8 ms·

>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

>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.

justherefortart 9y ago
So you've never lied at work?
- AmericanChopper 9y ago
  No, I haven’t. Is dishonesty something you’d like to defend?
  - lovich 9y ago
    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
    - AmericanChopper 9y ago
      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.
    - RoyTyrell 9y ago
      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...
    - nocman 9y ago
      Holding your tongue does not make you a liar. 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".
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    Sure, you get what you give. 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.
ironjunkie 9y ago
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!)
- AmericanChopper 9y ago
  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).
  - ironjunkie 9y ago
    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: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11652018/10-questions-you-should-never-answer-honestly-at-work.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11652018/10-que...
    - AmericanChopper 9y ago
      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.
wolco 9y ago
The cia would not welcome you.
- AmericanChopper 9y ago
  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.
  - gkya 9y ago
    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.
cabaalis 9y ago
> 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.)
jancsika 9y ago
> Dishonesty is an intolerable trait. 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.
- AmericanChopper 9y ago
  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.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    > 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.
rndgermandude 9y ago
>Dishonesty is an intolerable trait. He applied for a sales job... Some (NOT ME!!!!1!) would argue that dishonesty is a mandatory trait in that occupation ducks
dx034 9y ago
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).
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
It's getting caught that's the intolerable trait, let's be honest. Depends on the financial gain tied to the lie.
logfromblammo 9y ago
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.

justherefortart 9y ago

So you've never lied at work?

AmericanChopper 9y ago
No, I haven’t. Is dishonesty something you’d like to defend?
- lovich 9y ago
  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
  - AmericanChopper 9y ago
    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.
  - RoyTyrell 9y ago
    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...
  - nocman 9y ago
    Holding your tongue does not make you a liar. 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".
- justherefortart 9y ago
  Sure, you get what you give. 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.

ironjunkie 9y ago

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!)

AmericanChopper 9y ago
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).
- ironjunkie 9y ago
  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: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11652018/10-questions-you-should-never-answer-honestly-at-work.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11652018/10-que...
  - AmericanChopper 9y ago
    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.

wolco 9y ago

The cia would not welcome you.

AmericanChopper 9y ago
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.
- gkya 9y ago
  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.

cabaalis 9y ago

> 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.)

jancsika 9y ago

> Dishonesty is an intolerable trait. 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.

AmericanChopper 9y ago
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.
- jancsika 9y ago
  > 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.

rndgermandude 9y ago

>Dishonesty is an intolerable trait. He applied for a sales job... Some (NOT ME!!!!1!) would argue that dishonesty is a mandatory trait in that occupation ducks

dx034 9y ago

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).

FLUX-YOU 9y ago

It's getting caught that's the intolerable trait, let's be honest. Depends on the financial gain tied to the lie.

logfromblammo 9y ago

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.