Not top 50 people but I know someone from our group of teenagers/early-twenty-agers friends who just lied to get hired for a tech company in Belgium. He never went to uni but most of his friends did, so he knew a bit the who's who / hang out with these people and he faked a resume, lied (written down) about having a diploma in economics.
He started climbing the corporate ladder in that company (I think it was HP but I don't recall all the details of this story, it was a long time ago) then after something like 10 years, he started getting cocky and thought that now he could move to another company, boasting 10 years at the previous company and this or that title he had now.
Bad luck for him: the company he applied to did a background check and realized he had no diploma (I don't know how they found out? Is that public information? But they found out anyway).
They didn't just not hire him: they warned his current employer, the one he was working for since 10 years, that he applied lying about having a diploma.
He was fired on the spot [1].
I don't know if there's any moral to this but if you lie and your lie works, you better then keep a low profile for a very long time.
[1] Some are going to ask: "If he was good at his job, why fire him?"*. To me the answer is simple: you don't want a relationship (personal or with an employer/employee) based on a lie to begin with.
I would propose a slightly more cynical model:
It might not look good if it goes public
People with college degrees act as a group. By enforcing the educational cartel they prevent poorer upstarts from competing with them.
When I graduated college (UC Berkeley, very large public school in California) I had to go to the registrar to pick up my diploma since I graduated off cycle. In line in front of me was a guy who seemed to know the lady at the window well, and put down a piece of paper and said "got another list to check". The lady went into the back, so I asked the guy what he was doing.
He told me he worked for a background check company and was there about once a month with a list of names to verify graduation dates. He told me a lot of his work comes from government and big companies. He then suggested that if I was going to lie about graduating, make sure it was to a small company that can't afford background checks!
He also told me that almost every month there is at least one person who fails to have the degree they claim to have.
The general difficulty in checking such things is part of why that form of fraud is so ubiquitous.
>Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance. However, schools must tell parents and eligible students about directory information and allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them.
Doing a background check is the same thing. It’s authorized by the student.
So it looks like your mileage may vary.
IIRC, providing false information about a diploma in California is a felony.
Verifying degree is extremely easy in most cases - the background check company will just call the registrar. It's probably done through an API nowadays.
Personally, if I found out and they could actually do the work, I would let it pass. I'd consider it a white lie in that case.
I think it's more of a harm to society to use degrees as requirements when they aren't actually required. This too is lying, but you won't see companies facing penalties for putting a degree requirement when one isn't necessary for the job.
If someone were to lie to my face and waited until I caught them before owning up to it, then giving them a pass tells the world that I'm A-OK with deceit as long as they deliver results.
If you don't have a degree, don't claim it. If you can still walk the walk, you've still got a chance. If you fail basic due diligence, you're telegraphing your integrity is in question.
No one can afford that.
Let's be honest, I don't think you would ever actually do that in real life ;)
Thos was for a degree between 1999 and 2003.
They wanted info down to the month I started... I had no idea so just guessed a month in 1999... They got back to me to check what was up as they had determined I actually started in some other month...
They even wanted proof of what High school I went to.
Some companies are super thorough!
Seems like there's more to that then just not having the degree.
Your college degree is not correlative to your ability to actually do a job. He probably did a lot more than just that.
What you said and what I said can still both be true.
If they are competitor companies they just got someone fired to cause internal conflict. I assume Company 2 acts greedily and not through goodwill
(I may have misunderstood your first comment. If so, please let me know.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecaster
The thing that would concern me more is the pattern of dishonesty than that the person did well over a long time by just going with their gut.
Is there any good documentation on superforecasters efficacy? Like with actual statistical measurements? Because the Wikipedia article is really dumb.
If someone showed me airtight, verifiably top tier calls over 15 years (especially the last 15) I'd probably rub whatever rabbit's foot they asked.
You get some huge list of fax numbers. You pick some random penny stocks and fax each one a different random pick, telling them it's going to explode. Then you look and see which picks fail and you discard those numbers.
Eventually you get down to a small list of numbers they you've been consistently making amazingly prescient stock picks to for the last weeks/months... then you tell them all to invest in some dogcrap that you've cornered or ask them to buy your latest picks, or some other story to extract a lot of money from them.
The victims rubs your rabbit's foot and you cash in.
Thing is that the same scam can be performed in a decentralized manner, even by accident, just by having a lot of investment advisors some of whom get a consistently lucky run.
You watch all the players for a while and see that 1 player has won every single bet they've made 10 times in a row.
How much money would you be willing to give that person to bet for you?
Now imagine that you talk to this player and they reveal to you that actually they work for the company that made the roulette wheels and that they can control where the ball lands 99% of the time with the computer hidden in his shoe. They even show you the computer and do some example bets to prove it.
How much money would you give them now?
I can tell she is going to say something else, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is. She’s going to share with me how much time she has left. I can hear it in her pauses. After so many years working the phone, I’ve learned to pick out the nuances, the things being said behind what’s being said, entire life stories even, in a hesitation or vocal inflection, in blank moments in time.
It's difficult to explain what makes a pause have meaning or nuance, and yet, this guy may be able to interpret them consistently in a simple phone call without seeing facial expressions and body language. Tacit stuff is really tough to define and nail down. So it's easy to say gut feeling instead. But as tacit stuff finally gets clarified, defined, and explained, we're often able to see that tacit stuff is anything but a gut feeling.