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.