You seem to be working under the delusion that the worst thing that can happen if you lie to your employer is that you might lose your job. No.
He claimed to have a Master's degree from a prestigious university, that he was awarded the Navy Cross(1 step below the Medal of Honor) and that he played for the 1968 U.S. Olympic hockey team. No one fact checked a single qualification that he listed on his resume, they just hired him.
The sad part is, after they discovered that he was a fraud, they still wanted him to stick around. From what I hear, he did a pretty good job.
http://archive.bangordailynews.com/2003/09/30/jackson-lab-of...
There are exceptions-- sometimes you have to hire legal professionals and very occasionally one might have to hire illegal professionals to make someone do the right thing-- but those are way outside of the norm.
If he does good work and still gets fired, it's probably by a boss who had little choice in the decision and doesn't want to fuck him over, not someone who's going to be vengeful and make a bigger mess than what already exists.
I've never done most of this extremely chaotic shit that I endorse, but I think it's important to have the ethical conversations to shine some light on to things that actually go on.
Societies like to see themselves as existential struggles between lawful good and chaotic evil, but neither of those are major players. (Lawful good is too restrained; chaotic evil is too maladjusted to have a chance unless the world's already fucked.) The real battle is between chaotic good and lawful evil. So excuse my chaos. :)
Don't deliberately lie to employers who ask about your criminal record. The only ones who won't go absolutely apeshit on you when they find out are the ones who would hire you anyways if you just told them in the first place.
Like you, I have a lot of sympathy for people stuck with criminal convictions. We agree there. We'd both like to find advice to help people get excellent jobs despite stupid criminal convictions. My problem with your advice isn't with its intentions, but rather that I'm pretty sure it's dumb.
What does "go absolutely apeshit" mean? I contend that there's risk of termination, likely without severance. Anything more would expose the individual in a way that most people would avoid.
Also, "employer" isn't a monolithic concept. The players all have different motivations. Maybe HR dings everyone with a conviction. He hides it, gets through the HR wall. His boss likes him. He gets in, does great work for 9 months. Then HR finds out. His boss has to fire him. His boss isn't mad at him (maybe at the situation, but not at him). In that very plausible scenario, yes he's fired, but he gets a decent reference.
If it's between the risk of getting fired later and not being able to get a job at all, then you take the former.
I proposed "odds and evens" because I don't think either of us know which is the better strategy (lie vs. disclose) and I think mixing is the way to go.
In some industries, your advice isn't practical. Tptacek's home base being Chicago probably brings commodities trading firms to the fore of his mind.
Otherwise, your ideas benefit the individual with an almost adversarial approach to companies. Tptacek looks at things from the position of that adversary. Your advice stands to surprise the established order... Instead of relying on the mercy of an all-powerful business benefactor, someone who followed you would continue operating under their own power, through their own exploit.
So it's possible you guys might agree in certain cases but it seems unlikely you'll come to public agreement on the hypotheticals here.
Also, I like your blog.
It's generational, I think. My parents grew up in a time when it was unthinkable to do some of the things I've advocated (e.g. concealing a felony record, using harsh tactics to improve a reference) but, in their time, it was much more the norm for employers to be decent. You wouldn't get fired because your new boss (hired 2 days ago) wanted his high school friend in your position. That happens all the time now. My parents' generation grew up before the corporate social contract fell to pieces. It vanished for them before most of them could get to the top of anything, but they still want to believe in it and have a hatred for the rule-breakers at the top who killed it.
Millennial rule-breakers are different. We never believed anyone took the rules seriously, and we break them from the bottom.
I was born in 1983 (after the apocalypse had begun) and the differences in assumptions are huge. I never grew up thinking anything positive about corporations in general. Specific companies, sure. Microsoft seemed OK, Google was neat for some time. But it was clear even in the mid-90s that most of them had turned brazenly evil and weren't coming back.
As a generation, we are ethical, but we have more fluency with rules than older generations. None of us would think twice about bumping a performance-based bonus to the top bucket (e.g. in finance where that's important for future jobs). That's just something you do. It's none of their business and the lie is what they get for asking. On the flip side, there are a lot of things that most of us find disgusting and truly unethical (war, pollution, oppression of overseas workers) that Baby Boomer CEOs don't seem to oppose.
Frankly, in a world with the Koch Brothers and Xe/Blackwater and private health insurance, I don't give the square root of a fuck if someone decides to lie on his resume. I don't lie, but that's because I have a good resume and don't want to gamble credibility, but other people who do it are a rounding error, compared to the real shit going down.
1. Criminal complaint that results in arrest. Youthful folly can be forgiven, but being caught in a calculated adult deception is pretty much nonrecoverable.
2. Audits of everything he touched, with a view towards uncovering a repeat of his earlier deceptions. Even if he is innocent, there is a good chance that the security consultants and forensic accountants will find something interesting. Something that the detective investigating the case will not understand.
Lying in a job search, while usually unethical, is not always illegal. Most of the lies people tell to make themselves look more impressive or to conceal blemishes are not in violation of law.
Job fraud is pretty tightly defined. If you cannot perform the job (or have no intent to do so) and know it beforehand, you're committing job fraud. It's illegal (it's fraud) and you can go to jail for it. The same is true if you feign qualifications to get a job you cannot legally perform (e.g. quack doctors). Also highly illegal.
However, if your deception makes you a more attractive candidate for a job you can perform, then it's not job fraud. It might be unethical, but it's not jailable.
In fact, job search lies are only cause for termination if the employer can establish (sometimes requiring cavity searches of personnel decisions) that the person would not have been hired were the truth known. If the company only hires 3.5+ GPAs as a matter of HR policy and he turned a 2.8 into 3.7, that's "for cause" (even if he was a great employee) because there is an internally published and consistent policy and he didn't fit. However, if the person concealed a 5-month gap in employment history, that might have been a factor but the onus is on employer to establish that it constitutes "cause".
However, with this particular case (concealed felony conviction) the employer will have almost no controversy on that one when it comes to firing for cause. I don't think anyone doubts that. If he gets found out and fired, he can't expect severance.
Audits of everything he touched, with a view towards uncovering a repeat of his earlier deceptions.
Yeah, he's got to be whiter than white, ethically speaking, from here on out, except when there is strategic necessity. Avoiding long-term unemployment constitutes "strategic necessity". Once you're in check, the way he is, you really have to limit your lies and make them count. Picking your battles becomes key.
The real consequence I'm referring to here though is a firing for cause. Real for-cause firings are rare in our business, so I think we tend to forget that they are a big deal.
I grant you that if he gets fired over this, he shouldn't expect a package. His life is already in a state of fucked-up-ness that is beyond worrying about that he might get fired without severance. He needs to get a job, first and foremost. Severance is almost a Maserati problem, where he is.
Right now, severance is nice to have but not a huge deal. Fifteen years from now when he's getting large (~1 year) contractual severances due to being in highly strategic roles-- he can be cut for reasons that aren't his fault, and job searches take years at his level-- he will want to start coming clean about the felony. By that time, he'll have a track record and can come clean because no one will care about a 15-20+ year old felony conviction.
What you're saying is that you think the job market is so inhospitable to people with criminal convictions that they should endanger their career to weasel their way into jobs. We could debate how unwise that advice was if you were right about the employment market. But you're wrong about the employment market, which makes the risk/reward on what you're suggesting so far out of whack that your suggestion isn't worth entertaining.
I don't have strong opinions about what you do with a prospective employer who at no point asks you about your criminal record. But if you're asked about it, you're crazy if you lie.
Again, let me (tediously) repeat that I don't know you personally; you happen to spend a decent number of words on HN articulating ideas that I find worth disputing, but on the street I wouldn't know you from Adam and I have no issue with you personally.
This may be. That's why I suggested the "odds and evens" (full disclosure with half, full omission with half) strategy. Not only is it hedged but it will also give him data-- which we don't have.
It's obviously better if he can disclose and still get a job. Then he has nothing to worry about.
To be honest, I feel like we're both suburban kids arguing about inner-city gang life. :) We both think we're tough, and we both are tougher than most people in our neighborhood, but we haven't actually been in the slums. We don't have the data. I guess that's a good thing, given the nature of what we're arguing about.
I'm glad that you're arguing the other side of this, though, because we're talking about Serious Shit and OP needs to hear all sides.
Perhaps not in the Valley, but I don't believe the OP provided his location.
I'm not in the Valley and I speak from experience when I say that it is extremely difficult to find employment in any industry w/ a felony conviction.
Due to the nature of the information we sometimes have access to, it is (in many cases) more difficult to find a job in the tech industry.