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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

There is a general rule of thumb. People who don't cheat, tend to strongly dislike people who do. People who do cheat, convince themselves that everyone does it, and it isn't a big detail.

Admittedly a ton of people cheat. But as someone who doesn't cheat, if I find out that you did, I'm going to lobby to not have to have you as a co-worker.

I have no idea how many people there are out there like me. Hopefully enough to discourage you from cheating. (Probably not, but I'd like to believe that it is not just a quixotic gesture on my part.)

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In general, I don't cheat, but I don't find any problem with other people cheating, either. I think the difference is that you find the axis on which you are or aren't cheating (in this conversation, a degree) important and worth ranking and measuring people against. I don't. It's a silly game and people can have whatever numbers they like if they (or, perhaps, their parents) really want them.

I like knowing that the number I got was the one I honestly deserved (this is the same reason I never, say, crammed before tests in school--the grade I got wouldn't have reflected my lasting knowledge of the subject), but I know that I can't trust anyone else's degrees/certifications/previous employments and commendations et al. to represent their honest talent/skill/dedication, so it's a bit silly to consider them any kind of useful comparative (rather than self-evaluative) measure.

Like that other poster keeps pointing out in the job threads: if you want to hire good knowledge workers, an IQ test and a work-sample test will get you further than any set of expensive status-signalling criteria ever could.

...if you want to hire good knowledge workers, an IQ test and a work-sample test will get you further than any set of expensive status-signalling criteria ever could.

I have seen data supporting that. However it could also land you in court for discrimination, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co..

Most companies are risk adverse, and hence an IQ test as an admission criteria is verboten.

I believe only the army is still allowed to do it.

My understanding is that anyone can do it if they provide a validation study showing that the IQ test directly correlates to job performance and doesn't discriminate on other protected statuses. My understanding is also that the number of companies that have done this is as close to 0 as makes no odds.

No, it can discriminate on other protected statuses as long as you can prove that the test has a direct correlation to work performance. (Actually, the decisions require 'a strong basis in evidence' of 'business necessity', which you would demonstrate by showing a strong correlation.)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano for the state of the art in I/O psych/job placement/etc.

In practice, the race baiting laws only matter for professions where black employability passes the giggle test, and any topical test can be easily designed to correlate very highly with IQ.

> "In general, I don't cheat ..."

If I were an employer, this statement would make me nervous about hiring you.

Why? The "In general," or the "I don't cheat..."?

In this context, "In general" negates "I don't cheat...". Of course you may just mean that "nobody's perfect". However, there are people who habitually use lying as a tool to gain an advantage or place the blame on someone else. Without the opportunity to know someone better, I'd see little lies as a sign they are this type of person.

> I think the difference is that you find the axis on which you are or aren't cheating (in this conversation, a degree) important and worth ranking and measuring people against. I don't.

I'm perfectly happy to interview and hire people without degrees: experience counts for a lot. But lying about anything on a resume or in an interview is an immediate disqualification.

As an employer I would be very unlikely to hire somebody I suspected of cheating. If somebody's willing to lie to get the job, I have no idea why they'd stop once they had it.

I agree. It's about honesty and expectations, and trust of course. If you have set your character around being okay with lying, that's not cool to me.

If you have set your character around being okay with lying, that's not cool to me.

Obligatory Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/...

It isn't a lying if you believe it.

That's more complicated. Often our beliefs aren't even coherent. (The canonical example is the "I have a Dragon in my garage", where any experiment you can come up with will fail to show the presence of my Dragon, and I know it, even though I still "believe" there is a Dragon.)

So it is possible to lie to yourself. Rationalization, wishful thinking, motivated cognition… As we are on average terrible liars, it's often easier to first convince ourselves of the lie, then repeat it with a straight face.

We can't see into the minds of others, and what I've observed is that many of the people who lie, do not even seem to realize they are lying. They don't accept themselves as liars. They twist their view of reality to the point where the self serving lies are truth. I've seen this reality change almost instantaneously when the needs of the lie shifted.

Think about politicians. Do politicians know they're lying when they lie? I think in some cases this is the case, but I think in many cases they have convinced themselves of the lie for so long that they can't even conceive that it isn't the truth. Probably goes a long way towards making them convincing to others.

I have never met a person that never lies. But they rarely consider it "lying". It is a thresh-hold issue, a matter of getting through life and a balance between morality, convenience, and what level of inaccuracy constitutes falsehood.

"I put that I delivered them tomorrow, because it keeps the books simpler, but can you just sign today? Okay, thanks man!"

I've posted this before, but it's worth posting it again:

None of us could live with an habitual truth-teller; but thank goodness none of us has to. An habitual truth-teller is simply an impossible creature; he does not exist; he never has existed. Of course there are people who think they never lie, but it is not so—and this ignorance is one of the very things that shame our so-called civilization. Everybody lies—every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception—and purposely. Even in sermons—but that is a platitude.

ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING, by Mark Twain http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2572/pg2572.html

The problem is that lying on a resume is very closely related to a situation that will arise in most development jobs and which can really damage a team. Consider a developer who is in a status meeting and is behind or having trouble with their current project. Someone who lies on their resume is much more likely to be one of those people who try to cover it up, lie about the current status, or shift blame. It means that the project lead is always going to be second guessing their status reports and unsure whether to really trust their estimates.

I hear this stuff all the time, "yeah, it is almost done, I just didn't get it checked in...". Probably code for having major problems or sometimes not even having started it. If you get in a work environment with many of these characters, life sucks.

To consider lying on a resume a cheat is to acknowledge that that there is a game being played in the first place, and that the game can be cheated.

Perhaps we should discuss the fact that we have made a game (really, a LARP) out of human survival.

People do lie on their resumes, but it's kind-of hard to catch them. When I was in charge of tech interviews, we had this one candidate who came in, I looked at his resume, asked a few general questions and then started asking tech stuff. I think he had "SVN" listed, and I asked if he's familiar with SVN. He said "no". I said it was listed on his resume. He didn't know what to answer. It was awkward.

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