Hacker News Reader

Comment by chickenfries | Hacker News Reader

> However, I am glad that I caught it early before we hired him. If we had hired him, tough to say what could have happened. Maybe he would have been great and our best performing AE. Maybe he wouldn’t have even known how to log into Salesforce.

When you make it to the top by lying, you're considered a winner:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-goldman-gary-cohn-got-to-...

> "I lied to him all the way to the airport," Cohn told Gladwell. "When he said, 'Do you know what an option is?' I said, 'Of course I do, I know everything, I can do anything for you.' Basically by the time we got out of the taxi, I had his number. He said, 'Call me Monday.' I called him Monday, flew back to New York Tuesday or Wednesday, had an interview, and started working the next Monday.

I know there are dozens of other examples, because I hear people talk about how they had to lie to get their first break all the damn time, from people who are now very successful.

View on HN

Them: "What level are you at with Javascript?" Me: "Intermediate to advanced." Reality: Hadn't written a single line of Javascript at the time Reality 1 week after hire: Best JS programmer there (to be fair, standards were intentionally very low and 2 weeks is plenty of time to pick up a new language) Reality After a Year: Employee of the year

You forgot to cite the continuation:

> In that period of time, I read McMillan's "Options as a Strategic Investment"book. It's like the Bible of options trading."

Which is pretty laudable.

An even extraordinary example would be the current president of the united states, which still manages to lie, and people still support him.

>An even extraordinary example would be the current president of the united states

I am not a crook. - Nixon

Read my lips, I will not raise taxes it wouldn’t be prudent. - H.W. Bush

I did not have sexual relations with that woman. - Clinton

We found the weapons of mass destruction. - G.W. Bush

If you like your health plan, you can keep it. - Obama

Does that make it any less extraordinary?

Everyone lies, because the interviewing process itself is a fucking joke, ESPECIALLY in the Bay Area.

If the person can answer all my questions and they have a good attitude, I honestly don't give a shit what got them to that point.

If someone doesn't work out, you can fire them. Yes it's "exhausting", maybe if it's so difficult to manage or run a business you should find a different role for yourself.

I really enjoy hiring personally. I treat it like a two way street instead of "I'm the big boss man with all the power". I remember how I was recruited out of college, I show that same interest in the employee as I want them to show in their career (note, not my company, I'm 100% okay with someone just coming in and doing a good job, not being in fucking love with my product, industry or anything else all these bullshit companies seem to offer).

> Everyone lies

I am clueless about certain things and perhaps this is one of them... but really? Outright lies of pure red-handed snake-oil fiction?

Surely there must be a line between the "HR speak" most must sing along to and reality that does not qualify as pure uncut straight-up lies.

Help me understand what you mean.

For literal people like myself the line between a lie such as "my biggest flaw is I work too hard" or "I have never used illegal drugs" and a lie like "I worked at Acme Corp" can seem thin.

Please explain to me how "this person worked here" compares to "I never inhaled". These two statements do not equalize for me.

Totally similar things. Drugs are irrelevant for doing the job and same is work experience. What matters is skills but they can't be measured most of the time so proxy value "experience" has been invented. But everyone knows that it is only a proxy thing and that very likely you won't be hired if you can do the job but can't "prove" it. So social moral value of lying about work experience has fallen to insignificant levels, for majority of jobs. The only thing stopping people from lying about experience part is fear of getting caught or no need to do it in the first place.

Exactly. I've been pretty lucky in that I've had a lot of good experience, so my lying is with other things, such as making people think I plan to stick around at their company for a really long time when that's very unlikely.

I have to agree with the other poster: I think nearly everyone lies, it's just a matter of what they lie about, and how much. Don't forget that "lies of omission" are still lies. You're not going to get far by being completely truthful about everything. I was lucky that my educational background and work experience have been good (and of course that I come from the right socioeconomic background for this kind of work), but there's other places where I've had to be less than honest (like "why did you leave this job?"). I'm sure just about everyone is the same way to some extent.

They are both lies, but they are different since they aren't equal violation of the social contract. When an interviewer wants to know my biggest weakness, they don't actually want to know my biggest weakness, they want to know how I handle answering a political question where too much honesty is a bad thing. They want me to lie, but only so much. Saying something like 'I work too hard' is too big a lie. Bringing up something that is a real but minor workplace weakness and what I do to avoid it is the lie they want, and bringing up a real weakness is being too truthful.

But when I say I worked at $place and did $thing with $technology, they want to me to mostly truthful. They understand there is some embellishing or generalizing, but an outright falsehood is a major violation of expectations.

HR speak is about giving the desired answer, regardless if it is true, mostly true, or a straight up lie. In some way it is seen as an justifiable reason to lie where as most other lying is not considered justifiable.

this is not a brag but I have never lied in an interview so I have to assume plenty of others have never lied. I have not exaggerated either or told white lies during an interview. Not saying I never lie but never in an interview. If I don’t know sonething I say so. I might follow with “but I can probably figure it out” or “but I think it’s ...” or “I don’t know off the top of my head but it’s the type of thing I look up every few years, implement once, then use the implementation until the next job and promptly forget the details” etc...

I don’t lie either, but rarely get job offers, so I should probably start.

I get plenty but I'm willing to believe much of that was luck early in my career when I had no "job" experience. Met the right people. Was at the right place at the right time. Got lucky my parents supported my hobby. Etc.

On the other hand I made tons of personal projects in junior high and high school so I had plenty to show during my first interviews.

Junior high? No wonder you didn't have problems getting a break, you'd been working towards it since childhood.

The fact that you get plenty of offers probably means you're not in the situation where someone would consider lying to get a job.

Edit: Not trying to criticize you, I'm just trying to point out why you might be an exceptional candidate. But I guess your original point was just that "not everyone" lies, so I suppose I'm just saying that I agree with what you're saying. It's true that not literally everyone lies, but many many people exaggerate, even if they don't tell outright lies.

Fabricating emails and phone numbers, getting others to act like your boss and lie for you is quite far over the line of just "lying in an interview".

If he had passed all the interviews and when time came said he lied because he knew he can do it but without lying he wouldn't be able to get through the door, he would have probably gotten the job, at least on a probationary basis.

But doing what he did means he's completely untrustworthy. That's not something you'd want in an employee.

I worked in a film processing store (before the turn of the century), and one of my workmates there told me how he'd set up a friend to pretend to be a former boss for him. Said friend forgot, my workmate was called in to the business and they told him they would ring the police if they ever heard his name again. Apparently there was swearing.

Same guy found a mobile phone and rang some random number in Australia. Ran up a massive toll bill talking to strangers, and ditched the phone.

Last I heard, he'd got into med school. As you might observe, I'm not sure this is an appropriate field for someone of his ethical caliber.

Will you report him to the school to save potential patients’ lives?

Well, it was almost 20 years ago and I only heard about it long after I'd forgotten his name. Without an actual conviction, I don't think my word would carry much weight and could just cause me a lot of trouble.

Hopefully he's grown up a lot since then, but if he hasn't I can't imagine that kind of stupidity could be hidden forever.

For sure someone that lies to me in the face has not the right attitude. I honestly cannot understand how you can trust someone that lies to get a job. And I can definitely say that you are completely wrong if you think that everyone lies. I never lied to an interview and frankly I can’t imagine why I should do it. It’s a really sad world if lying to get a job seems normal.

It seems normal to me.

If someone asks you "why did you leave this job?" for a place where things didn't go very well (suppose you had a terrible manager there), are you going to be completely honest and slam your former employer, or are you going to just say something about how "I wasn't being challenged enough" or something like that and found something better? You do realize that candidates who trash former employers are much less likely to be hired, right?

You can let the new employer know that you didn’t feel comfortable with the previous manager. And if he asks for the reason you can explain why. It happened to me in the past.

Ok if you make up 10% or 15% but faking references is like all alarms going off. I know it is creative and he had to put in effort to pull it off. But it is not like I would give such person access to any company documents. Account Executive has to have access to invoicing and customer database. If guy makes such fake accounts and all that stuff I can imagine he is going to try to steal company data and run away with it or sell it to competition.

So if someone answers all your questions and have good attitude but then steals company data that can be end of your career in the company as well. Because maybe you were his friend in crime...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com