Agreed. You should not lie in interviews.
A common way of avoiding having to lie is registering your own consulting company after getting laid off. No resume gap! As far as if it fools recruiters, no idea. It's got to sometimes, right? I see it too often on LinkedIn for it to be useless.
Let's assume that there are facts that a person has a legitimate right to conceal in a particular context. What if the only way to conceal such a fact is to create a false impression?
I would hesitate to call that lying, because the word lying ususally implies that it is not legitimate, which contradicts the assumption.
When pressed it can be as simple as "maintaining a corporation for any work I do (when not working as a FTE/salaried employee) is preferable for accounting purposes". Of course if they press further you should probably have your accounting in order/understand the topic so you can explain this without looking like an idiot but it's unlikely they'd press you much further than that.
"Consulting" is the programmer equivalent of claiming "Entrepreneur" as a job title. Sure it exists, but it generally translates to "Unemployed".
It does not even seem to be limited to IT.
Myself, I've been either an entrepreneur (had a company with up to 12 employees for a few years) or doing consulting pretty much exclusively in the last 16 years.
So no consulting/contracting doesn't mean unemployed.
When Silicon Valley was less toxic, less exploitive, and not so riddled with useless frat boy brogrammers, there generally didn't used to be any stigma attached to being laid off.
I was loyally working at Kaleida (a joint venture of Apple and IBM) for a long time, and then applied for my dream job at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation, but they took a while getting back to me with an offer. But in the meantime Kaleida announced they were shutting down and laying off all employees (after having been steamrolled over by the Java Juggernaut).
Apple and IBM allowed Kaleida to pay out generous layoff packages (even converting worthless "KVAR" virtual stock options to cash) and gave job offers to most of the technical staff (which I turned down, because Interval was much more fun and interesting to me).
I told Interval that I wanted to delay accepting their job offer by a month or so, until after the Kaleida layoff, so I could qualify for the financial compensation in the Kaleida layoff package, and they understood completely and were just fine with it.
During that time period and before, Apple would even lay off batches of employees for a while to downsize, then eventually hire some of them back again, restoring all of their accumulated benefits and seniority.
The real question is, will "consulting" fool the people who would reject you for a resume gap?
No different to any other job.
Yeah, I tend to agree. It is depressing, but we are where we are. That said, I might be naive but I think things are fair most of the time. But mostly because people tend to do the right thing, often nudged by laws and regulations and not because they cannot get away with figurative murder, which some employers do.
> I don't know what the fix would be, but it sure seems like there's something fundamental that needs fixing to make it so that when a would-be employer and a would-be employee meet to decide if they want to work together they meet on equal ground.
I am not sure either. A good step would be to increase the bargaining power of the employees, which implies strong trade unions and a working social safety net. Employers have no qualm making informal agreements and coordinating hiring policies. Otherwise employees or would-be employees have intrinsically the lower hand: if they don’t work, they starve but employers don’t lose sleep over a worker’s life.
In an ideal world, this would be unnecessary because a bad employer would soon have trouble finding workers and an equilibrium could get established. We are not in an ideal world, and the equilibrium is unstable.
I did that one time when I quit for a 4 month break, no one seemed to ask if I had quit yet and interviews went fine?
My favorite piece of advice from interview.io's interview coaching was an emphatic "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview."
On the one hand I agree with you, on the other, you can't pay your mortgage with dignity.
Would I judge someone for fudging the dates of their last employment to get around a ridiculous recruiter screen like this? Absolutely not. Would I judge someone for directly lying about their experience or knowledge? Yes, that’s unethical.
Doing recruiting rounds as a candidate in the early 00's taught me that you have to lie in interviews. All the questions were "give an example of a time when ... " - everyone displayed leadership when they were captain of the national championship winning football team, and overcame adversity when they climbed the three mountains taller than everest in the same day. At the end of the day ... it worked.
Much like social media etc today - real life cant compete with the fantasy of the 100x coder who added $50mil of sales to the bottom line of their last employer.
You should also consider lying to your doctor when they ask how much you drink / smoke / exercise. They will just assume that you are so 2x whatever you say for drinking and 1/10th the amount of exercise you self report - because everybody lies.
True, these places eventually fall away, whether it takes 2,4,6 10+ years. They eventually perish.
You: "because I wanted a new challenge"
We all know that in most cases thats a lie. But if you were to tell the truth you would stand a high chance of being punished.
Why?
But as always, there's lying and "lying". Saying you quit when you were laid off, I would consider lying. Telling you needed new challenges when in fact your boss was so toxic you wanted to quit the universe, not lying.
In the end, a job interview is a courting dance and you'd want to put your colorful feathers on, but at least they should reflect your reality.
Sure, some people would claim "It's just about putting your best foot forward and presenting yourself in the best possible light," but those people are such liars they lie about lying. Lying by admission is still lying.
How would it be any different if you had simply lied about Android experience? As in, you simply were never remotely competent at it and you just said it had been awhile?
Fake it until you make it is age-old advice and you being lucky enough to have an interviewer who cared isn't really an argument against it.