As far as the migraine bit goes: there are already some sorts of medical discrimination that are illegal to use for hiring in the US, though I don't know exactly what is and isn't currently allowed. But analyzing someone's FB posting to try to find out that they suffer from migraines seems like the sort of thing that violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law and would quickly get shot down. And the Affordable Care Act is already taking steps towards making it illegal for insurance companies to abuse this sort of information. If you don't like the scenario in the article, keep that in mind next time you wonder about whether government regulation is ever appropriate.

The fundamental problem is that the order of operations is likely to be "what is the narrative we would like to portray", followed by "how may we select from the available information to convey that narrative".

The present tendency toward counterfactuality and/or selective factuality in various narratives (notably political, also concerning various other social and scientific matters) doesn't particularly encourage me.

If it is due to blatantly obvious handicaps, that's a different story. But good luck proving you we're passed over because the employer figured out you have headaches.

In my view, there's a pretty bright line between the described business and today's background check companies.

Imagine a meeting with HR. Company is racist. They never really made it into an official police of course but just by joking or sort of non verbal communication they figure out that other higher ups hate certain races. They will talk about so and so's personality "not matching".

It is fairly easy for them to figure out an euphemism used to signal this or that other person needs to be let go because their race isn't "right". Let's call it "personality reasons" or say "restructuring reason". It doesn't matter as long as it never officially put into writing.

It would be an uphill battle to successfully sue for discrimination. One would need to compile historical data and show that people of a particular race have been consistently not hired or laid off once hired.

  >So this hypothetical Narrative Data company would have a largely-illegal business plan, and nobody would notice?

Now folks who've done really stupid things? They might have problems. There is a certain 'maturity' bit that flips somewhere (not uncommonly on marriage or first child) which selects for longer term benefit behaviors over short term benefit behaviors. I could easily see a management/individual contributor choice swing on that data.

But the article plays to the insecurities that are common in people which is sad.

Now, I'd be ready to discuss Gen Y's real nightmare of watching their cool high school friends get old and fat..

- Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends. People who post pictures of themselves naked and using drugs use this feature.

- The hypothetical conclusions drawn are only possible if users post extremely frequently and in great detail. Otherwise, the predictive analytics will suffer from garbage-in-garbage out. Huge companies spend millions of dollars collecting decent data, and the claim here is that a 16 yr-old's facebook profile will have high quality data.

- If the situation presented in the article gets even close to coming true, people will know about it and compensate. The end game won't be all-knowing companies, it'll be SEO for social media profiles that make people look good for a fee.

[edit: removed meanness]

Doesn't matter if they are still accessible to FB themselves tho'!

EDIT: There are lot of companies in online reputation management. Even today.

There are 1,000 different things that can affect your productivity. Maybe her migraines cause 15% "lost productivity", but her enthusiasm causes 35% better quality work, her daydreaming cuts 10%, and her intelligence adds 20%, the fact she's stimulated by spicy food adds 5%, etc.

Companies that might attempt to do this kind of micro-analysis miss the forest for a few trees, will be less competitive in the long run, and over time will die out.

In reality, these social analysis companies will be data mining to find people far to the right on the performance bell curve. They might try to weed out the particularly crazy, but the ones you most want to weed out are masters of deception.

The entire scenario of a highly savvy person having a publicly viewable page that is then used against her is slightly absurd

In the future the pool of jobs that require a human and do not require an Olympian level of focus and dedication that few people can hope to achieve without major sponsorship is going to be quite small. In other words the job market is going to become even more of a winner take all contest, and less of a matching market.

The question the hiring committee will be asking will be "Given her past history, if we hire her will she be one of the top five negotiators _in_our_industry_?" and if the answer is no... then she might not find a job at all.

You apply for a job with a resume. The resume lists the dates you worked various jobs.

So you just go out and comb the social networks to find all the posting times for this person and cross-reference it with their work hours. You've just made a predictor of how much time they'll be spending on your dime trolling the net.

Now perhaps that's only 1 in 20 secondary factors you look at in hiring. But I bet it's easily one of those 20.

Now if you could poll how long I spend on google reader in a given day...

This won't be end of the world or the internet. Not even close to it. Things just will be different in the future and people would accept them.

Or, last year, there was an old friend who'd seen one of my updates pop up in her feed, and decided to send me a quick message to see what I was up to these days. We ended up talking and hanging out quite a bit, and now she's become one of my closer friends, after we had drifted out of touch for years due to moving away.

Without Facebook, would we have been on each other's email list or blog or whatever non-social-network method of sharing info? Probably not.

Those aren't the only things it's done for me, either -- and just two days ago I got another one of those sorts of messages, though it's too early to know if anything more than a quick "oh here's what I'm up to these days, how about you" exchange will come of it. But I think even that's worthwhile.

I'm also not particularly concerned about them having cookied me and learning a bunch of sites I've visited through that. There it's mostly a numbers thing -- out of all the millions of users, I'm not too worried about someone deciding to try to hassle me with my info somehow. Compare that risk with how easy it's made it to reconnect with all those old friends.

(I'll talk about the nightmare scenario of this post in a separate comment, this is just meant to illustrate the positives vs the current negatives.)

An easily maintained wide network of shallow relationships which is extremely useful when looking for a job, or something to do on Friday night, or the fourth person to split the costs of gas when going to a larger event... Basically, it allows you to spam people you barely know in a socially-acceptable manner.

Benefits of a network like that may be far greater than a small group of trusted friends. I'm not on Facebook because of its creepy/stalkery vibe but there is value there, probably a lot of it.

I mean, there are already quite a lot of people who try to do it, but at some point, someone will achieve non-garbage enough results and use them to screen job or insurance applications. Or will just be good enough at marketing to convince insurance company that the results aren't garbage.

It's probably fine for people who can afford to refuse a job offer based on ethical issues, but the overwhelming majority of people don't have that luxury.

This is only a problem if no employer wants you at all - if they have enough safe applicants so they can reject anybody even slightly unsafe.

But that, even if it would happen, not a Facebook fault.

"Well, 9 out of 10 candidates we interviewed has some sort of health problems. Tina is great in all other fronts, I guess we'll just have to live with it."

But regardless, social judgement/ranking is zero-sum game, if someone is losing out due to some social change, others are winning.

It's hard to have a public presence to say, >1000 friends on facebook. As a user since 2005 back in college, I witness my peers and my Facebook usage evolve from 'a social network with personal sharing' to a 'bare wall with a few instagram picture uploads / article sharing, and essentially a contact list'. It's sad, but inevitable - how personal can sharing be, when the friends list is over 1000 and some of whom are no longer actively in your life? Of course no one is to blame but the user (myself) that added too many friends. However, this issue is quite common in many users that approach their 3-4th year of using facebook; less personal sharing, more 'contact collecting'.

I wonder if what everyone thinks of a service that helps clean up the social media, or even more broadly, online presence of individuals. www.123people.co.uk tells you webpages/ social media accounts/ pictures/ articles about a person just by typing in first, last name and a region.

With facebook recently opening up email addresses for companies to target their ads (http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/facebook-crm-ads/). One can only imagine where our information is shared and sold to corporations.

It is a shuddering thought.

I hope its friendly. The selection pressures we're putting on its ancestors (to systematically weed out the people who aren't valuable to us) aren't instilling me with a great deal of confidence.

Combined with the current focus on markets, profits and efficiency, this does not bode well. One could arrive at a complete humanity simulation (without even intending to, just to optimize stuff, there is nothing inherently evil or unfriendly). It will eventually become so good at modeling us (at least, humanity as a whole), that wasteful, inefficient, cluttered actual humans aren't needed anymore.

At the same time we're becoming more and more dependent on the external information processing. There will be no terminator-like war with strong AI. We'll be unable to live without it. We'll just fade away, on autopilot, as we matter less and less, brain function after brain function better handled by computers. It's a bit of a dark future vision, at least compared to the "individual mind uploading and living forever" of the singularity optimists, but I have a hard time getting around it.

If facebook said, "we're going to show potential employers and insurers a report based on your activity" do you think that would be enough to get people to delete their accounts? The average college student isn't going to significantly change their behavior because of a hypothetical job offer in a vague future. Most of the people they know will also be posting party pics and talking about health issues...they aren't doing anything wrong.

As other comments have pointed out, no one is perfect. Everyone has something they don't want people to know, and most of those things aren't a big deal. Even if facebook prepared and sold general reports about everyone's activity, I don't think it would cause enough harm to get people to stop using it.

In my country, they cannot do some profiling because of personal data protection laws (similar to Europe), but I understood that they do use information in that way in the U.S. .

1. Users. Once Facebook users learn that their public data will be used for these purposes, people will en masse make their profiles private. Not everyone will understand what is going on, but everyone with enough Facebook friends will figure out from their friends to make their profiles private.

2. The public. Public outrage is a powerful thing. Data-sharing on such an unprecedented scale would almost certainly trigger public outcry and/or boycott. People have an alternative to Facebook: G+. A boycott would not be such a big tragedy for people. Plus, you don't want your website to be known as the one that can get people fired.

3. Government. This is related to number 2. If enough people get mad, then Congress may pass laws to stop Narrative Data and similar companies from producing personal data mining products.

Somewhat related experience in the past few days - A co-worker who never had known or cared about privacy, all of a sudden asked me how she could change her privacy settings on facebook. Curious as to why she did it - she said it was because of a friend of hers sent out a chain mail message asking for her to be removed. I found it ironic, that for those users most at risk of being exposed to lax privacy safeguards at FB, it was the network and social effects that were most likely to educate them in how to reduce their foot print.

I for one hope this should never happen. Mining your data to do pattern matching whether your are healthy or not? Are you kidding me? We tend to forget there is something "socio technical gap" (as demonstrated by Mark Ackerman - bit.ly/UqlNLI), meaning our social world cannot to be mapped into virtual world using technology since tech is not mature. We will never be able to close the socio-technical as our brains are too complicated.

I fear for our kids if this is future.

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/failing-provide-...

I would not be surprised if the blame avoider that passes for a recruiter chooses the safe route and do not hire the person.

I don't foresee myself ever needing an explicit lie, but it's hard to keep a story consistent over 20 years. The online paper trail is a bit scary. I wouldn't even have a LinkedIn profile but it occasionally comes in handy to have access to the people in the network.

I think more people are going to be burned by consistency risk (even unintentional and non-deceptive) than by what we tend to think of as garden-variety embarrassing stuff.

I also don't think anyone with data mining talent is going to work for health insurance companies doing intrusive cross-site work for less than a million per year (we're talking about work that isn't just unpleasant or boring but actually evil) and I can't see those companies paying that much. They'll hire more cheaply and get crappy work and the world will be fine.

No matter who gets elected in November, by 2015 guaranteed-issue health insurance is going to be the norm, so this health insurance story about reading tea leaves out of Facebook wall posts to ding people's premiums seems far fetched.

I realize it's a bit off-topic, but what factors lead you to believe this will happen by the third year of the next president's term?

It depends what the "dishonesty" is. Claiming a skill you don't have is unethical. Bumping your college degree by 5 years in order to seem 5 years younger is, in my opinion, ethically OK. There's a difference between quackery (faking a skill you don't have, and potentially hurting people) and social status inflation. One is fraud; the other is just how people work.

The problem is that, if you get caught in one of those minimal and ethically acceptable lies, or are just accidentally inconsistent, HR won't make the distinction because of the mythology that small discrepancies beget substantial whoppers. In my experience, this isn't true. Deeply unethical people are so experienced with lies that they almost never get caught in the small stuff.

I don't need to lie because I'm a person of high enough social status that I don't see it useful to fake, and I'm comfortable having an online presence because I foresee that remaining true, but I have no dislike for high-caliber, low-status people who use a bit of creative revision to up their game, as long as they're not defrauding or hurting people.

Does that mean I never lie? Of course it doesn't. We've all done unethical things. Ethical people call those "mistakes" and don't paper over them.

Well, sort of. They call them "mistakes" after they get caught, or, rarer, after they have admitted what they did. Before such time, however, said ethical people don't call their unethical foibles anything, because they aren't talking about them.

I have to agree with the GP's specific point, here. It is a bit sad that the ability to bump your age a bit and perhaps dodge age discrimination has probably now been permanently lost. I find it hard to summon very much outrage about someone trying to dodge age discrimination, which is itself unethical and unfair.

EDIT: I define a high horse as a position taken that is false that I, as an employee, am expected to reciprocate. If I am a resource (expendable), then act and state as much. Don't verbally act as though I am more than that to extract loyalty and dedication. That's lower than dishonesty, IMO.

It's a power relationship. They can lie and get away with it because they have the gold (cf. "golden rule" as "those with the gold make the rules") but you are screwed if you get caught in even a small one. It's important to know how the game works and what risks you're taking, and my strategy is not to lie. But I don't believe that people who pursue other strategies and cheat harmlessly at an unfair game are awful or unethical people.

To react also on the "crab mentality" remark in another post: If the emperor says that crabs older the 1 year of age should be cooked and all crabs start to lie about their age and put others forward as being older (the ones who don't lie) the real ugly face of this mentality becomes clear.

I happen to see it like this: people, e.g. software developers, with the same experience and background attributing themselves as "architects", blowing up their programming experience by years and languages they have never seen.

Inflated resumes are the natural response to inflated requirements. You can't require 5 years of experience in a technology that's only 4 years old. You can't require 5 years of experience in a dozen different things. I won't speculate on the reasons behind these inflated requirements, but they are definitely inflated.

Also, you can't take a set of requirements and carbon copy it for all of your positions. The difference between a junior position and a senior position should be more than just a year of experience. Likewise, the requirements for positions like architect, developer, and tester should not be identical except for "architecting", "developing", and "testing".

In the end, though, you should view job postings and resumes as a very weak filter. People are going to lie, from small tweaks to outright falsifications, and you're going to have to use other means to weed the liars out. Interviews, training, and probation are going to be your tools here, and no amount of inflated requirements or expectations of "professional honesty" are going to change that.

By the way, you may want to Google for Scott Thompson. He was a CEO of Yahoo, until they found out that he had lied on his resume. It isn't just "the proles" who get into trouble because of dishonesty.

P.S. I don't consider it wrong to leave jobs off your resume if you feel like they are not important or they don't show you in a good light. But making up stuff that did not happen, or refusing to answer a direct question crosses the line, and I think we both know that.

Michael says playing with dates isn't dishonest. Bullshit. It's incredibly easy to "play" with the dates (e.g., lie) to hide the fact you're fired from every job you've ever had within the year and it takes you six months to find new employment.

Half this thread is people saying "Don't lie, because that makes you a liar, and nobody likes liars." and the other half is people saying "Just because I lie on my resume doesn't mean I'm a liar because this one time a company did something bad to me so that makes this unrelated occurrence totally okay."

Like you said: disgusting.

Let's say that I fire someone, and I absolutely can't afford a severance package, leaving him out in the cold. Let's also say that the following are the options:

A. He changes dates to make himself more employable. (I'd probably offer a term in severance to give him the ability to do this, but let's assume I forget.) This is annoying, but doesn't really hurt me.

B. He spreads a lie about me that ruins my reputation. Perhaps he makes up a bogus sexual harassment claim and pays other disgruntled ex-employees off to corroborate it. Now I have to deal with a frivolous lawsuit he made up to clear his name, and it may hurt my reputation.

C. He can't find another job, because of the damage that the spell of unemployment does to his reputation, and after his money runs out, he butchers his entire family in a murder-suicide. My name is in the papers as that of the guy who fired him a year before it happened.

Out of these three choices, I'm going to say that A is the one I dislike the least. I'm probably not his biggest fan given that I had to fire him, but I'd prefer the arrangement that minimizes harm to him and to me.

In the real world, people do nasty shit when the stakes are high or when they're desperate. I wish it weren't that way, but it is. Maybe you want to live in a world where people with damaged careers live with the damage. I want to live in a world where people who need to escape their past (even though I hope I'm never in that category) can do so without resorting to more drastic actions.

Half this thread is people saying "Don't lie, because that makes you a liar, and nobody likes liars." and the other half is people saying "Just because I lie on my resume doesn't mean I'm a liar because this one time a company did something bad to me so that makes this unrelated occurrence totally okay."

I don't lie on my resume. Ever. I've never needed to. But I have more pity than disgust toward people who have to reinvent their histories because they have no other options.

If I apply for a job and it's down to me and Candidate X, both of which have n years of experience in software development, I am going to be pissed if he gets the job because I'm an honest person and he's "padded" his resume for every job to where he now has n+2 years of experience.

I think the reason this gets such a visceral reaction from folks on my side of the argument is that there's no way to know how often this happens (my guess is truthfully that it happens more often than not, even just the "padding" of a month or two to hide or lessen stretches of unemployment).

Um, you think that people are forced to "butcher [their] entire family in a murder-suicide" because they get fired? Do you grasp the fact that the government gives unemployment benefits for months at a time? Here's this for an "alternative": stop being a giant douchebag and tell the truth on your resume.

[edit: I'm not implying that you personally lied on your resume, I am using the abstract "you"/"your" in keeping with the example.]

At the start of 2012, I was working for a startup that hired 3 people into the same leadership position without knowledge of the others. (I was one of them; that was fun.) It routinely did that: hiring multiple people for the same leadership position at the same time. The CTO eventually left because he was actually a decent guy and he couldn't stand the ethical compromises the other executives expected him to make.

Promising 3 people the same leadership position at the same time... now, that is unethical.

Once you've been screwed over by a couple actually unethical people, you realize that the petty, victimless status inflations people use don't deserve any real indignation. Let's talk about the real crimes, which are usually perpetrated by powerful, established people hiding behind corporate veils. There are bigger fish to fry out there, and most of them (a) will never get caught, and (b) are enormously successful.

We proles tend to have what Filipinos call the crab mentality: we all keep each other down and stay stuck in the bucket. We heap a lot more ridicule on people who harmlessly inflate their social status with a title upgrade than on the much worse criminals who often hide behind positions of power and diminished accountability.

I'm not a liar. (See other posts about exploder vs. exploiter. I'm at least 2 sigma of exploder, to my detriment.) I have, however, concluded that most people will lie to get ahead, and that there are different forms of it and some are much more decent than others. I don't give a shit about people who move dates around slightly-- not in a world where real crimes occur on a daily basis.

With regard to the "high horse": because there are so many unethical people in business and most of them never get caught, the appearance of being ethical is paramount. Don't get me wrong: it's very bad for you if you get caught even in the minimal lies. I'm not saying it's advisable or wise for a person to play with dates-- if you get caught, you're fucked-- but I'm just saying it doesn't make me that angry if people do it and get away with it.

Its pretty common in human beings to exhibit this activity. We just happen to work in organized employment spaces to see manifestations of these problems in these ways.

The crab mentality. Have you ever taught about it? Middle class people tend to like and hate each other at the same time. As much as they like to help each other they are also jealous of each other internally. Nobody likes the other guy growing or doing better than him. If there are two colleagues at the same financial level, they generally have an untold secret pact that they both will remain the same way for ever. If the other guy ever discovers that you have a secret project to build, sell something new. Or that you have been working off office hours for some extra cash, Or that you have saved and invested to be more rich that him. He feels cheated, that some very sacred pact was broken. Like a contract that binds two people in the same group was broken.

If your projects get out in the open before you can make some money out of it. They will try to sabotage it in a way or the other. Like trying to emotionally drain you out, or try to demotivate you, or scare you by the potential risks of failure. Or if they are shameful, they may just very openly try to kill your project in the best way they can. Many people would have noticed this attitude among friends and relatives.

The fact is most of the people around us are jealous. More than liking their own progress, they hate seeing you progress.

... until you're passed up for promotion because, unbeknown to you, your colleague lied about his experience and qualifications. (this has actually happened to me).

In the end it won't be that bad for me, I'll have to quit a job I wasn't happy about anyways, but I'll have to start at the bottom of the ladder again, or start my own company.

I guess the assumption is that you might be able to "win them over" in person, assuming you get past the first interview screen?

I do find myself having to try very hard to ignore my "experience bias" when hiring infosec folks. My first inclination after seeing a resume from someone with "25 years of information security experience" is to cringe (Oh good, this person has spent 20 years doing C&A's, which are fundamentally useless).

You, not the retailer, are legally obligated to report your purchases and pay the tax.

You've stated your opinion about morality all right. You think it's okay to be a scofflaw (definition: "a person who flouts the law, esp. by failing to comply with a law that is difficult to enforce effectively"), even for tax evasion. Yet you'd look down your nose at someone lying to make ends meet. Tsk tsk!

I'm an exploder, not an exploiter. It's my nature. I'm way too honest and blunt to be an exploiter. (Fuck, here I am being honest about the fact that I don't think dishonestly is always bad and that for many minor forms of it, even though I could never pull them off myself, I'm ethically OK with it.)

But ask your local Googler whether I'd recommend whistleblowing as a career move.

In movies, people like exploders and whistleblowers, but in real life, people think of exploders as a pain in the ass (killing the messenger) while exploiters get ahead. I used to think that exploiters were all unethical, but I've come to realize that some people can be exploiters without being harmful or unethical.

By which I mean, changing your resume from VP-at-48 to VP-at-43 either means that you're lying about how long you've been a VP (which is definitely now lying about experience/skill), or it means you're just moving all of your work experience up a sliding scale to appear younger; in which case you are now potentially lying about your work/experience/schooling as well, as tying that experience to a point in time is more than just human shallowness.

For example, let's say I was a web developer in the mid-nineties, but I decide to change that on my resume to appear more recent (to make myself seem younger). I'd argue that being a web developer in the mid-nineties is pretty far removed from being a web developer currently (so at what point does it become disingenuous...is sliding things ahead a few years ok? more than 5?)

This all seems too "The Secret of My Success" for my liking.

As I said above, I'm an exploder, not an exploiter. I get angry at a rigged game and prefer to expose the worst players, rather than joining them. Call it pathological honesty. I also know that exploiters tend to do better at the corporate-ladder game than we exploders do, and I don't think all exploiters are unethical or bad people.

On average, exploders are better people than exploiters, but a decent person who's an exploiter has a much better shot at getting ahead.

If someone took credit for my accomplishment and it damaged by career, I'd be angry and want to get him back. I'd be incensed if he lied about something material (such as having a skill he lacked) and I hired him, and I'd probably fire him. If he lied about his age or family connections and got ahead on account of the charlatanry, well... it's not good, but I'd rather that he use victimless deceptions instead of the kind that actually hurt people.

Not many ethical folk out there. States with sales taxes report that the vast majority of their citizens don't pay use taxes as required by law.

Anybody who deliberately lies about the year they graduated will immediately become highly suspect in that regard, even if they're probably generally an OK guy. So maybe they're not going to be defrauding people or whatever, but what other small, "harmless" lies will they think they can get away with?

No. Not only is it lying, which is obviously not acceptable, but it is pandering to discriminatory attitudes.

It is not legal to discriminate based on age when employing people in the UK, and thus it should be pointless to lie about age.

Yeah, we more or less have that in the US, too. (The details matter for specific cases, but not for general discussions.)

Yet, we still have people posting job offers like this, which demands you have gotten your PhD in the past two years.

http://parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/old-phds-need-n...

I have a lot of appreciation for "you shouldn't ever lie on your resume," but I also feel for the people who feel they are being discriminated against. If someone black thought that he stood a better chance of being hired by pretending to be white (we used to call this "passing"), who am I to tell him that he should sacrifice his employment for the greater good?

If you want people to not lie about age, take away the incentive to do so.

But, if you're researching, it's trivial. You send out a bunch of CVs / resumés that are identical apart from age. You then compare the return rates.

If it's incredibly trivial to prove, I'd be surprised if it hadn't. (I'd be equally surprised if it had been attempted and shown no age discrimination--it'd push against my priors, but I'd try to keep an open mind.)

In reality, I suspect it's much harder than you suggest to prove, and even harder to litigate on.

Most companies would rather bet on a young 6 than an old 8, because they overestimate their ability to mold the 6 into a 9 (which is actually very hard to do).

That's why establishing age discrimination is impossible. You'd have to generate identically indicative/"qualified" resumes at very different ages, which is probably impossible to do.

You compare this lie on your resume to being "accidentally inconsistent". Tell me: if HR asked you about the discrepancy (maybe the company requires a background check?), would you admit to your deliberate deception, or would you lie again and say, "Oops, must've typed that wrong"? (And then you wonder why HR mistrusts people who make accidental mistakes.)

Maybe you're right and this is a social status thing, but man. It hadn't struck me that the ability to live with a shred of integrity was that much a matter of privilege.

Sorry to be that guy, but it's bold faced lie, as in print.

I have far too much of an online presence to ever get away with lying about my age (I'm 29) or anything like that, so you don't have to worry about me.

I've also had enough experience to know what the real crimes are and what the worst players actually look like. I've been screwed over by people who are actually deeply unethical (like a member of a prominent family who robbed me and threatened to bribe judges if I sought legal action) so if someone benefits by fiddling with dates and making a better story, I don't really give a shit. If you care about these things, then go and do something about the real crimes, which are usually perpetrated by powerful people who never get caught and involve far worse deceptions than a few dates on a CV.

Also, the pile-on that happens to people who get caught in these minor lies isn't a reaction to a lack of integrity; it's indignation at the thought of a low-status individual getting "above his station" (the horror!) I'm lucky enough to be one of those high-status people with a good career and pedigree, but I'm not foolish enough to believe that it comes from innate superiority rather than mostly luck.

As for your "real crimes" argument, BS. You absolutely do not get to excuse one person's unethical behavior just because someone else, somewhere, did something worse. In my day-to-day life, I have practically no ability to bring your prominent robber to justice, nor price-fixing Wall Street CEOs, nor that Kony guy. But that doesn't disqualify me from insisting that my employees or co-workers behave with integrity themselves.

Finally, I don't think I've said anything here to merit what looks like a suggestion that my motivation is "status protection" rather than "integrity" as I said it was. I'm a professional scientist and a professor, so integrity and academic honesty are quite central to my working life. I'm sure there are people out there who do "pile on" only when it's chance to crush some uppity peon, but that's far from the only reason.

(And hey, what's with your final aside about the origins of social status? It's largely true, of course, but what's it doing in this comment?)

Don't lie on resumes. It's not HR that'll be catching them. It'll be a company that's been instructed to just report back to the client with whether things were true or not. And we caught a lot of both innocent mistakes (off by 1 year or so), as well as outright fabrications.

There's no trying to explain that stuff to HR when you're simply sent a rejection letter by a third-party.

Also, some of our clients were required by the government to account for where they've been for the past 5 or 10 years, and requiring paperwork proving where they were (even if unemployed) for any gaps in those employment. People were embarrassed to admit when they were unemployed and so left it unexplained... again costing them a job. Yes the paperwork explained to them beforehand they had to explain it.

And yes, we'd catch the "small stuff" - calling up a training school to verify someone had gone, and then double-checking government databases to verify the school itself was legitimate, running names and credit checks... and telling people "we don't want to hear your explanation for why your resume is inconsistent. Send us paperwork proving it, and then we'll find out on our own if that paperwork is valid" is all a liar would hear.

I do have to admit catching people in innocent mistakes was heartbreaking, and I'm glad I got out before they started offering the social network checking services. But to say someone's so experienced with lying they think they won't get caught... just means they haven't applied with a company that has a good service provider in the background.

Dude. Top people will do work like that for far less. See, e.g., the defense industry, the coal mining industry, etc. And with billions at stake, the insurance companies will pay.

I don't know. In my experience, "you get what you pay for" applies to developers like anything else. If you want the very best people, pay them.

Having said that, I don't know if the GP is right about a million per year. I hope it would cost at least that much to pay for such evil behavior but it will actually depend on what other offers people have. After all, TSA agents aren't getting $1m/yr, right?

I also maintain no FB profile.

My prediction: the "social web" will end very badly. Mostly as the present cohort hits its 30s and early 40s, with concomitant life issues (marriage, children, breakups, divorce, bankruptcy, minor or not-so-minor legal issues).

The real world isn't 4 years of Ivy League experience you want to brag about openly.

As Gen Y moves higher up the career ladder, they'll be the ones making the hiring decisions about the Facebook oversharers.

How information is interpreted depends very much on who's interpreting it and what their objectives are.

Hiring processes are notoriously opaque. Corporations are, very literally, machines for creating one-way flows of liability, shielding management and owners at the expense of the public and workers. What do you think the term "limited liability corporation" refers to? How many NDAs have you signed? What are your workplace's rules regarding disclosure of employment terms and/or compensation?

There's a credible case to be made that much of the present opposition he faces stems from the same root cause.

I recall a comment once made - "statistics is the most important creation of our time, I foresee a future where even the simplest of men would have a basic knowledge of the field."

It hasn't happened, nor will it ever. People are born constantly into this world, and the large amount of development required to get to a point where you have sufficient emotional intelligence is a path littered with mistakes.

By the time you have a cohort stable enough and mature enough, you also have a counter cohort learning from the first obvious mistakes, or arguing against the older group.

So I agree that we're not going to meet some 'perfect state' of emotional intelligence, but I like to think that in the context of today, our ability to process and empathize with a diversity of thought is, on the collective, greater.

People are becoming more tolerant of minor drug indiscretions (cocaine is a nasty drug, but he didn't use it as an adult or let it become a habit, so I'd count it as a relatively minor issue) because society was at an extreme of intolerance on that issue, but I don't think that's a general trend in social acceptance of error.

There's also the significance of current data.

I've made some various inquiries of a few databases, and the profile on me is both sparse and inaccurate. Whether or not this is/will cause me problems, I'm not entirely sure, but I mostly prefer it as it is.

Or to anyone with a conscience who doesn't want to become known as a liar.