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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that what you are getting is people who are both decently clever and fairly dishonest.

Which is an awful combination to select for, imo

I've thought this of every personality test a job has offered. And in my experience it was never even a good job giving it - the last one I took was for a beer delivery driver 20 years ago.

The tests are usually so obvious, too. Like three awful traits and one good one. Coincidentally(or not?) I was rejected for that job for scoring too high overall - they said there's no way I'd stick around long, and they were absolutely right.

Not clever honest people are taken advantage of

Not clever dishonest people can do ok sometimes

Clever honest people can be moderately successful, but can always be out-maneuvered by the clever dishonest people, thereby limiting how high they can climb,

Clever dishonest people rule the world.

So true. How does one become dishonest?

I can tell you how.

Compartmentalizing by treating business as a “game” that honest people are simply playing poorly seems to be a place many start, if they want to be able to continue to see themselves as honest.

Once it’s just a game, and deception is part of it… why, you’re not even behaving unethically!

Empathy. Remove it. Don't necessarily steal willy nilly, but see people as pawns on a board to get you to the next stage of the game. You're not concerned with doing a good job, you're concerned with learning the players; their personality, their weaknesses, the power structure, etc.

Your goal is to move up the ladder and move quick. Get friendly with boss, the hold it over them. then get to the next step. maybe you need to pretend to fit in, maybe lie about qualifications. That's part of the board. Get powerful people to like you, get powerful tools and resources, and keep moving up.

Many stop around middle management since you start to need more money to push further, but it's a similar game as you go farther up, you just end up fighting against more players that may or may not be cleverer than yourself (and likely much more dishonest).

It seems you have given this considerable thought...

I like how that is already impossible, and that in only two sentences

> So true.... Become dishonest

Win the second, will loose the first

I think that's it really. You give up a great deal. Dishonest people don't realize how much they've given up. They surround themselves with equally dishonest people, and then wonder why they can't trust anyone.

A small percentage of "clever dishonest people" rule the world. Unless one hits the stratosphere quickly there will be a downfall, because time is the enemy of major dishonesty. In other words, most of the world-ruling class are dishonest, but most dishonest people (even clever ones) are not world rulers.

An alternative take from Venkatesh Rao managed two narrow it down just to 3 types of people in his Gervais Principle [1]

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Compulsively dishonest people don't rule the world at all. If you can't resist stealing petty cash from the Burger King till then you'll eventually be found out and slapped down.

99% honest people rule the world because of the sneaky 1% of cases where they cheat and make it count.

>the sneaky 1% of cases where they cheat and make it count.

I'd count that under "clever but dishonest". I do agree most people aren't clever, but enough are.

maybe I'm cynical but I think it's selecting for moderately or reasonably dishonest, the dishonesty of the median. I think you'd have to be extremely honest to think huh, this is an absolutely bullshit test that if I answer honestly on just this part here means I won't get the job I want (assuming that you are only bad on a single metric) but I am going to answer honestly no matter what.

Hmm, but maybe they have that baked into the test!? If you slightly fail one of the bad metrics and none of the others they rate you super honest and hire you immediately! Science says we should definitely try to figure this out.

> maybe I'm cynical but I think it's selecting for moderately or reasonably dishonest, the dishonesty of the median

I feel like that's accurate. After all, I did describe it as "fairly" dishonest, not "very" or "extremely" dishonest.

Lying on personality tests is definitely an average, socially expected amount of dishonesty.

OK I had read fairly as being significantly above average, thus my response.

Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire isn't dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game by the rules isn't dishonest.

You'd rather clever enough but defiant employees?

Or not clever and some other combo?

Being honest is realizing your situation and making tradeoffs to prioritize what's important. Pretending that your ability to call out weaknesses in the interview process makes you the best candidate is dishonest. If you feel that's more important you are forgetting why you are part of this process in the first place. If the outcome is they get a better interview process because of your feedback but you don't get the role, you failed in your original purpose. You need to be honest with yourself why you even applied in the first place.

> Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire isn't dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game by the rules isn't dishonest.

Answering in a way that is not consistent with what you truly feel or believe is dishonest. I don't think it's an amoral dishonesty, as you say, you've been forced to play this dumb game. There are many cases where being untruthful is not morally wrong.

> Being honest is realizing your situation and making tradeoffs to prioritize what's important.

I wouldn't say that's 'being honest', it's being pragmatic.

> Answering in a way that is not consistent with what you truly feel or believe is dishonest. I don't think it's an amoral dishonesty, as you say, you've been forced to play this dumb game. There are many cases where being untruthful is not morally wrong

Thank you for this reply, I couldn't have said it better. It's important that people realize

1) Representing yourself falsely is dishonest

2) Dishonesty isn't an especially bad thing in many cases. In fact it's socially expected in many cases, such as in interviews.

That doesn't make it less dishonest. It means that a lot of our society is an engine that basically runs on dishonesty.

It took me a while to get that interviewers aren’t really looking for honesty when they ask stuff like “why do you want to work here?”

I mean maybe they are, but they’re gonna be very unhappy with the most-honest answer from 95+% of candidates for the vast majority of employers and jobs.

So of course, you’re supposed to be… quite a bit less honest. And I guess maybe there’s some value in filtering out people who don’t get that? Or who refuse to “play ball” on principle? IDK the reasons, I didn’t make the rules.

I was raised with and internalized honesty as very important, and adjusting to an adult world (mostly—almost entirely, actually—the business world) in which that needed to be judiciously tempered and certain kinds of dishonesty were expected and failure to play along punished, was quite a damn shock. I adjusted eventually but I’ve never really been happy about it.

What they're usually asking for is "why do you want to work here instead of somewhere else, if they offered you a similar position".

I ask why people want to work here (or similarly “what do you want from your next position”) as a basic check of whether their and my motivations are aligned and how strong their motivation might be. Sure people can lie, but it also helps clarify if you both have the same ideas about what the role involves short or medium term.

There is not a right answer, but there are some wrong ones that indicate a disconnect that do come up sometimes.

The classic example of requiring dishonesty to pass the test is one I've seen a few times:

"Is it ever ok to steal?" If you answer anything but "NEVER, and thieves should be publicly drawn and quartered", you won't get the job, even if you have no particular foibles with e.g. inmates in death camps stealing from their captors, etc.

Either you're too stupid to recognize the difficulty in expressing complete and coherent moral directives in 10 words or less, or you're sufficiently coerced by your economic circumstances to bend some of your own ethics.

Obviously, what they want is for you to infer "is it ever ok to steal from your employer?", but again, this is complicated, because every single company that I've taken one of these tests for had robust anti-union rhetoric as part of their onboarding "training, and "be completely ready to work when you clock in", "your whole checklist must be complete before leaving" and "you must clock in and out only at the designated time" in their stated expectations for all workers. In other words, making any attempt to receive all the wages you are entitled to under the law is considered "theft" by the company, and they'll frequently have such rhetoric in the same training packet as the anti-union rhetoric.

These personality tests are perverse-incentive city, and clearly nobody requiring them has a high enough opinion of the people expected to take them to recognize that.

You're conflating honesty with humility.

Would you say the absence of humility always equates with dishonesty

If I can't see my mistakes and failures, I would say I have zero ability to be honest; maybe I'm not 'lying' as such; I'm so far gone I don't even know I'm lying

Does social filtering constitute dishonesty or professionalism?

This question itself might be a good interview question.

Both. The entire concept of "professionalism" is based around the idea that certain people should be dishonest about themselves in public, for the sake of others' comfort.

I entirely disagree with that being what the concept of "professionalism" is based on, but I'm also not entirely sure what you're alluding to here, so grain of salt.

Primarily, I'm alluding to it being considered "unprofessional" for queer people to be themselves in the workplace, as that is the particular thorn I've been pricked with.

But there are other fun ways "professionalism" has been used to oppress people - from the way Women are expected to dress, to Black hair being treated as unacceptable.

OK, so you aren't really talking about professionalism. You're talking about people using a phony excuse to enable outright discrimination -- which is itself very unprofessional behavior.

If someone isn't capable of being honest without making their coworkers socially uncomfortable, I don't think the honesty is a redeeming quality.

If a coworker can't handle a woman wearing pants instead of a skirt, can't handle a black person wearing their hair in a way that's comfortable, or can't handle a queer coworker dressing in queer ways... They're the problem. Not the person who's "unconventional".

All of those things have been called "unprofessional" as a way to oppress minorities.

Covertly flirting with your female colleague in ambiguous ways after she asked you not to and then pretending you didn't do anything, asking your black colleague if he "knows any rappers", and wearing a dress to a company dress-up party when you are in no way trans then claiming to be "trans until tomorrow" and laughing loudly are also all unprofessional.

How is any of that related to the issues I raised? I never argued that any of that was acceptable.

I'm not arguing that anyone should be able to do anything in the workplace, and that is a bad-faith reading of what I said.

People are assholes. And assholes need to be dealt with. But the term "professional" is consistently abused as a tool to oppress people.

I am arguing that the general (American) expectations of "professionalism" are deeply influenced by hateful people, and we should question those standards.

My point was that general expectations are exactly what professionalism is and they reflect the broader society you're in, and there's nothing wrong with professionalism as a concept that isn't also wrong with everything else. We shouldn't question professionalism in isolation because there's no point to doing so: it's just a convenient mirror of broader society used to beat on workplaces for doing what everyone else is also doing.

That last one may well be professional enough to win you business awards, if you do it boldly enough - as in the case of Credit Suisse director Pips Bunce:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/outrage-male-bank-dire...

There are lots of ways that people can be unprofessional, regardless of their identity or beliefs.

That doesn't address my assertion that "unprofessional" is used as a cudgel to abuse minorities.

Yes, but the topic above was social filtering -- things people say and do -- not identity or minority status. When I say 'professionalism' in the context of social filtering, I am talking about the things people say and do to each other in the workplace.

I started the topic, and you chose to respond to it. The topic and contest is "the concept of professionalism is used as a tool to oppress people" (although I phrased it gentler). I said nothing about social filtering.

You chose to respond with something that just didn't address the issues I raised.

For you now to claim that I'm going "off topic" when you just ignored the original prompt, is absurd.

The first comment in this thread is about selecting images in FedEx's personality test, the second is surmising about what they are really testing for, the third is about whether dishonestly selecting those images constitutes lying, and the fourth is my question:

"Does social filtering constitute dishonesty or professionalism?"

Your highest comment is the fifth in depth, and everyone seemed to be confused about what you were getting at, because we were all talking about selecting images in a personality test during an interview, not talking about people's personal identity.

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