It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. Meanwhile, we talk to lots of great people who don't have LinkedIn profiles; it is by no means a standard requirement. If you can't be honest to LinkedIn, just keep your profile off it.
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.
It's a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal problems with products, trash the environment, lobby the gov't to be allowed to trash the environment or whatever, set up shell companies for nefarious reasons, etc. Yet companies do all that. Lying on a resume is small potatoes in comparison, as horrible as it is.
Facebook et al. can reveal aspects of one's political views. "Oh $NAME went to a pro-legal-abortion march? We don't want those sort of people here...."
It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes.
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.
I would never want to work with someone who felt like lying about the year they got their college degree was "ethical". In fact, I'd really rather not have to think too much about where the ethical line is on "lying" with anyone.
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.
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.
Right. So sick of the ethical high-horse most employers/corporations seem to be on re: honesty, etc. when they show no such respect towards employees. They have no problem smiling in your face and calling you family, knowing that they'll downsize/ax your ass in a millisecond, should the numbers dictate. Classic socio/psychopathic Jedi mind tricks...
No one tells the truth in any and all circumstances. To assume as much is...dishonest.
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.
The issue is that people get fired and sometimes even humiliated over minor deceptions (like "playing" with dates) while companies routinely protect managers who do much worse things that actually hurt people-- things like promising good reviews and writing bad ones, abusing process for retaliatory or deceptive purposes, and hiring multiple people for the same leadership role at the same time. "Rules are for the proles" is what seems to be the corporate attitude in at least 75% of companies.
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.
You happen to see this only in what you call "power relationship". 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. You call this harmless cheating because they kill nobody. It's not harmless because it distorts the reality we all operate in and it confirms the power-relationship-rule. (what age are you talking about anyway? I'm 46, I could tell you about ageism, but telling I'm born in '76 only confirms the ageisms in place)
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.
Without commenting one way or another on the larger discussion, I do have something to say about this:
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.
What a disgusting response. "Someone else may or may not have done something worse at some point, so anything I do is ok."
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.
I don't know anyone, even in HR, who expects a resume to show the whole truth.. But Jesus, are we at a point where we don't expect to only show the truth?
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."
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.
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.
I don't think option A ever hurts the former employer, or at least only in the rarest of circumstances.
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).
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:
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.]
So sick of the ethical high-horse most employers/corporations seem to be on re: honesty, etc. when they show no such respect towards employees. They have no problem smiling in your face and calling you family, knowing that they'll downsize/ax your ass in a millisecond, should the numbers dictate.
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.
Playing fair is too much of an expectation in any part of the world today. The worst part is cheating, unethical activities and all forms political activity to unfairly benefit from the system by denying other deserving people of their rewards is called smart work.
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.
"petty, victimless status inflations people use don't deserve any real indignation"
... 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 think the concern here is that people would edit the year they would graduate in order to escape being excluded because of ageism, a trend which Silicon Valley is notorious for.
It would seem like this doesn't actually buy you very much, because presumably the same places that would exclude your resume because of an ageist bias, would also pass on you after interviewing you (in which case lying about your graduation dates just causes you to have to sit through more interviews with places that won't hire you).
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).
It would seem like this doesn't actually buy you very much, because presumably the same places that would exclude your resume because of an ageist bias, would also pass on you after interviewing you
Disagree. If you transform your career story from VP-at-48 to VP-at-43, your social status changes and the interview is a completely different conversation.
Lying about actual skill is unethical, but people who are able to improve their social status by exploiting human shallowness, in my opinion, deserve everything they can gain in doing so.
Can you imagine how unbelievably stupid and venal and untrustworthy you look when it's discovered that you deliberately lied about the timeline of your career? It's batshit that anyone would even consider it.
I'll jump in and say yes. I'd never trust someone who lies to get ahead, and I'd make sure they knew it. It's sad that some here seem to think honesty is too high a bar; it's really not.
That's not even close to the same thing, whether an online retailer should charge taxes or not is a matter between the state and the retailer to settle and is currently up in the air; though I hear amazon will soon charge but will also introduce same day delivery. That's nothing like lying about my history to an employer to get a job or promotion.
I never said the retailer owed taxes to the state. And as I said, taxing online sales is a currently hot issue and relying on voluntary compliance of consumers isn't going to cut it and every state knows that. This is completely irrelevant anyway, I reject any assertion that failing to pay taxes due (often out of ignorance) on internet purchases is in any way comparable to deceiving your employer and co-workers by lying (on purpose) about your resume to gain social status.
You're rationalizing. It's tax evasion, a crime, regardless of ignorance. Many states have a simple online form for it. That it's voluntary doesn't make a difference; paying property taxes is also voluntary for people who own their homes. These facts are highly relevant: when you're a tax scofflaw it's best not to point fingers at those merely lying.
No I'm not rationalizing, I'm stating my opinion about the morality of the issue. And you're making yet another irrelevant and bad comparison, property taxes are generally rolled into a mortgage and you are given a bill for the taxes due. You're grasping at straws.
People who own their homes don't have mortgages. They pay their property taxes on their own initiative, the same as the honest people paying their use taxes.
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!
No you can't move the goalpost; were talking about lying to raise social status and get ahead, not lying to make ends meet. It's clear you're not capable of an honest conversation, good day.
It's the opposite. Obama, the chief enforcer of laws in our country, said "Our law is by definition a codification of morality." Lying is legal when society deems the lies to be acceptable or not wrong enough. Tax evasion, however, is considered to be morally wrong by society, hence it's illegal.
Still grasping at straws I see, now it's argument from authority, any more fallacies you want to throw out. Laws are not morals, illegal does not mean immoral nor does legal mean moral and I don't care who you quote, you're wrong and they're wrong.
waterlesscloud is correct. It's a crime (tax evasion) for you to not pay your state's use taxes. Much more serious than lying to an employer; at least that's legal.
I probably wouldn't consider it. When it comes to how people react to injustice, shallowness, stupidity (such as age discrimination) there are exploders and exploiters. Exploiters figure out how to use peoples' superficiality, stupidity, and moral deficiency to their benefit. Exploders get angry and try to rally the good to the cause-- they're the whistleblowers.
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.
I guess I don't see how lying about this can inherently not also cause you to have to lie about other things.
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.
I've never lied in a job search, so I don't think I have anything to worry about. First, I've never needed to do so and, second, I wouldn't perform well under that kind of cognitive load. For someone with my makeup, that style of career repair has little upside and adds a lot of risk. So it's extremely unwise.
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.
So you're also against all the little "hacks" that startups are encouraged to do to gain traction? For example making a hundred fake accounts and creating fake "activity", or a one-person startup trying to make themselves seem more established than they are through various tricks? These are all variations on the same theme.
Deeply unethical people may have enough experience to get away with stuff, but there's a huge spectrum between "deeply unethical" and "entirely ethical", which includes many people I would not want to work with or hire.
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?
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.
You're right. It's very easy for me to say "Don't pass, don't use a 'white' name." I live in a country with good laws, and quangos intent on upholding those laws, and free legal advice for people who feel they're being discriminated against. And yet it's still a problem.
Out of curiousity, have people done this study about tech workplaces, particularly in the Bay Area?
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.
The biggest problem with age discrimination is that it's subtle-- not overt. It exists in the form of harsh age-grading for accomplishments, because the delta between the average and the maximum possible at a given age grows, so the average person's deficit compared to where they "should be" becomes more of an issue. No one would pass on a 55-year-old CS luminary who's still writing papers, but 40-year-olds with the careers expected of 35-year-olds are screwed. After a certain age, being merely above average isn't acceptable anymore.
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.
It's a lie. It's a deliberate, baldfaced lie. I don't want "you" working for me. Who knows what other lies you think are okay because they're "just how people work"?
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.
Rats. I looked this up and apparently the original term was "Bare faced" and is pre-shakespear. I had always heard it had to do with print (e.g. a lie told in Bold Face print on the front page). I still think that's nicer than bald faced, even if my version is the wrong one. :)
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.
I've read your other posts, and they don't sway me. (And I put my initial "you" in quotes because you'd clearly separated yourself from this particular form of dishonesty.)
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?)
Even if it was ethically okay, it's more likely to get you rejected for the job than hired, regardless of the lie. Why? HR isn't doing the checking. I did background checks for years at a major company. Our clients were both big and miniscule - you'd be surprised at how many very small business would be able to afford a reasonably priced non-subscription background screening service. If the degree was off by some years, the client wouldn't hire the person because they lied on their resume. It doesn't matter what the lie is, just that they lied, end of story.
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.
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.