What I find amazing is how many just plain stupid resume lies people make. What does a 50-year old executive gain by listing a fake college degree? Nothing. (An

What I find amazing is how many just plain stupid resume lies people make. What does a 50-year old executive gain by listing a fake college degree? Nothing. (And it's not hard to unwind a lie, which you should do as time passes and the benefit of the lie approaches zero while the cost remains constant.) I think what happens is that we hear about the sensational and embarrassing lies. This stuff gets dug up when the decision to fire an executive is already made, in order to reduce severance. If the lie is small and reasonable (slight title inflation) it doesn't much matter because that's so common, but if it's something immensely embarrassing like faking a college degree when he actually flunked out, it gets broadcast. Most of those public humiliation stories are cases of failed severance negotiations in which the company decides to be a dick and play the nuclear option against his reputation to get out of a contractual severance agreement (e.g. extortion against the fired employee.) This is not to condone lying on a resume. I don't, but I think the public shaming that accompanies these digging expeditions is a bit much. When someone is shamed over an irrelevant resume lie, he's usually being shamed because someone (often the ex-employer) wants it that way.