn’t do my backdoor checks I would have never uncovered the Catfish", but then later states the "fake manager [was] one out of the two people that I knew from Acme Corp". Had she waited 'til that point, she would have discovered the lie without sharing the information with people who don't (ostensibly--as they are listed on the reference) already know it and without relying on woolly information ("no one has heard of him" does not sound like solid proof that he never worked there, particularly if it's a large company).
There's a high chance that he's on LinkedIn with his current company. And if he got laid off, using the header of the old company is definitely not ok.
The place I'm at now forbids employees from being references for past employees (or current employees discreetly seeking other employment). Is this normal?
It would have prevented "Jim" or anyone else at ACME Corp from being a reference to catfish-er, so requests for a reference from the company would have been denied right off the bat. That would have made it harder to spot the fake.
This was the policy when I worked at Rackspace circa 2001-2004, they would only confirm employment.
In the bay area, I often can't even confirm employment because the company has gone out of business, my manager was fired after I voluntarily left, etc...
Literally everything about this story raises the hairs on the back of my neck except for giving false contact info for a manager the recruiter knew by name - esp the, "trust your gut", stuff, which is basically saying:
Embrace your implicit bias.
I have managers who I can't get in touch with, one of whom I've had to tell several recruiters, "This dude wouldn't take my calls when I worked for him, he pretty much just ignores everyone." In those cases, however, I do my best to do a LinkedIn connect and provide a company email.
"Feel free to contact jackass@shittycompany.com and see if you have better luck than I do."
Just because you are (MAYBE) a manager who cares enough to give references, don't assume anyone else is. Many of my past managers are pissed that I bailed on them, because they were shitty managers, but I have 20y in the industry and in many cases that meant more than them.
It's a tough game to play when you don't want to be a manager, yourself.
There are companies that exist solely to verify employment history, i.e., if you leave Company X, Company Y will confirm your time of employment, titles, etc. to new employer Company Z.
Most companies like that seem like they are just there to provide a plausible cover for legal liability. I've had multiple jobs that had background checks where I gave them my [1...n] addresses over the past 5-10 years and the background check comes back with me only have lived at [n-1] address with no indication that the data I supplied didn't match up with what they verified. If those companies we're doing their job they would at least tell my prospectvie employer, their client, that what they could prove didn't match up with what I said
"Doing their job" - they are data aggregators and brokers, if the data doesn't exist because it was never reported to a third party, there's nothing they can do.
If the whole point is to find discrepancies between what the prospective employee tells you and what is reality, not highlighting differences between those two sets of data is an issue, even if because the people doing the background check just lack access.
The real reason most background checks happen are so that companies have someone to point the finger at when one of their employees breaks the law. If that wasn't the case then you wouldn't get into situations like background check companies reporting completely clear records when the government has a simple process to show you every sentence given to someone. They stick to third party companies because they are cheaper and don't trigger compliance regulations required by law.
They would go for the better, if slightly more expensive, data source in a heart beat if finding about criminal history was the actual goal
I think this is standard procedure for many US companies; the employee (e.g. your manager) can't give professional references on behalf of the company, mostly because there is nothing for the company to gain. In fact it's loose-loose: You get the job, they loose an employee; you don't get the job, the company could become liable for all kinds of things (libel, lost earnings etc.)
However there is nothing stopping a private individual giving a personal reference even if that person happened to be your manager.
This has been my experience working for large US corporations in the UK.
Yes, it's mainly a legal/libel issue. The code is if they just verify someone worked there, it's usually bad (without saying they were bad). If they say they were great, they were great.
There's no code. If they say they were great, they were possibly great. There are so many reasons for a terse confirmation of employment. Foremost would be that you're talking to HR and they're following a fixed process. A process that exists for a reason: Even a positive review with good intentions could be framed as injurious to the candidate's prospects.
Yes, all my references are colleagues. I have their cell / home numbers and emails and all that. The point of references (at least back when I would send resumes to people) is, "did so and so work with you at place and place?" "What kind of work did so and so do?" "How did you like working with so and so?" "What languages did so and so work with?" That sort of thing. I think you are talking employment verification.
Standard in the US maybe, but I've never even heard of anything like this in the UK. I'm sure it happens, but I will eat my hat if it's fairly standard.
Most larger companies require references to at least be checked by HR. Employers have a duty of care to provide accurate references for their former employees. There's a non-trivial risk that a manager could provide a bad or indifferent reference simply because of a personal grudge, which the company could be held liable for.
I've only had one company and 2 government jobs check my references in 25 years in the field (feds were checking for clearance, so required).
I call my references to see if they were contacted after I've been offered positions in the past it's amazing how little it happens.
I don't check references because I don't give a shit. You're either giving people that like you, or why would you be giving them at all. If you're still employed, calling that person's current job is a huge no-no (could cost them their employment).
What the fuck is so hard about just figuring out if you like someone and hiring them. Telling them fully what goals you expect them to achieve and giving them the tools to do the job. Then if they're not successful, letting them go.
Oh yeah, you'd have to be a good employee yourself and work for a good company to do that.
It is my policy in the UK, and is the one recommended by HR experts for liability reasons. HR bods describe it as a factual reference. It is most definitely a recent US import, and I am not sure about it's penetration.
John Smith worked here between x and x as a tea-boy.
Personally I would much rather someone gave me a factual reference in good time, than an in depth reference eventually. Normally it is also OK for a manager to give a personal reference, ie not on behalf of the company.
The (large) company I work for also has this policy. If a potential employer contacts the company, they will confirm dates of employment, but that's all. It's a liability thing.
Most of the large Fortune 500 companies use https://www.theworknumber.com for this. It’s owned by Equifax and they do Income and Employment verifications. And salary history was compromised because of this. [0]
It means that they're not only working leads that come in from marketing campaigns, website, & emails (these are inbound, initiated by a potential customer). Typically means picking up the phone and calling strangers to try and sell them things (initiated by you - outbound).
The real question is how many people normally get the job with embellished resume's, fake recommendations and friends as references. I think its quite a high percentage. I'm always honest but I think I've missed out on a lot of jobs I could easily do because I don't meet the "requirements".
There is a big difference between embellished and fake. I always assume there is some title/responsibility inflation on resumes i read, but i generally assume that those people did in fact work at those companies in those groups, etc.
That makes sense. Once you signed, it's easy to get a reference from your employer (at least factual). Before that it's unnecessary. Especially if there are more tests to come, I don't want 10 companies requesting references when I look for a new job.
I know a person who has faked a position on resume to get around the whole you need experience to get hired and to get experience you need to get hired thing in marketing field and now he is super successful C level exec in Fortune 50 company so go figure.
There is a very thin line between "hustling" and outright fraud. The same behavior can result in a good career or jail time depending on luck and ability.
I don't know ow why you were downvoted. It was told on a joking manner but is effectively true. There were many people on here crowing about the greatness of Elizabeth Holmes even though she was a giant fraud. If people are going to ask for ridiculous requirements for well paid jobs then they should expect either A:that people will say what you want to get the position since, as this article implied, reality and what is useful to a company don't seem tied together or B:never complain about a shortage of candidates and the associated highb salaries if you are going to cultivate a list of requirements that exclude 99.99% of humanity
Maybe he would have been great and our best performing AE. Maybe he wouldn’t have even known how to log into Salesforce. Or, even worse, maybe he would have been dishonest about something down the line. Whatever the outcome, better to suss it out early.
So, the person appeared competent and capable, and "may have been our best performing AE" but it's "better to suss it out early" by immediately rejecting him?
Sounds like they should have considered some sort of short-term contact to evaluate the guy. Instead, their ego was bruised, so they rejected him and patted themselves on the back.
My position is that, in his own words, the applicant "may have been our best performing AE", but the solution was to reject him.
As for misrepresenting oneself, what's the actual problem? If he's got the ability to do the job, who cares if he lied to get through the Byzantine interview process? And, as I already said, employers (management) lie all the time.
egos set aside, once you know the person youre looking to hire has been lying about most of his past to the point of making up email addresses and getting his buddy to speak on the phone for him as a reference, i dont see how you can look past that and actually still hire them.
I once sent out a coding test email to a candidate.
Not long after I got an email back from this candidate saying "Hey bro could you do this test for me please." or words to that effect.
Obviously mistakenly forwarded it back to me instead of to his bro who he wanted to do his coding test.
#2
I definitely got catfished but it was by another recruiter who was fishing to try to find out who my client/employer was - he was hoping I'd call the number so he could pretend to be a valid candidate and I would reveal the name of the employer. I took the issue to the job board that the resume came from, and they threatened to ban his company from advertising on their board. Never happened again as far as I know.
#3
I've got about 150,000 resumes in my candidate database. One thing I'd be interested to do is run some sort of duplicate text detecter over my candidate database.
I've definitely received resumes that duplicate text from other resumes.
Maybe hire one of the devs you interact with to search for duplicates? Searching for duplicates substrings isn't necessarily something that could be done off the shelf but it shouldn't be too hard for a competent dev to get you a working process
I've been wondering how often #1 happens. Our coding test isn't particularly difficult but it is timeboxed, and somehow candidates pass it who take 15+ minutes to string together a for-loop when they come on-site.
I've received a mistaken "please come in for an interview" email intended for someone else. The recruiter was embarrassed when I illuminated the error. I enjoyed knowing I was "not selected to proceed", even if it was by mistake vs the usual silence.
Home based unsupervised coding tests are fine I think, as long as you ask the candidate to talk through their solution when they come in to meet in person.
> Obviously mistakenly forwarded it back to me instead of to his bro who he wanted to do his coding test.
Long time ago a guy I knew send me a quiz that apparently from a job interview, I pretend I've never received it ("Oh sorry, it must be filtered as spam").
My opinion, you shouldn't hire someone who can fail on a task that as simple as forwarding an email to someone else on such situation.
Oh come on, people make silly email mistakes all the time. You don't want to hire someone that's going to lie about finishing their coding quiz, but if they screw up an email in an innocent way, it shouldn't be a dealbreaker.
Reminds me of the joke about throwing half of your job applications in the trash because you don't want to hire unlucky people.
> One thing I'd be interested to do is run some sort of duplicate text detecter over my candidate database.
You'll probably get a double-digit percentage of hits. I google parts from every resume I receive when I'm hiring for a position. About half have bits and pieces copied from somewhere else.
Don't forget that you're supposed to paste phrases from the job description language into the resume, so every resume should have a very high baseline similarity.
I don't think we should use such stories as a reason to make the hiring process even more paranoid. In general people are pretty honest so I wouldn't like to see them having to jump through even more hoops because of a few fraudsters.
Advice number 1 is probably best : "Trust your gut". If something doesn't make sense it's worth clearing that up.
Yes, this and reference checks. Plus, if a guy isn't working out, fire him. Not a huge deal. The current tech hiring process, at least what I read on here, is absurd.
Depends on what "isn't working out" means. If the employee is just bad at their job in mundane ways like low performance, poor quality, etc. then that's probably not too harmful (or it shouldn't be, if your company is more than a dozen people or so).
However, if "isn't working out" means that the employee has behavioral issues that harm colleagues, is inappropriate with clients, steals intellectual property, or something like that, the damage could be much worse—even catastrophic. Of course, companies should be built to be resilient to these situations, but it's rarely "not a huge deal".
All that being said, I agree with your premise that much of tech hiring is "absurd". Too many companies (especially consultancies) are built with a very low tolerance for underperformance, to the point that they don't contribute to the development of the overall workforce.
Sure, deciding why to let someone go is up to the company or manager. Firing someone isn't the huge deal, the reasons for firing them certainly can be. With development, you can actually have negative productivity. An example would be spending money to un-hose what the developer did years after they've left. If enough stuff was built on top of a mistake, it's unfeasible to fix. Bad design decisions tend to lead to other bad design decisions. I'm dealing with a lot of that where I am now.
I think part of the reason these tech interviews are so absurd is people are emotionally terrified of firing people, so they take great pains to ensure they won't have to. I'm just speculating though.
Depends on the culture of the people. I have experienced numerous instances where an Indian candidate is not who they claim to be. Person X is hired, person Y shows up. Person X conducts the phone interview for person Y. And so on. And this has happened for not just me.
He's a contractor. That's the difference between him and an employee: He chooses the time, place, and manner of his work, including subcontracting it. If he's not allowed to do this, chances are you have an employee.
Not true, limitations on subcontracting (or at least limiting it to approved subcontractors) are allowed and common. Just because he’s a contractor doesn’t mean NDAs are meaningless.
Limiting work to people with security clearances is an example of ok limitations. Adding so many limits that the acceptable people to do work are the single contractor means youve jaut made a constructive way to get around hiring a person as an employee
your statements are unsupported. It is my observation that you are stating spirit of law to your understanding, but not what occurs in law or practice.
If you are controlling how work is done then you have an employee. If subcontracting is unacceptable and you are still hiring contractors then you are just trying to run around employment law, at least in the US
do you have specific citations or is this some ideological stance?
to me it makes zero sense to hire a vetted contractor who can then just toss say, classified data, over to some unknown random. it's a completely untenable proposition.
If you are requireing who can do the work and how it's done you've constrained the person into an employee-employer relationship regardless of what you decide to call. Contracts are like an interface, you are setting up an agreement on what is being provided and don't care about the implementation. When you constrain the contract so much that only a single person can fulfill the contract you are just abusing the concept of contracting.
In the example above with NDAs and security clearance that can be a perfectly valid requirement, but you can't reasonably be upset if the contractor subcontracts out to someone else with clearance who has signed the same NDA
i don't agree with your definition of contracting, but either way i'm particularly interested if you can point to some legal code that forbids a contract from containing a "no subcontracting" clause. that would be quite interesting.
I looked and couldn't find any limitations on subcontracting that werent specific to federal contracts so it likely that my personal view doesn't match up to the law
Absolutely no. The client needs to agree on the other person that is doing the work instead of you.
They will need to check that they have the qualifications and they will need to know who is handling sensitive data.
It’s even valid for the IR35 rule. The important thing is that someone else can do the job upon agreement, but you will never find in any contract for a serious company/institution that you can pass on your job covertly.
I appreciate and largely agree with what you've said, but I think you're neglecting a context where there's an NDA or similar involved, which is what I assumed was meant by "even vaguely sensitive". As far as I know, there's no legitimacy to someone who's signed an NDA somehow sublicensing that NDA without the explicit approval of the issuer of the original agreement.
That's entirely true about NDAs, but then are you really hiring a contractor or just misclassifying full time employees so you're off the hook with employment law?
Just my $0.02... I have worked some jobs as an employee, some as a contractor, and in my experience there is really no difference between the two, other than how taxes (and social security, etc) are handled. My contracting jobs did not give me any more flexibility (and probably all had this "don't use a subcontractor" clause). How much leeway I had in choosing "the time, place, and manner of my work" depended entirely on the company, not on my status as an employee vs a contractor.
That is reality of how contracting jobs are in the current environment, but it is circumventing the law. I also have worked contracting jobs where I had to be there 9-5 and implement the exact architecture outlines by one employee of the client, while the boss I answered to on a daily basis was another employee of the client and not my nominal boss at the consultancy.
All of that is solely to get around to requirements with hiring employees like providing benefits, or needing to pay for increased payroll taxes when the company decides to lay a bunch of people off.
It's not right just because the rule of law has degraded so much that the government no longer enforces their own rules
i'm not sure what you mean. do you have some reference to point to that says a "contractor" can't be expected to not sub-contract or work in a particular place and time? i'm honestly curious.
You don’t get to enforce when and where a contractor works. They can perhaps agree to it to keep a good relationship, but they are not obligated, and if they change their mind the only thing you can do is fire them.
You also don’t get to choose how they do their job. If they agreed to do something for a given price, they can do it how they see fit, even hiring a subcontractor. Don’t like it? Don’t hire them.
If you want control of both of those things, you want an employee. Now, there’s plenty of contractors that will behave like employees for you, if it gets their foot in the door, but if the IRS finds out you could be in trouble.
thanks, but i'm hoping for something more specific. like a us code or something. i'm skeptical that you're speaking to something that actually exists, but i'm happy to see evidence of what you're talking about.
> You don’t get to enforce when and where a contractor works.
i'm not sure what you mean by "enforce" exactly, other than perhaps you mean to say a contract is not allowed to stipulate that, for example, a contractor work during the day to coordinate with others, or work on-site to handle materials in a secure location, or not hand privileged or sensitive data over to unknown random people.
> Where do you work?
at a large company that has both employees and contractors.
He's talking about the actual definition of contractor according to US law. If a person does not have the right to choose how, where, when, and by what means the work is done, they're not a contractor.
this is interesting heuristic guidance on taxes, but this doesn't describe labor or contract law, as far as i can tell.
your link even notes:
> There is no “magic” or set number of factors that “makes” the worker an employee or an independent contractor, and no one factor stands alone in making this determination. Also, factors which are relevant in one situation may not be relevant in another.
> “You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer -- what will be done and how it will be done, the IRS rule says. “This applies even if you are given freedom of action. What matters is that the employer has the legal right to control the details of how the services are performed.”
> You also don’t get to choose how they do their job. If they agreed to do something for a given price, they can do it how they see fit, even hiring a subcontractor. Don’t like it? Don’t hire them.
So, if I want to contract Beyonce to sing at my wedding, I need to make her my employee or she can legally send someone else to do it?
No that's the same as requiring software to be written in Java. That's allowed as you have a business interest. But banning a contractor to use additional employees/subcontractors for their work is not your business, unless it's an employee. Sensitive information can restrict this but you wouldn't send those to a contractor anyway, in this case they'd likely work in-house.
This contractor is working onsite during normal working hours. I am not even judging the situation but from what I can see he is not doing anything himself. He also got hired with the assumption that he would do the work.
Not in my experience. But doing an on-site interview in India is the exception, not the rule. (Note: I’ve done both). And when an “on-site” interview is done, make sure you’re the one who is on-site, and not an Indian agent. Their caste system makes it hard for “others” to be people, and we all know what happens when you dehumanize others.
Let me relate a true story, and then discuss some implications. After dinner one night, many years ago, an Indian co-worker and I started discussing politics. The Indian wanted to know why we didn’t nuke Pakistan in our hunt for bin Laden. I said that the fallout would kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of his countrymen. His response? “They’re excess people.”
If you don’t care about others, then you will use the “other” for your benefit - not mutual benefit. You will be used, you will be lied to, and the political maneuvering will be slanted against you.
Note that this isn’t limited to Indians. It’s, unfortunately, becoming more prevelant in American society, too. In a shrinking world, tribalism (aka identity politics) will be an increasing problem. But Indians have been practicing it for 6K years, so they’re especially good at it.
How is it racism to say India has a caste system and they've had a lot of practice? It has nothing to do with the colour of their skin (or whatever else you usually base "race" on - I'm not from a culture that uses it like that so I don't understand fully), rather it's a given of the country.
"Trust your gut" slides into "culture fit" slides into "I'm not sure someone who looks/talks like that could really do what they say they do" and "This person looks like someone who I'd expect could do the job".
problem is there's two things going on here with "trusting your gut"
his gut was actually mainly telling him the person was great...
but there was something fishy about their work history. Which caused a niggle.
My experience is, and I'd guess for most people who have recruited a lot, when you find someone who is good, it's obvious. So, in this case he probablly had found someone good for the job. ( depending on how they validated the persons skills )
I'd want to give the guy an opportunity to explain... The deception of having worked for a company that he never did is a pretty serious deception, not quite a minor altering of the facts, but I'd still want to know a bit more about the reason for the deception.
did it mean the candidate did it to get the opportunity to interview? and if he didn't do it he may not of got the opportunity to interview? In which cased I may be sympathetic.
Or, perhaps there was bad blood from previous employment? or, is there something more neferous going on, fraud, sexual misconduct, etc. This would be an instant no go for me.
I also thought that people were pretty honest, but after reading this discussion with people asserting that “everyone lies” at work and other people defending the liars, I’m not so sure anymore.
Much better to err on the side of the caution then and add more checks.
Very upbeat narrative, guy sounds so proud of himself. Also very short sentences, is it usual to write so naively, perhaps a kind of mannerism meaning to be true?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadThe tech industry has a similar problem in over relying on the school you've graduated from to filter out candidates.
Because honesty is better than dishonesty?
Maybe. I can say I want to work for a company where management feels acting in the workers' best interests is in line with the company's bests interests.
It's a two-way street.
Not saying that is the case, but the question deserves asking. Respect is a two way street.
See: micromanagement, use of the term "resource" to refer to people, layoffs as soon as there is a bad quarter and the stock price takes a little dip, shoddy "open plan" working conditions, and all the other things companies tend to do. If you have found a better situation, hang onto it with both hands and don't let go!
Blatantly lying to a potential employer will never work out well in the long run. Just don't do it.
Programmers are lucky in that they can take code they've written, and say "see, here's my proof that I can do the job".Other types of jobs (like sales), however, are reputation based, and you damn well better make sure the opinion of the person who is vouching for your candidate is legitimate.
This also goes the other way. I have had companies lie to me about salary structure or working conditions and it definitely hurt my loyalty when I found out that I had been lied to.
That is the rule rather than the exception unfortunately.
What recruiters need to watch out for is the candidate (like the one described) that can't control their lies as they can do lasting long-term damage. Everyone else is just tuning their risk-reward calculation.
Your boss lies to you that he can't give you a raise, you lie to the hiring manager that you won't take the job without a 10% bump in pay, your VP lies that the merger won't affect headcount, etc.
Most of the code I write ss closed source and owned by my employer. I never get to show off the cool things I've done. As for doing side projects to show potential employers, I have very little 'personal' time on any given day between work and family life. I no longer code for fun. Now I do chores, read, and maybe sleep a little.
Recruiting processes are so convoluted and hard to break through, that someone who apparently otherwise would have been a great candidate, had to lie to get an interview. Was a good candidate really only one that had worked at the managers previous employer?
How many great candidates are companies missing out on because of arbitrary filters?
I am sympathetic to candidates who feel they have skills but lack credentials, but it is no excuse for falsifying info. Make the strongest case you can about your true history, and you'll eventually connect with a company that values the actual you instead of a fake that will eventually break down.
You think it was just a coincidence that the fake job/reference the catfish had listed was one of the hiring manager's past employers?
> Make the strongest case you can about your true history, and you'll eventually connect with a company that values the actual you instead of a fake that will eventually break down.
This is definitely true and the right advice for candidates who are considering lying to get through the recruiter filter.
There's nothing wrong with asking the opinions of people other than those a candidate directs you to. With both the references and the others, you need to understand what experience they're speaking from and what their motivations might be for telling you what they do. Anything that seems like gossip (not the speaker's direct experience) should be treated with suspicion, either ignored or backed up by corroboration from others who can speak independently; discussing it with the candidate themselves may be important. I'm more concerned about hearing only good things from official references or not.
In this case the candidate said they left on good terms, but given the author's willingness to go beyond what is "considered kosher" says to me that they likely do this all the time.
Even if you're not asking people at a candidate's current employer, if you start poking around asking all of your contacts about someone and it gets back to their current boss, there can be serious consequences for that candidate.
The author even said that one of their contacts said he would discretely ask around about the candidate. Are all of the people the contact talked to going to keep discretely asking their coworkers as well?
In America it is incredibly easy to fire someone--stop being so paranoid.
That escalated quickly.
Checking references is one of the last things we do and insist that one be their a current manager so being "outed" by someone else isn't an issue. If I talk to a non-reference who I think is in a position to know about a candidate's performance, I would make it clear that discretion is called for; that's no guarantee but again, reference checks are the end game, they're either "the one" or maybe one of two if it's a really hard choice.
Clearly that was hyperbole.
>Checking references is one of the last things we do and insist that one be their a current manager so being "outed" by someone else isn't an issue.
What kind of positions are you hiring for where people are OK with this? The vast majority of managers aren't OK with employees who are actively looking for other work, despite what they may say.
I work in higher ed. There are plenty of people with other workplace problems, mental health problems, but maybe university staff are generally more humane (our benefits are compared to the American average).
Yeah I would say that's probably true.
In private industry this wouldn't work at all. Because most managers will retaliate. Mostly they'll just do things like giving you short term grunt work because they don't want you on anything long term. The worst managers will just flat out fire you.
That's inviting imposters. Most regular people applying for a job wouldn't provide their current boss as a reference, but the people who would provide fake references? No problem! You can talk to my current boss, or even my boss in 5 years time, whatever you want!
If a candidate attempted that, I would definitely look into what options there are for consequences beyond not getting the job.
I've never done this when checking references, and I've never known anyone who does it regularly. It seems that there is a disconnect here between your sector and private industry. Your hiring practices seem a bit off to people coming from private industry, so you're seeing people here trying to come up with ways around it.
>If a candidate attempted that, I would definitely look into what options there are for consequences beyond not getting the job.
If you mean legally, no one is going to prosecute this even if their technically could be criminal penalties.
You could sue the person to recover damages, but you don't really have any damages beyond a bit of wasted time. The person they are impersonating could sue the person for defamation, but they'd have a hard time proving damage as well.
You could also try calling up their current employer, but then you're opening yourself up to defamation claims that would have a very clear damage component. Truth is a defense in defamation cases, but you're going to need to prove it and it's not going to be pleasant.
> Your hiring practices seem a bit off to people coming from private industry
I don't care what handful of people think, especially when they seem to be just thinking adversarially and not speaking from experience. None of us are in a position to speak about what practices are prevalent in any sector. But you can now say you've encountered someone who claims to have been a hiring manager that, on at least one occasion, didn't just go by the contact information provided for a reference check.
> If you mean legally
I don't mean anything beyond that I'd have a strong emotional reaction to such a large deception and would wish for there to be consequences so they would regret it and never do it again. Courts didn't cross my mind but in then little that I have thought about it, my guess has been that there wouldn't be anything to do.
I don't think that's true. I've been around long enough to know that insisting on getting a reference from someone's current manager is not a common practice for developer jobs in private industry.
Like I said, it may be common in your sector, but it most definitely is not in mine.
how benevolent of you
If you called my manager and got me fired from my job in an interview process, I'd most likely hire a lawyer and sue you.
This is America so anyone can sue for anyone for anything but what exactly do you think the grounds would be for a suit? I won't call without your consent, I have no intent to cause you harm, if the reference calls go well you'll even likely get a job offer.
The way you wrote it, it seemed you were going to just call the employee's current manager.
I would NEVER give you consent for that. I don't know what kind of screwed-up industry that would ever be the norm in. Doing this is grounds for a lawsuit because it will most likely result in termination of the employee from his current job.
>if the reference calls go well you'll even likely get a job offer.
That's a big "if". The reference call almost guarantees the person will lose his current job.
As for the grounds for the suit, getting someone fired from their job is pretty good grounds for a lawsuit. There's expectations of privacy that go with job-hunting, and willfully getting someone fired from their job will not sit well with a jury.
I wrote, "Checking references is one of the last things we do and insist that one be their a [sic] current manager". I thought that made it clear we ask the candidate for references and that one be their current manager.
> The reference call almost guarantees the person will lose his current job.
Not everyone is like you, I wouldn't fire someone for applying for a job. If you wouldn't fire someone for it either, why do you assume almost every manager is not like you or me and would fire them?
> There's expectations of privacy that go with job-hunting
But by giving me consent to call your manager, that expectation is gone.
Take it with a grain of salt but this post [0] addresses "outing" a candidate.
Q: can a prospective employer tip off my boss that I’m job-searching? A: It’s legal, but it’s really, really crappy.
[0] http://www.askamanager.org/2013/01/can-a-prospective-employe...
However, "It’s legal, but it’s really, really crappy."
Notice the common theme that most people think that outing an employee is crappy, and forcing them to tell their perspective employer is also crappy.
Again, your sector may be different, but that's were everyone here is coming from--it's considered downright awful in our industry.
^ uh, that is very often not the case. Well I guess it is if you are willing to live with any legal consequences that are the fallout of firing someone.
I have a close relative that did a lot of hiring and a decent amount of firing (for legitimate reasons -- they were the type to give people a lot of chances, and genuinely wanted to help people better their situation). Their caution in the firing process was driven by years of experience (both theirs and other manager's experience) where some fired employees that were clearly in the wrong would try to pursue legal action against the employer (even though they had no case whatsoever). Attorney's fees aren't cheap, even if you are in the right.
So it often is not true that "In America it is incredibly easy to fire someone".
People can pursue legal action for anything they want. They can pursue legal action for not hiring them in the first place.
This isn't something unique to firing someone, it is a normal cost of business.
The fact that it isn't unique to the firing process doesn't change the fact that it often makes it more difficult to fire someone (again, even if the case goes nowhere the employer often has to deal with it anyway - costing both time and money).
Here's why that's relevant. Because you're trying to reduce the amount of frivolous lawsuits from firing employees, you decide to be more hiring averse. You interview more people and turn many people down than you otherwise would have.
Each additional person you interview but turn down, exposes you to the possibility of a frivolous lawsuit. If you turn down 50 extra people, you've now opened yourself up to 50 extra frivolous lawsuits.
Hell each additional person who you accept a resume from could result in a frivolous lawsuit.
>The fact that it isn't unique to the firing process doesn't change the fact that it often makes it more difficult to fire someone (again, even if the case goes nowhere the employer often has to deal with it anyway - costing both time and money).
You keep using the term often. Wrongful termination lawsuits aren't common. Lawyers know they are very hard to win without a clear evidence of wrongdoing by the employer, and lawyers generally don't want to file frivolous lawsuits that they know will be almost immediately dismissed.
Lawyers who are willing to file lawsuits that they know they can't win definitely don't do so on contingency, and most people who've just been fired don't have thousands of dollars lying around to pay a lawyer to file a frivolous lawsuit.
Don't fire someone on FMLA, don't fire someone in retaliation for whistleblowing, don't fire someone because they're in a protected class etc... and the chances of being sued are very small.
Firing someone in the US is incredibly easy compared to most of the rest of the developed world. Stop being so risk averse. If you don't do anything stupid, The chance of a lawsuit is very small, the chance of a lawsuit that makes it past an initial hearing is smaller, and the chance of losing is smaller still. The amount of extra time you spend on interviews, the additional risk exposure from interviewing additional candidates, and the lost opportunity from additional false negatives is going to far outweigh any potential risk.
I've heard of plenty of cases of legal action taken because someone was fired. I've never heard of a single case of someone taking legal action because they were not hired. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I just have never heard of a single case.
And personally (and I'm sure the same is true for the relative I was speaking of), I would be never be afraid of frivolous lawsuits from someone who did not get hired (again, because I've never heard of anyone ever filing one). So in my view the point is still irrelevant. However knowing about multiple cases of people bringing legal action due to being fired, I'd still argue that it isn't as easy as people think it is.
And no, I'm not referring to the employer doing any of those stupid things you listed, though some of them were cases where the employer was accused of doing something illegal in firing, but it was unfounded.
I'm talking about relatively small companies for which the hassle of having to deal with these things is expensive - in time lost and hassle dealing with it, if nothing else.
I think that's a really hard bias to get over, even if people don't readily admit it like the author did. Presumably you have feelings about previous places you worked at, and thoughts about the general culture at them ("everyone was great!" or "that place was a dump!").
If you have strong feelings about a place, it's pretty hard not to let those feelings influence decisions like this. It's a bit like trying to be unbiased about hiring a friend: Even if you never admit it, how could you possibly be totally unbiased?
Of course, in an ideal world the ethical thing to do is to remove yourself from the hiring process because of a conflict of interest. That, also of course, can be impossible in some places (no one to take your place, rigid processes that insist you interview or decline the candidate, etc.).
Just going, "oh he wored at the same company as me so I should like him" seems like a frat/sorority mentality
Why is it no excuse? Because we work in a system where the majority of employees and employers are trying to do the right thing.
But that's becoming less and less true - I've interviewed with plenty of companies who have no problem with wasting days of a potential employees time with large take home tests and I've got no qualms about outsourcing those tests.
It's fair to be annoyed when hiring managers shift costs of filtering over to candidates. If it really bothers you, might be a sign to avoid that company culture entirely.
What makes you think the interview process is indicative of the work environment?
Most of the time it isn't.
I've worked at quite a few great places that had ridiculous interview processes.
(This is meant to be pointed, because I disagree, but not rhetorical - I'm genuinely interested in understanding the happy path end to end for this strategy.)
Let's not pretend candidates have equal recourse if a company lies to them about the culture or the job.
Answering a few questions in an interview is just a gut check. The real yardstick is how well a candidate worked for other companies in the past.
Anyone who's tried to get their foot in the door of an industry with an entry level position can attest to this. Even the smartest, most charismatic candidates give employers pause when they're untested.
I would have a hard time believing this candidate was the only one who wasn't entry level. The fact that the catfish progressed so far with that specific fake reference had to be materially important, especially when complaining about difficulty hiring prior to this candidate.
Hell every single job I've worked at had multiple people whose requirements to hire someone were so difficult that they, themselves wouldn't have been hired
A lot of the software worlds application process out of a few tech hubs is just shotgunning applications so that you get your resume in front of enough hiring managers who are having a good day that you get an interview.
We tend to cargo cult interview practices from whomever the big player of the week is (IBM, then MS, now Google).
Then we justify these awful hiring practices by convincing ourselves that programming is so hard that of course we need to put candidates through 6 rounds of interviews and treat people with 20 years of experience like new grads.
Dishonesty is an intolerable trait. This person clearly wasn't a great candidate. Lying at work is just about the only thing I'll always fire somebody for.
Minor lies are such a part of human society that it's a sign of some disorder if a child is actually incapable of lieing
I don't know what kind of world you live in where not blurting out the first insulting comment is considering lying...
Not sharing every thought you have does not make you a liar.
Everyone is not required (Thank God!) to reveal everything that crosses their mind in order to be truthful and honest.
You have a very warped definition of "dishonesty".
I'm honest out of the gate. But once they've lied to me, all bets are off.
I'm sure you've never lied as well, except to yourself which is abundantly clear.
How many times did my managers not "lie" to me by telling me that it is impossible for the company to give a raise or anything as a policy right now, while my colleague gets one one week later (sharing salary information is beautiful!)
A trustless workplace cannot be functional. You can point to examples of workplaces that are dysfunctional if you like, but it’s something I refuse to contribute to, or even tolerate. I don’t feel an ounce of remorse for any person I’ve fired for dishonesty, and it’s a practice I’ll continue with.
Perhaps other employers are more tolerant of it than I am, but all people hate being lied to. Some people do use lies to get ahead, but it comes at the expense of integrity, and youre equally capable of getting ahead with honesty and integrity (qualities that most people like, unsurprisingly).
What I'm saying is that in the social work environment everyone lies to some level and it is actually widely accepted so. I googled exactly for 5 seconds and found this article to give you a couple examples:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11652018/10-que...
I’m also saying that a workplace cannot be functional without trust, and that a workplace that tolerates dishonesty will invariably erode it. So unless you want to exist in such a workplace, you should not tolerate dishonesty either.
Finally I’m saying that dishonesty is not a prerequisite for success, and that you can be successful with integrity and honesty, and that people value those traits.
I’m not saying there’s some magical threshold, which below, lies become justified. Dishonesty is not a justifiable personality trait, and trying to defend it demonstrates a lack of integrity.
You’re also confusing dishonesty with a lack of 100% openness. If somebody asks your for personal information, or information they’re not entitled to, there is no moral requirement to disclose it to them. This is the reductio ad absurdum I was talking about.
Usually that's not the case.
Plenty of people lie, often unnecessarily, about tiny things like making excuses for being late but would not lie to cover up anything that has serious ethical implications.
I used to own a business, and I hired people that I knew, nice people. I learned that I should never hire anyone who was not trustworthy, to myself or others, it's just not worth it. One of my friends attended part of the hiring process by telling his current employer that he was sick. This raised red flags in my mind, but I thought, surely he wouldn't do that to me, his friend? Later he did sloppy work and hid it from me with lies, the company almost fell apart. One of many similar stories.
If you have a habit of convenient lies, when the pressure is on and the fear is in your gut, you're going to lie. Don't lie to yourself about it :)
Psychology seems to be way more complex than "once a liar always a liar". Some citation of psychological research would help.
Certainly people can change and improve themselves. I don't believe "once an x always an x" for anything I can think of.
Turns out, what I am saying is all backed up by a study which took about a minute of Googling to find: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4426#affil-auth
"Here we provide empirical evidence for a gradual escalation of self-serving dishonesty and reveal a neural mechanism supporting it. Behaviorally, we show that the extent to which participants engage in self-serving dishonesty increases with repetition. Using functional MRI, we show that signal reduction in the amygdala is sensitive to the history of dishonest behavior, consistent with adaptation. Critically, the extent of reduced amygdala sensitivity to dishonesty on a present decision relative to the previous one predicts the magnitude of escalation of self-serving dishonesty on the next decision. The findings uncover a biological mechanism that supports a 'slippery slope': what begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions."
What he should have done was a) coordinate a time with me when he was off work anyway or b) ask for a day off. He doesn't need to explain why, he could have said it was a personal day, it's not his bosses business. I don't expect someone to work two jobs simultaneously, we'd have easily worked it out.
I no longer run my own business. When I am looking for new employment, I do my current job, and do my job search when I can fit it in. If I need to take time off I take it. That didn't even occur to you?
We're not talking about spewing all your private thoughts to people, we're talking about responding to questions. You take a day off from work to go on an interview, and your boss asks you if you're interviewing. What's your response? People like you apparently spill the truth, and get fired. People like me find some way of lying about it ("I wasn't feeling well", "my kid was sick", etc.) so we don't get terminated before we're actually ready to make a move.
>What he should have done was a) coordinate a time with me when he was off work anyway or b) ask for a day off. He doesn't need to explain why
Wrong. Maybe you wouldn't ask why, but another manager might. You cannot guarantee that all managers are like you. Unless you can guarantee that no boss anywhere on the planet will ask invasive questions in this scenario (following your own advice about asking for a day off, which is exactly what I've done when I went on interviews), then you have no right to expect anyone to be honest. People lie because other people have bad behavior, and those people have greater power. Lying is the proper response to protect yourself.
>If I need to take time off I take it. That didn't even occur to you?
That's exactly what I do too. What makes you think I don't? The problem is if your boss pries, and asks why. I'm not going to tell the truth here, and not I'm sorry if that offends your morality. Luckily, I've had good bosses in recent years who didn't ask, so I didn't have to resort to this, but I can certainly see how someone might have a crappy boss who is nosy and asks improper and invasive questions like this. For those people, lying is the proper response. The boss is obviously bad, which means they obviously need to find a better job, but they're also working on that, and it's unreasonable to demand that they quit their job (or risk being fired) while doing a job search. My most recent job search took about 3 months (though I didn't get really serious until the last ~1.5); it can take some time to find just the right opportunity that you want to jump ship for.
Human social interactions are built on small deceptions. Some amount of dishonesty is required if you want to avoid being an awkward social pariah. If you are incapable of any social dishonesty whatsoever, you will quickly be labeled an inappropriate, self righteous asshole.
Of course there is a limit to those social norms. Dishonesty that exceeds those limits moves from being polite to what most of us consider lying.
Philosophers have debated this question for millennia--it's nothing new.
>empathetic with people without being dishonest
Empathy and honesty are orthogonal.
A proverb on the subject.
Actually that's not true. It is possible to be completely sincere, yet tactful. And you can do it in a way that doesn't come off as self-righteous. I will grant you that it is definitely more rare than it should be, but that doesn't make the opposite a requirement.
I completely and utterly disagree with this. There are too many social interactions centered around a shared expectation of dishonesty.
If your partner's grandmother asks you how the food was, if you answer with anything less than "great", regardless of how tactfully you do so, there will be negative social consequences.
Even in the rare case that the grandmother wants your honest opinion, the rest of the family have expectations about how you are supposed to respond.
If my wife's grandmother had asked me how the food was (assuming the food was awful), I might say "it was very much appreciated" -- and I could say that with 100% honesty, because she would have put a lot of effort into it, and even if she failed, I appreciate that she tried.
Or let's say she didn't try very hard (which would have been unlikely for either of my wife's grandmothers), I could answer with "thank you for making it", or something else like that, and my response could be 100% sincere.
I think the fundamental argument being had in this portion of this thread is that if you don't say everything you think about something then you are being dishonest. I and many others in the thread totally disagree with that assesment.
Your statements can be 100% truthful, and yet not reveal all of your thoughts about a subject or situation. Having a filter doesn't make you dishonest. Some of your thoughts are unkind, some can be even downright evil at times. The fact that you don't reveal these things is often a sign of self control. Words have power, and they affect others around you. There's a reason everyone can't hear every thought you have.
Again, the fact that I don't reveal everything I think does not make me dishonest. If that's your definition of "honesty", then I'm glad I don't live in a world where everyone is "honest" -- it would be a miserable experience.
Absolutely 100% true.
>I could answer with "thank you for making it"
You are carefully crafting a response to the question to make everyone believe that you liked the food without directly stating that. I believe this is completely morally equivalent to leading everyone to believe you liked the food by directly stating it.
I believe that neither one of these things is immoral in any way in the particular case.
Let's say she doesn't accept your dancing around the question? Are you going to keep crafting answers that are technically correct in attempt to make everyone think you liked the food?
I don't think it's wrong if you do so, but I do think that the effect is completely the same as if you'd just said it was great.
> You are carefully crafting a response to the question to make everyone believe that you liked the food without directly stating that.
NO -- see that's the problem. You're making a huge assumption that is incorrect.
"thank you for making it" does not mean "I liked it". And no, it won't make everyone believe that I liked the food (especially since that would not have been my intention in the first place). People aren't stupid. Most folks I know would realize in that situation that I wasn't directly answering the question. "thank you for making it" would not have been dishonest, and it would not mean "I liked the food".
> "Let's say she doesn't accept your dancing around the question? Are you going to keep crafting answers that are technically correct in attempt to make everyone think you liked the food?"
Firstly, you are wrong in your assessment that I would be attempting to make everyone think I liked the food -- in that situation that would not be my intention at all.
Secondly, if I was pressed I might try to move on with the conversation in a different way (without answering) -- which, again would not be dishonest. Not wanting to answer a question is not the same thing as dishonesty. I am not required to tell everyone what I think about everything in order to be honest.
If she kept pressing the question, I might try to answer the question nicely, like "It wasn't my favorite", or "I didn't care for it". Both of those answers would be honest. Being kind is not dishonesty, either. Even if it was one of the worst meals I'd ever eaten, both of those statements would be truthful.
"the effect is completely the same as if you'd just said it was great." -- No, I totally disagree with that. "It was great" would be a lie, "thank you for making it" expresses genuine gratitide for the effort made toward the meal.
You make it sound as though it is impossible to be tactful and truthful/honest at the same time. I disagree.
[ edited to remove a typo ]
Social consequences will ensue regardless of you stating it or not. In this situation, as in many others, a lack of positive reaction is considered a negative reaction.
It all boils down to ego and believing others don't have a reason to look down at you just because you didn't directly state that the food was bad, while in reality you actually maneuvered your way out of the question to willingly avoid this, which is even more selfish.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with ego, it's about being kind to others.
There is simply no way anyone could perceive this as not dodging the question in order to not state what you truly think. This is why I consider it a worse behavior (and with a certainly worse outcome) than just simply lying and saying something along the lines of "it was good, thanks".
In the end, you could either
a) Lie directly ("it was great")
b) Lie by omission ("thank you for making it")
c) Be ruthlessly truthful ("it was pretty bad")
d) Be truthful, but tactful ("it was alright / I've had better, but it's very much appreciated")
In my opinion, b is definitely a worse social behavior than a. Yes, you blatantly lie in case a, but that is a lie with a justifiable goal: making someone else feel better.
Case b is still lying to some degree, and here you are half-lying in your own selfish interest: you want to think high of yourself because you didn't say an outright lie, while still trying not to hurt someone else's feelings. In other words, it's the response someone with needs for self-justification would choose. The worst/best thing is that this behavior is easily perceived, and its motives inferred: worst for the respondent; best for others, who can see her/him for what she/he is.
Yeah I understand that some people try to spin everything their way, and I know it's annoying. My point was that just because someone doesn't answer a question or doesn't tell you everything they think in a situation, that doesn't mean that they are being dishonest.
I don't see how that's not mental gymnastics to say it's not lieing, which seems like a big divide in this thread
It's not a lie because I didn't say something that was not true.
Again you are saying that me not answering a question is equivalent to me lying, and you are simply wrong about that. They are not the same thing.
If you refused to answer the question in this statement that's not lieing. If you said "no, it wasn't good" that wouldn't be lieing.
The entire camp of people in this thread with your viewpoint are acting like a stereotypical genie where as long as everything you say is technically accurate you have done nothing wrong even when you are will full disregarding the extra layers of meaning that are part of human to human conversation
irrelevant. I never said it was.
Also, saying "thank you for making it" isn't answering a question at all, so it isn't "answering a different question".
"The entire camp of people in this thread" with my viewpoint simply disagree with you. You attribute dishonesty to things we would say, when we know that saying those things would be honest.
So you can keep reiterating the same viewpoint over and over again, and I'll keep disagreeing with it every time (regardless of whether I spend the time to reply again).
>Also, saying "thank you for making it" isn't answering a question at all, so it isn't "answering a different question".
Saying that you're not lieing because you are haven't said something that is false out of context, but is still misleading _on purpose_ is the most pedantic thing I have heard all year.
And just don't reply if you are going to be done with a discussion, telling people you might not bother replying to them is condescending and uncivil for this board
That's your opinion, which I disagree with. So from my view it is still irrelevant. I'm willing to agree to disagree on that point.
> And just don't reply if you are going to be done with a discussion, telling people you might not bother replying to them is condescending and uncivil for this board
There was nothing uncivil, nor condescending about what I said. I just said I would continue to disagree even if I didn't continue the conversation.
I think we've pretty much beaten this disagreement to death, and it's time for me to move on.
It's not irrelevant just because you disagree with it. That's not what irrelevant means. It would be irrelevant if the truth or falsehood of the statement had no impact on the rest of the argument.
>I think we've pretty much beaten this disagreement to death, and it's time for me to move on.
Then just move on...stop trying to get the last word in. (I'm not the person you were replying).
Sometimes you just don't want people to know one way or the other. That is the scenario I described.
Many in this thread say that not answering is dishonesty, and ascribe my not answering the question to intending to lead my wife's grandmother to believe that I liked her food.
As I believe I pointed out earlier, my intention would not be to lead her to believe that I thought it was either good or bad -- I was not going to reveal the answer at all.
Leaving someone in the dark with no intention of pushing them to incorrect assumptions is not dishonesty.
Also, people can make incorrect assumptions about what is meant by what is said, even when the speaker has no intention of them making those assumptions.
It is the intention of the speaker that makes omission of information honest or dishonest.
Phrased another way, in software, does one insist on clinging to a protocol's specification if 90% of the implementations misinterpret it, or does one violate the specification in order to ensure that 90% of the implementations interpret it the correct way?
While this debate is occasionally relevant, we know that adapting software to the implementation is the only way to be effective. This is true with people too.
There is a lot of emphasis on tone, but that itself is one of these "social lies" we're discussing. The reality is that people don't care so much about tone as they care about hearing what they want to hear. An overwhelmingly positive tone to deliver a negative message will merely make someone hate you more.
The only way to "tactfully" deliver bad news is to deliver it so ambiguously that it isn't really clear what's happening (and maybe this isn't bad, as it gives the recipient time to mull over the possibilities and gradually adapt to the negative information, rather than getting hit like a ton of bricks).
Anything else will give a negative reaction, and your careful literalist wording that is technically "not a lie" will be interpreted as pomposity, arrogance, and additional deception, despite the extra intellectual effort you dumped into crafting a literally sanitary response.
This is hard to deal with, because it's the exact opposite of the intention for people who are naturally linguistic thinkers, like you and me. We put in the mental effort to be legally and technically correct and it just gets misinterpreted, often silently because "normal" people don't want to or necessarily know how to rebut the statement verbally -- they're content that your "hostility" was conveyed by making any statement that wasn't overwhelmingly positive.
This dichotomy is why lawyers are traditionally reviled. Their profession is linguistic trickery, minutia, and pedantry.
You can approach communication at the surface level of the verbatim information exchange, or you can approach it at the emotional level of ensuring that it conveys the intended, actual sentiment to the people receiving the information. Much of the time, unfortunately, we can't have both.
Concur. I was asked for a reference on a graduating anesthesiology resident who was terrible in terms of his attitude, yet competent enough to practice safely; my reference letter, in its entirety:
"He worked here."
Communication is more than just the literal meaning of the words you write. Most people reading this are going to interpret is a "Do not hire this guy under any circumstances, he is terrible"
I think complete honesty--"Terrible attitude, but competent"--would have actually been more tactful than what you wrote.
Not at all. When people ask "did you like the food?" they want to receive honest feedback, including a perfectly acceptable "actually not that much", at least where I live.
You can teach people that you will refuse to manipulate them and lie to them - and that this is a way to respect their dignity.
It's also unpolite to ask direct, potentially embarrassing questions that put people on the spot. There is nothing wrong in asking people not to do that.
People can find your (polite) honesty refreshing and warm.
That is completely cultural. Many culture have different expectations.
>People can find your (polite) honesty refreshing and warm.
In many cultures, including large parts of the US, politeness is often valued more than honesty--polite lies in such cases are a required a social convention. In any culture there will be consequences to ignoring social convention. Perhaps you are willing to accept those consequences. Some people have the social capital to flaunt convention, and some people choose to live with the stigma, but there is a stigma.
For example, if you were to answer "actually not that much" at my grandmother's house, you'd at a very minimum get a sideways glance from most people at the table.
To address the examples in the link given:
1. "Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?". There are honest ways of answering this question, or at least not-dishonest answers, that don't entail volunteering information that won't help you.
2. "Are you hungover?". Don't get shitfaced on a work night. If they're even asking you the question, you've already lost. Jesus Christ.
3. "What do you think of Bob?". Constructive criticism is how people improve, and many companies have formal peer review processes. If you can't answer that question without coming across as an asshole, it's not because you're being honest, it's because you don't know how to be honest without being an asshole.
4. "How are you?". This is just a synonym for "hello", except instead of saying "hello" back, you say "fine". That's not lying; that's just normal social etiquette. If you really want to be literal about it, you can still be tactful about it.
5. "Why are you leaving your current job?". Usually there are lots of very good reasons to leave your current job that 95% of employers will have no problem with. The fact that there are also other reasons that you choose not to volunteer isn't lying.
6. "Was this a bad idea?". Mind point #3: providing constructive criticism without being an asshole is an important skill. If they're not even willing to accept constructive criticism, then just don't offer your opinion (and find a new place to work). I can almost guarantee you, however, that most of the time, the people who run into this problem aren't the ones who are actually being asked their opinion--they're the ones volunteering it when it's unsolicited and unwanted.
7. "What do you think of me as a boss?". That's just "constructive criticism without being an asshole" again, with an extra dose of, "I suspect no one actually asked you that, and you just volunteered that information and got in trouble for being a tactless buffoon".
8. "What is your greatest weakness?". This is a shitty interview question, and you should respond with a joke about your favorite flavor of ice cream, and if they don't laugh, you shouldn't work there. I think this (and if you actually work places that ask you trap questions that you're not allowed to answer honestly, even if you're not an asshole) is a red flag of a toxic work environment. And yeah, if you're in a work environment where you have to tell lies to get by, then you should leave because that work environment is turning you into a cynical liar who writes cynical listicles trying to drag everyone else into the mud.
9. "Were you at a job interview earlier today?". I don't really have concrete advice for this, because I'm a software engineer and I would have to take a full day off for a job interview. But try changing your clothes or something.
10. "Is Bob cheating on his expenses?". If the truth is that you don't know, then saying "I don't know" isn't lying. If you do know, or at least if you know something, then share what you know. If your office politics have reached the "snitches get stitches" stage where genuine misconduct happens all the time and people can't even report it without it damage their careers--well, then you should find a new job, and you'll have a really good answer for why you're leaving your current job. Figuring out a tactful way of phrasing that is left as an exercise to the reader.
The listicle as a whole tells a very sad story: a story of someone who is trapped in a toxic and politicized work environment where outright misconduct goes on completely unchecke...
That's the argument. Some amount of dishonesty is required to follow normal social etiquette. Saying I'm fine is expected even if you're not actually fine. We have cultural norms for what kind of dishonesty is acceptable. When you exceed those norms, you're lying.
Politely laughing at an unfunny joke, and telling someone that their food is "interesting", fall well within the realm of socially acceptable polite dishonesty. But skipping work to see a ballgame by inventing a fake funeral is considered lying by many (most?) people.
Like most things in life there is a gray area along that spectrum.
I also second what my sibling comment says about lying by omission. I think morally, both are equal.
It's quite different if someone asks a real question such as the example you give about the quality of their food. If I don't want to be honest with whatever level of tact, I may avoid directly answering. I won't choose to lie to them. I don't agree with you if your view is that my unwillingness to declare my feelings about their food (omission) is equivalent to telling a lie about my feelings about their food.
You can chose not to be polite, but you will acquire a reputation. Refusing to play the expected social game will have negative consequences.
You clearly have no problem playing the "I'm fine" game. I'm not sure why you have a problem with the "answer the inconsequential question the way people expect it to be answered" game.
> If I don't want to be honest with whatever level of tact, I may avoid directly answering. I won't choose to lie to them.
If you avoid answering, the person asking will assume you hated it. You might as well just say so.
>I don't agree with you if your view is that my unwillingness to declare my feelings about their food (omission) is equivalent to telling a lie about my feelings about their food.
A moral code that makes harmful omissions perfectly fine, but benign untruths immoral is, to me at least, very bizarre.
The Sopranos version is, Q: "How you doin'?" ... A: "How YOU doin'?"
Even then, if a casual acquaintance asks me how I'm doing and I'm not in the middle of some sort of crisis that I would reasonably expect them to care about, the honest answer is to say that I am fine because my casual mood swings are not what they are asking me about. If it's a close friend or a counselor or someone like that, I should expand more. That's just normal context.
There's a weird fundamentalist notion of "honesty" that implies that anything short of continuously broadcasting all of your thoughts to everyone around you is "dishonest". Perhaps that's just innocent literalism, but I think a lot of that is, itself, a dishonest attempt to establish false equivalencies between submitting a completely fictitious resume on the one hand, and restraining yourself from barging into your boss's office to tell him he's a complete idiot every time you feel cheesed off (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079014).
>There's a weird fundamentalist notion of "honesty" that implies that anything short of continuously broadcasting all of your thoughts to everyone around you is "dishonest". Perhaps that's just innocent literalism, but I think a lot of that is, itself, a dishonest attempt to establish false equivalencies between submitting a completely fictitious resume on the one hand, and restraining yourself from barging into your boss's office to tell him he's a complete idiot every time you feel cheesed off"
Here is what I wrote that you were responding to.
>Politely laughing at an unfunny joke, and telling someone that their food is "interesting", fall well within the realm of socially acceptable polite dishonesty. But skipping work to see a ballgame by inventing a fake funeral is considered lying by many (most?) people.
>Like most things in life there is a gray area along that spectrum.
How does your response follow from my comment? There is no false equivalence on my part--there's no attempt at equivalence at all. I would place a completely fictitious resume clearly on the opposite the spectrum from polite social lie.
Again this your response was to a comment where I agreed with this previous comment of yours.
>That's not lying; that's just normal social etiquette
I even stated that this is the argument I'm making. Normal social etiquette isn't lying.
Where we seem to disagree is on what is normal social etiquette.
I think that politely laughing at an unfunny joke falls well within normal social etiquette. I think that telling your partner's grandmother that you like her food is well within normal social etiquette. I also think that telling a polite lie about your opinion of someone is within normal social etiquette.
I contend that there is zero overlap between what I would characterize as dishonesty and what I would characterize as acceptable behavior in a healthy professional environment.
What we seem to be focusing on at the moment is the relative honesty or dishonesty of polite social interactions, e.g. laughing at bad jokes or claiming to enjoy grandma’s cooking when you don’t. I think there’s likely an overlap between politeness and mild dishonesty in those situations, but by the same token, I don’t personally engage in many of these dishonesties—the polite “fake laugh” is more than I can pull off without coming across as sarcastic—but if you’re better at subtlety than I am, and you fake-laugh in a way that doesn’t come across as either sarcastic or genuine, and you reasonably expect the other person to be fluent and subtle enough to pick up on that, well, that’s not even dishonesty anymore, it’s just non-literal signaling, and after all, etiquette is largely a signaling dance where you show off and feel out how good each other is at subtle interpersonal signaling.
On the other hand, I also advise not dating people who unironically ask “does this dress make me look fat?”, and consider playing along with those games to be dishonest in a soul-eroding way. Although maybe that’s just because that’s a level of non-literal signaling that I just don’t have the patience for....
[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics/
Every single company that more than 2 people is full of constant lies, it's just that most of them are below our collective threshold of being an egregious lie.
Also, do you know what happens to companies that have mass layoffs cloaked in dishonesty? They destroy their own reputations. An outcome that entirely proves my point.
My point is that lieing isn't a binary option. If people told literally no lies our society would fall apart. White lies are social lubricant to get through the day.
This matters in the discussion because employers have made their job positings be full of lies 99% of time. When everyone can expect that a random interaction is going to be mostly lieing then it's moved into white lie category, the same way that if you ask an American "How are you doing" the social expectation is for them to say good or great, regardless of the actual reality
Edit: I think the person talked about in the article has moved way past white lie and into unhireable status, but I feel like the idea that 100% honesty is the only policy is ignoring all of reality
If you are a manager, you heard the CEO say they are going to lay off the bottom 20% of the engineers next month, you know you rated employee A as your worst employee during evaluations, and you then assign Employee A to a new project that's estimated to be 8 months of work, you have not lied by your definition because your CEO didn't say explicitly that they were firing employee A.
If you were a manager and a bank called to confirm an employee worked there so that they could be approved for a home loan, which you know they check to make sure that the employee has a salary that will pay the loan for the near future, you are going to fire the employee next week, and you just tell the bank, "yes he is employeed here" you have not lied by your definition because they didn't explicitly ask if the employee was going to be employed for the duration of that loan.
If you put out a job posting for a set of skills + salary that you know no one will ever take, and then apply for an h1b slot because you couldn't get any candidates, you haven't lied by your definition.
You've made the point that I am trying to win an argument by changing the definition of what words mean, but from my view point that is what you are doing. Human communication is not run through a compiler. There are explicit definitions, implicit definitions, connotations, and even social expectations that all add meaning to our communications, and by saying that you never lied because you are following the exact definition of the words you are being disingenuous
The real process for how something like happened is that the management spend some time assessing the viability of a project > decide it's not worth continuing > make a plan for how to shut it down > inform staff and help them find new roles inside or outside the company. Now, until the plan had been finalised and approved, there is no news to tell anybody, we (intentionally) didn't have any new major pieces of work kicking off during the review period. At no time in this process did anybody lie to anybody else, by omission or otherwise. If my superiors had asked me to help them do this in a way that was morally questionable or dishonest, I would have refused.
Your argument that everybody must lie by omission simply because there are always things that you can't tell certain people is complete nonsense. A lie by omission is to construct the information you present to somebody intentionally in such as way as to misrepresent the facts and mislead them. By itself, not revealing confidential or private information to somebody is not lying by omission.
I'm not going to reply to any more of your comments, because your entire argument is predicated on reinventing the meaning of words, and creating fantasy straw-man scenarios to apply them to.
I apologize if it came off as me saying that you had done these things. I am on the east coast and not in a tech hub for most of my career, and many of the stories coming from the west coast tech hubs sound like utopian fantasies compared to the way I have seen employers treat employees here.
At this point we are looking at the same painting but you see blue and I see red, so perhaps it is best to end the discussion
I agree with what you're saying about withholding information being different than lying but there are circumstances where you will need to flat out lie and fabricate a story to effectively withhold that information. In my case I had to pretend that it must have been a stuck key or something while I quickly reverted the changes and walked them through turning off the computer and pressing all of the keys a lot to "fix" it.
It's one thing to not tell anyone what a meeting between management is about but if you're telling people that you're in a meeting about "Regulatory compliance auditing" while planning a layoff that's not just withholding information. I'm not saying it isn't justified but a lie is still a lie.
Concur. Imagine if we could all read each other's minds: things would go downhill in a New York zeptosecond.
That statement seems completely disconnected from reality. Not the part about going to find something better, because that is (usually) possible. But managers regularly and transparently lie.
It sounds like you’re a boss, so I think you haven’t had to experience this for too long and have probably forgotten it.
Also, try not to be so gung ho on declaring who you fire and how little remorse you have / whatever the situation. It does not come off well.
There are those that do, and they have to handle the consequences of that.
>It sounds like you’re a boss, so I think you haven’t had to experience this for too long and have probably forgotten it.
I am, but I also have one myself. I am also fully aware of how dysfunctional organisations can become when they don't value honesty and integrity.
>Also, try not to be so gung ho on declaring who you fire and how little remorse you have
I don't have any issues with discussing my values with others. Especially in an anonymous online forum. Reading some of the responses I've gotten in this thread, it seems honesty and integrity are perhaps not widely valued here. Maybe I've changed somebody's perspective on that, maybe that's a good thing.
It does seem supercilious though, declaring yourself to be so honorable while basically bragging (it seems to me) about firing people.
Maybe, but rarely to the degree that this guy did.
In any case, the CIA and a normal working environment have a lot of differences, so you can’t really take ordinary workplace expectations and dismiss them because they’re not compatible with the CIA environment.
The general issue of this thread, which you lot have forgotten completely as you went nitpicking what is dishonesty and what is hiding sone facts etc, is that, the whole concept of "references" is a fucked up way to cover incompetence and discrimination at hiring, and forces people to spend time in jobs they would rather not in order to build resumes, and tollerate assholes in order to avoid bias when hirers are scuba-diving into your personal history. That seems to me to be a huge breach of privacy too.
Furthermore, those few of you who can have pleasant jobs seem to just plain ignore the fact that most businesses lie to their employees constantly. My only IT job for example, which I started out as a Python backend developer, but then was forced to, before I wrote five-six lines of python, to work on frontend instead, using JS and jQuery, both of which I did not really know? That was sth. I could have avoided if the employer did not fool me into thinking that I would do Django stuff instead. And, I havent done a survey, but generally the amount of stories employers fucking up employees far outweigh the case vice versa. The morale being, most people have shitty jobs, and you lot are being hypocritical judging them while you dont have to endure such things. Lucky for you, but have some empathy.
As for the initial point of this thread, well, while the Catfish is guilty of lying and better avoided, the circumstances that pushed him to do so are just as equally if not more messy. And also, consciously or subconsciously, we seem to condemn lies and manipulative behavoiur when we are on the benefitting side.
Dishonesty which you can detect is apparently intolerable. But dishonesty which you never catch may not be.
That's one of the points of the article, the other being that the candidate apparently showed a solid set of skills in the interviews. Dishonest people are dishonest, but they also might be lazy and thus willing to apply a skillset rather than deal with the complexity of additional, ongoing layers deceit.
The thing about dishonesty (aside from the fact that a person willing to be dishonest about one thing, is more than likely willing to be dishonest about other things too), is that it tends to beget more dishonesty. You tend to have to tell more lies in the future to maintain ones you told in the past. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, you can get ahead on the basis of dishonesty, but only if you lack integrity. Keeping a lie concealed for ever seems to me like it would require luck or tremendous effort, otherwise it's probably not a very interesting lie.
Sure, but that's irrelevant to my point. We typically have $known_small_quantity of cases where we have detected people being dishonest. But we also have $unknown_quantity of people who were dishonest to us without us realizing it-- maybe because we were naive, or because the deceit was so sophisticated, or it was so carefully contained, etc.
> The thing about dishonesty (aside from the fact that a person willing to be dishonest about one thing, is more than likely willing to be dishonest about other things too), is that it tends to beget more dishonesty.
You necessarily based that opinion on the cases of $known_small_quantity dishonesty. Which, unless you are a professional PI, is almost guaranteed to be crude and fairly easily detectable.
Again, the point of the article is that this cheat left little to no traces of dishonesty aside from choosing the same reference. Yes, the author describes the candidate as "too good to be true." But that's after the fact, and after the author admitted that they would have hired the person without the coincidence of knowing the reference chosen.
If you assume from the beginning that "dishonesty begets dishonesty," it leads you astray. For example, how many of the author's current employees are just luckier cheats than this candidate? That's a question you don't ask if you assume dishonesty is necessarily self-destructive.
I'd like to say I second this, but I have to weigh the value of the employee and the size of the lie. For instance, calling in "sick" the Monday after the super bowl. Is 8 hours of PTO so this person can recover from an obviously self-inflicted hangover and not a random "sickness" worth losing a team lead on a project? (Yes, I consider calling a hangover a "sickness" as dishonest.)
He applied for a sales job... Some (NOT ME!!!!1!) would argue that dishonesty is a mandatory trait in that occupation
ducks
Yeah, I wasn't all that sick when I took that sick day that one time, suspiciously close to a AAA video game release, but then the company told us that it was doing great, and a month later we all got laid off, and our satellite office got shuttered. Yeah, I said my subcontracted position wasn't renewed at my last job, when I was actually pushed out by office politics, but then the company told us it just had a great year, and nobody got more than a 2.5% raise, and no bonuses anywhere.
As such, I'll lie to my company whenever the benefit to me would outweigh the amount I'd feel bad about the lying, and if there were a negligible chance of getting caught, because I trust management about as far as I could kick it. I have to do a motive analysis on every official statement, and if the reasonable alternatives might result in damage to the company, such as by loss of critical employees or short selling of the stock, I can't rely on the statement in any way.
I don't have the luxury of "firing my employer" for lying to me, because all of them have done it. If I kept that policy, I couldn't work for anybody [who is likely to be hiring].
So I certainly hope you have been scrupulously honest to all those folks that you fired for lying to you, and that you never passed along the obvious bullshit from your boss to your underlings. You have to give honesty and respect it, in order to expect honesty and receive it.
A hell of a lot. And then they proclaim that there is a major shortage of workers.
A bit off topic, but this adulteration of language — from an obscure pop-culture reference, is a bit silly.
Obviously the author agrees that most people don’t know what the term means or he wouldn’t feel compelled to explain what the heck catfishing actually means in the second paragraph.
Urban dictionary != real dictionary. I guess in another life I must have been a member of the Academie Française. Or maybe just too old to be cool.
It’s so fetch apparently that I and a large number of non-Buzzfeed aficionados just don’t get it.
How about you comment on HN in only Old English from now on, so you can avoid these newfangled spellings people made up?
I saw the documentary on a flight. I guess I'm part of the 6.57x10^-7 percent!
But all of this is irrelevant to the main point: Language is dynamic.
"Anne, who appeared on Adam Ruins What We Learned in School, explains how grammar rules are not fixed in the English language. Language is constantly evolving and we’re the ones who get to shape it -- not dictionaries! So we can all stop correcting each other and just appreciate our different ways of speaking. On the podcast, Anne and Adam discuss how we should think of the dictionary as a field guide rather than the authority on language, how young people think about language and texting, and how Anne helped choose 2000's word of the millennium! Anne is an English Professor at the University of Michigan where she researches the history of English and lexicography. She is also a member of both the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel and the American Dialectical Society." http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins-e...
> "2 : a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes"
Hard to get more "real dictionary" than that.
Edit: For that matter, "ghost" is also in the M-W dictionary in the sense of "suddenly cut off all contact with", you just have to scroll down a bit.
It's so fetch, your own adulteration of language! Don't speak to me about being cool, who started that? Such a silly thing, cool means one thing and one thing only: the other side of lukewarm. Please don't adulterate the language.
By the way the Dutch word is similar: 'katvanger' and is quite old as well.
> Rule #4: Google is your friend.
That are one of the main reasons I don't post with my real name on the Internet, and I don't have an LinkedIn account. I don't want people to interpret what I put on the Internet in their own way when it comes to the decision if they should hire me or not.
I think I understand not desiring to post your name with any other opinions though.
I would much rather fill the Internet with my own content about myself, than leave it empty for someone else to impersonate or disparage me. Additionally, I am proud of what I post publicly — otherwise I wouldn’t post it.
Public personas are a professional necessity, especially in our industry. For example, what if you want to show your contributions to open source? Or your stackoverflow answers?
If you do everything online under a separate identity, then all your positive contributions are unlinkable to yourself. Yes, you can hide any “bad things” you may post from your employers. But are you really posting anything bad? Is it worth sacrificing credit for your positive contributions?
Granted there is always the “nothing to hide” counterargument. That is, it’s not up for me to decide what’s “bad.” A potential employer could misinterpret my words, or otherwise negatively judge me based on my online profiles. But in that case it’s probably better to avoid the relationship anyway.
> Public personas are a professional necessity, especially in our industry
If I wasn't on hacker news, I would assume you were an actor or a radio talk show host. Maybe you're right, and developers need to have a public persona today. But why does it need to be that way? You aren't performers. You aren't politicians.
Aren’t we though? How is a developer on a software project different than an actor on a set? How is a product requirements doc different than a movie script?
An actor can make or break a film just as a developer can make or break a software project.
I actually think there are far more parallels than differences.
The problem with you view is that there are times when your message gets caught up with your identity. Especially, when your message may be against the consensus flow and stills needs to be made, without affecting you in any material way.
Too often today, the messenger is "killed" because of the unpleasantness of the message being delivered.
[Edit: to to too]
If you actually want to know, it’s because when I registered on my first forum in 2004 (runevillage anybody?), I signed up with my AIM username but mistyped the password. So I had to come up with a new name, and 12 year old me thought “chatmasta” sounded pretty damn cool.
I use my real name (milesrichardson) on services where my name is featured prominently and/or I would like people to find when googling me, eg GitHub LinkedIn etc
I dread the day that something negative pops up about him in the first pages of Google.
Then all the self-righteous and arrogant interviewers, distant family and potential friends or lovers, they'll all think that "they got me" by searching my name on Google. They all think they're right with little proof for it. And the worst part is, that just like the guy in the article, they won't tell you. They're silently wrong, thinking they're right. That kind of attitude really pisses me off.
By this definition, U.S. Marshals Service is a bunch of catfishes: https://people.howstuffworks.com/witness-protection.htm/prin...
For a witness the old "we know where you live" is now 100 times more plausible and threatening.
I have a LinkedIn but rarely log into it, most LinkedIn emails get filed into spam.
Missing good opportunities? Maybe. I dunno, it's just never been my thing.
I hope recruiters, at least for developer roles don't use LinkedIn profiles and connection count as some sort of metric in a hiring decision
The catfisher is stupid, he should've looked through the author's LinkedIn profile and saw that the author is connected with Jim, he would have not used Jim as a reference if he had done that.
I've known honest salespeople, but generally sales, as a profession, does not reward complete honesty.
The important thing would be to find out if this guy was lying to hide previous criminal behavior. That would be important to protect the current company from. But if there was no criminal behavior in this guy's past, I'd be interested in seeing if they could hook new customers as well as they hooked the hiring company.
At one point, when I was running my own business, I worked with an alcoholic who was a good salesman. I knew that he could be toxic, so I structured an agreement such that I kept some distance between him and my company. I basically just offered him a generous finders fee. I told him if he could bring in business, I would give him a percentage. We got at least one big contract because of him.
I'm not saying that every company can or should work with such people. Every company is different. But if you know the circumstances of your company, and you think you can get useful work out of someone who has some known problems, then it is possible to structure a deal such that your company wins.
You're assuming that they were caught and convicted.
Displaying this pattern of behavior w/o a criminal history doesn't mean they won't continue said behavior in the job. It's a terrible idea to have hired this candidate and I'm not entirely certain what your motivation is for arguing otherwise.
That's an enormous assumption.
Someone who I had interviewed and who turned out to be a terrible employee (we fired him after 9 months of trying to find something he could do right) listed me as a reference on his resume.
Problem for him was that the hiring manager at the next place where he applied turned out to be a friend of mine.
The world's smaller than you think it is!
Or did the candidate provide fake contact info for 'you' ?
He immediately knew what I meant and said "OK, that's all I needed."
For those who don't get it, the Corporate Response (that any other person checking up would receive) would be "the employee worked in Software Development from MM/DD/YY to mm/dd/yy and was assigned xxx tasks" with no further comment.
That worries me if I need to enter the job market. I have no social media profile with my name attached to it. I don't enjoy the facebook/twitter/instagram style sites.
?? These are the most important references. Many excellent candidates won't have a back connection but when they are possible they can make an important difference two ways: One is the way described here (or, "this person was OK but doesn't sound like they would work out for the kind of thing you want -- that was where they failed with us too."). The other is the opposite, which has happened to me twice: "Oh that person? Look, if you don't take them let them know we'd really like them back" (on a candidate who barely made it through the interview but there was enough something there that we decided to do some background checking. Turned out he was simply nervous in front of people he didn't know and gave a terrible interview.). Without the background check we might have missed an excellent candidate with poor job-seeking skills.
Whenever I get a resume with a school on it that I or one of my colleagues attended I always check. I also once had an amazing candidate with 20 years experience in the lab doing just what we wanted. Their resume said that they had a degree from my schoo in X. I of course looked them up on the alum site and saw they had a degree in Y. Now both X and Y were in the set {Chemistry, Physics, Material Science, Chemical Engineering} so clearly had they simply told the truth it wouldn't have mattered -- the 20 years of experience would have said enough for anyone who actually cared about degrees after all that time. But since they lied...the resume went into the trash and the candidate was never brought in for an interview.
In what part of the application process did the candidate consent to you letting anyone you choose know they are looking for a job?
afaik, a backdoor reference is specifically _not_ a reference that was (intentionally) supplied.
Seeing as how there is some debate in this thread, I'd argue that that is not generally understood very well.
That's rubbish. It's generally understood that all parties are expected to perform due diligence. What do you think people do with the connection graph linkedin displays?
I've interviewed people who were clear that they didn't want their current employer to know that they were looking - that's fine, and easy to respect. But the article describes a former job on a resume; there's no risk you're going to interfere with their current employment by reaching out to mutual contacts.
Personally, I hope people look me up through the social network... hell, that's how I find all of my employment.
2. Passive diligence (looking someone up online) is very different than active diligence where you disclose to another party the candidate’s status and potentially receive defamatory information.
3. You say you’d “respect” a candidates desire for you to not contact a current employer, but it also doesn’t sound as if you think that is explicitly out of bounds.
4. Just out of curiousity were a candidate to lose their current job (for example), due to word getting back to their current employer due to your Backdoor Checks - what level of responsibility are you prepared to personally undertake? Seems to me that people should be exceedingly cautious that their actions don’t result in someone losing their livelihood due to a gossipy former colleague....
1. "If they're looking for another job, they can have no guarantee of secrecy." -- Sure, but is it your job to out someone?
2. "I need a second opinion on their references, just in case they're giving me bad ones." -- So.... what exactly is your threat model, here? "Catfished by a candidate" stories are interesting because they're rare.
3. "If I tell other people they're looking, I can reduce their leverage by making things awkward for them at their current job." -- Hey look! I found the sociopath!
Bonus Thing: It's a small industry, and people don't go away. You've now marked yourself as someone who can't be trusted with knowledge about someone's else career choices.
That's a good point, and I took these as a given: the people you call should be people you know very well, and, typically, don't do this until the candidate has advanced to the reference checking phase anyway (why would you waste your friend's time either?)
Also of note is that the article claims that "if I didn’t do my backdoor checks I would have never uncovered the Catfish", but then later states the "fake manager [was] one out of the two people that I knew from Acme Corp". Had she waited 'til that point, she would have discovered the lie without sharing the information with people who don't (ostensibly--as they are listed on the reference) already know it and without relying on woolly information ("no one has heard of him" does not sound like solid proof that he never worked there, particularly if it's a large company).
When Catfish provides Jim @ Acme Corp as a reference, but with a non-Acme Corp address for Jim, then that's a huge red flag. You either:
1. Reply with "Please provide Jim's Acme Corp work email address." Catfish won't be able to. The end.
2. Call Acme Corp front desk and get Jim's real phone number. Call Jim.
3. Find Jim's real email on Acme Corp's website. Email Jim.
Sounds like the author is a piece of work himself. I wonder if he knows how this post paints the work culture at his company.
It would have prevented "Jim" or anyone else at ACME Corp from being a reference to catfish-er, so requests for a reference from the company would have been denied right off the bat. That would have made it harder to spot the fake.
In the bay area, I often can't even confirm employment because the company has gone out of business, my manager was fired after I voluntarily left, etc...
Literally everything about this story raises the hairs on the back of my neck except for giving false contact info for a manager the recruiter knew by name - esp the, "trust your gut", stuff, which is basically saying:
I have managers who I can't get in touch with, one of whom I've had to tell several recruiters, "This dude wouldn't take my calls when I worked for him, he pretty much just ignores everyone." In those cases, however, I do my best to do a LinkedIn connect and provide a company email. Just because you are (MAYBE) a manager who cares enough to give references, don't assume anyone else is. Many of my past managers are pissed that I bailed on them, because they were shitty managers, but I have 20y in the industry and in many cases that meant more than them.It's a tough game to play when you don't want to be a manager, yourself.
The real reason most background checks happen are so that companies have someone to point the finger at when one of their employees breaks the law. If that wasn't the case then you wouldn't get into situations like background check companies reporting completely clear records when the government has a simple process to show you every sentence given to someone. They stick to third party companies because they are cheaper and don't trigger compliance regulations required by law.
They would go for the better, if slightly more expensive, data source in a heart beat if finding about criminal history was the actual goal
However there is nothing stopping a private individual giving a personal reference even if that person happened to be your manager.
This has been my experience working for large US corporations in the UK.
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1994/7.html
I call my references to see if they were contacted after I've been offered positions in the past it's amazing how little it happens.
I don't check references because I don't give a shit. You're either giving people that like you, or why would you be giving them at all. If you're still employed, calling that person's current job is a huge no-no (could cost them their employment).
What the fuck is so hard about just figuring out if you like someone and hiring them. Telling them fully what goals you expect them to achieve and giving them the tools to do the job. Then if they're not successful, letting them go.
Oh yeah, you'd have to be a good employee yourself and work for a good company to do that.
John Smith worked here between x and x as a tea-boy.
Personally I would much rather someone gave me a factual reference in good time, than an in depth reference eventually. Normally it is also OK for a manager to give a personal reference, ie not on behalf of the company.
They cannot forbid a personal reference.
[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/equifax-breach-fallout-y...
It means that they're not only working leads that come in from marketing campaigns, website, & emails (these are inbound, initiated by a potential customer). Typically means picking up the phone and calling strangers to try and sell them things (initiated by you - outbound).
Sleaziness and moral flexibility in general seems to be a very useful soft skill for reaching high management levels.
So, the person appeared competent and capable, and "may have been our best performing AE" but it's "better to suss it out early" by immediately rejecting him?
Sounds like they should have considered some sort of short-term contact to evaluate the guy. Instead, their ego was bruised, so they rejected him and patted themselves on the back.
Hard disagree, even if this guy is the best that ever was, he's shown his true colors. The second it's beneficial to him, he'll lie again.
As for misrepresenting oneself, what's the actual problem? If he's got the ability to do the job, who cares if he lied to get through the Byzantine interview process? And, as I already said, employers (management) lie all the time.
Three anecdotes come to mind for this topic:
#1
I once sent out a coding test email to a candidate.
Not long after I got an email back from this candidate saying "Hey bro could you do this test for me please." or words to that effect.
Obviously mistakenly forwarded it back to me instead of to his bro who he wanted to do his coding test.
#2
I definitely got catfished but it was by another recruiter who was fishing to try to find out who my client/employer was - he was hoping I'd call the number so he could pretend to be a valid candidate and I would reveal the name of the employer. I took the issue to the job board that the resume came from, and they threatened to ban his company from advertising on their board. Never happened again as far as I know.
#3
I've got about 150,000 resumes in my candidate database. One thing I'd be interested to do is run some sort of duplicate text detecter over my candidate database.
I've definitely received resumes that duplicate text from other resumes.
Long time ago a guy I knew send me a quiz that apparently from a job interview, I pretend I've never received it ("Oh sorry, it must be filtered as spam").
My opinion, you shouldn't hire someone who can fail on a task that as simple as forwarding an email to someone else on such situation.
LOL
Reminds me of the joke about throwing half of your job applications in the trash because you don't want to hire unlucky people.
You'll probably get a double-digit percentage of hits. I google parts from every resume I receive when I'm hiring for a position. About half have bits and pieces copied from somewhere else.
Advice number 1 is probably best : "Trust your gut". If something doesn't make sense it's worth clearing that up.
However, if "isn't working out" means that the employee has behavioral issues that harm colleagues, is inappropriate with clients, steals intellectual property, or something like that, the damage could be much worse—even catastrophic. Of course, companies should be built to be resilient to these situations, but it's rarely "not a huge deal".
All that being said, I agree with your premise that much of tech hiring is "absurd". Too many companies (especially consultancies) are built with a very low tolerance for underperformance, to the point that they don't contribute to the development of the overall workforce.
I think part of the reason these tech interviews are so absurd is people are emotionally terrified of firing people, so they take great pains to ensure they won't have to. I'm just speculating though.
all of this is entirely within the scope of the contract.
"subcontracting" is unlikely to be permissible in a variety of scenarios, especially if the material being worked on is even vaguely sensitive.
when it does happen, it's typically in a larger organizational context and then there will usually be some vetting or approval process.
to me it makes zero sense to hire a vetted contractor who can then just toss say, classified data, over to some unknown random. it's a completely untenable proposition.
In the example above with NDAs and security clearance that can be a perfectly valid requirement, but you can't reasonably be upset if the contractor subcontracts out to someone else with clearance who has signed the same NDA
All of that is solely to get around to requirements with hiring employees like providing benefits, or needing to pay for increased payroll taxes when the company decides to lay a bunch of people off.
It's not right just because the rule of law has degraded so much that the government no longer enforces their own rules
Personally, I wouldn’t talk too loudly about how I want contractors to behave like employees.
You don’t get to enforce when and where a contractor works. They can perhaps agree to it to keep a good relationship, but they are not obligated, and if they change their mind the only thing you can do is fire them.
You also don’t get to choose how they do their job. If they agreed to do something for a given price, they can do it how they see fit, even hiring a subcontractor. Don’t like it? Don’t hire them.
If you want control of both of those things, you want an employee. Now, there’s plenty of contractors that will behave like employees for you, if it gets their foot in the door, but if the IRS finds out you could be in trouble.
Where do you work?
thanks, but i'm hoping for something more specific. like a us code or something. i'm skeptical that you're speaking to something that actually exists, but i'm happy to see evidence of what you're talking about.
> You don’t get to enforce when and where a contractor works.
i'm not sure what you mean by "enforce" exactly, other than perhaps you mean to say a contract is not allowed to stipulate that, for example, a contractor work during the day to coordinate with others, or work on-site to handle materials in a secure location, or not hand privileged or sensitive data over to unknown random people.
> Where do you work?
at a large company that has both employees and contractors.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
your link even notes:
> There is no “magic” or set number of factors that “makes” the worker an employee or an independent contractor, and no one factor stands alone in making this determination. Also, factors which are relevant in one situation may not be relevant in another.
https://legal.uncc.edu/legal-topics/contracts/contract-check...
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/employers-must-follow-s...
https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
So, if I want to contract Beyonce to sing at my wedding, I need to make her my employee or she can legally send someone else to do it?
Since I have little experience with outsourcing to India, the implication here is mysterious to me. What are you getting at?
If you don’t care about others, then you will use the “other” for your benefit - not mutual benefit. You will be used, you will be lied to, and the political maneuvering will be slanted against you.
Note that this isn’t limited to Indians. It’s, unfortunately, becoming more prevelant in American society, too. In a shrinking world, tribalism (aka identity politics) will be an increasing problem. But Indians have been practicing it for 6K years, so they’re especially good at it.
his gut was actually mainly telling him the person was great...
but there was something fishy about their work history. Which caused a niggle.
My experience is, and I'd guess for most people who have recruited a lot, when you find someone who is good, it's obvious. So, in this case he probablly had found someone good for the job. ( depending on how they validated the persons skills )
I'd want to give the guy an opportunity to explain... The deception of having worked for a company that he never did is a pretty serious deception, not quite a minor altering of the facts, but I'd still want to know a bit more about the reason for the deception.
did it mean the candidate did it to get the opportunity to interview? and if he didn't do it he may not of got the opportunity to interview? In which cased I may be sympathetic.
Or, perhaps there was bad blood from previous employment? or, is there something more neferous going on, fraud, sexual misconduct, etc. This would be an instant no go for me.