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Comment by tucnak | Hacker News Reader

This is not accurate.

Polygraphs are not detecting lies, they're used to assess your sensitivities; there are really talented interrogators in counterintelligence, whose full-time job is to fuck with you in subtle ways. To poly a person at will is very much a power move, and some guys fucking love it. But that's a different story all together. Most of the time it's a formality like everything else. In reality, people don't have remotely enough bandwidth to pursue stuff like that unless there's a genuine investigation. But office politics people will office-politique.

Unpopular opinion: private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews. Food for thought.

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> private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews.

Useful in what sense? That you can't figure out anyway what tested person is capable of because tested person can believe that they have skills on godlike senior level, but they are junior at best?

Yes I’m also curious. From what I know polygraphs and similar interrogation are for assessing whether there is anything that could be used to blackmail or compromise you. Whether one agrees with the method, the goal seems logical for intelligence orgs. For companies, industrial espionage would be the obvious parallel. I don’t know how polygraphs would relate to culture fit though… watching to see if candidates perspire and their heart beats faster when asked if they have grit and value diversity :)

Well, my perspective is having to do with Ukrainian mil tech, but I believe the same is true in e.g. cybersecurity, and it helps that the newcomers are often familiar with the process. Poly is not for everyone. Now, when you say "industrial espionage" it sounds dandy and fine, but for all intents and purposes there is no such thing. There is exploitation, yes, and it may easily cross from industrial, to defence, to political depending on trade.

I never said I subscribe to the unpopular opinion, but it's a point of contention regardless!

Thankfully, it is illegal for private companies to do that.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really prevent companies from doing things being illegal if they turn out to be profitable enough. You could use a multispectral hidden camera and an mmwave radar fed into 'AI' to simulate a lie detector - you can definitely get pulse and breathing rate out of it, probably also perspiration..

Sure. And then someone who set that up will get fired and leak the scheme, and nudes from mmWave will be found, and it’s all lawyers and liability.

Unless you work in a pharmacy. Or you’re a ‘mall-cop’. Or literally any employee anywhere who is suspected of fraud or embezzlement or any “incident that resulted in a specific economic loss to the employer”.

You are correct. The Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988, which otherwise prohibits the use of putative lie detectors by employees, provides exemptions for such cases.

> Unpopular opinion: private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews. Food for thought.

Because what we need is more inscrutable judgement calls in the interview process?

Unpopular because it’s a bad idea. You’re now hiring better liars and scaring away humble talent.

And if you stop doing it, you now have a group who were polygraphed and a group who were not.

> Unpopular opinion: private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews. Food for thought.

OK. I'll bite. I'm interviewing with you to be a frontend developer. You have me hooked up to a polygraph. What do you ask?

“Have you ever used a <table> for non-tabular data to avoid looking up the CSS grid syntax?”

“If you had the opportunity to inject pig-butchering scenery into our banking app, would you flee the country after its executed?”

> "This is not accurate"

I don't get what you thought was inaccurate?

I couldn't disagree with you more about your unpopular opinion.

I've been hiring for years and imo the best interview is a trial period doing the actual work with the actual team, not cop movie cosplay.

> whose full-time job is to fuck with you in subtle ways.

And this is a process that you expect to produce an output with any predictive value what so ever?

> it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews.

You could also just end up selecting for psychopaths and sociopaths for whom this test does not function, regardless of how much you "fuck with them."

I did paint a cynical picture, so please do take it with a grain of salt.

Poly is just one tool, and it's never a solution to anything. What you say about potential abuses, undesirable selection, etc. I agree 100% and hate the office-politique jockeys as much as the next man. In most corporate environments, fucking with people has no place and use, but it's far from only application, in fact it's pretty much the worst application possible. Doesn't change the fact that it happens, even though it shouldn't. I also believe that it's important for many orgs to start taking security seriously; in the world where there's so much exploitation, and where applicable, it helps a lot if your org can have some kind of counterintel function. It doesn't have to include poly, but whatever helps you better understand the people you work with is surely a boon.

There is something of value it produces:

The relationship between politics and finance has lost accountability. Would you take a chance investing with just any cryptocurrency? Or will you make the wise decision and choose mine, the first and only crypto that’s polygraphed all programmers for accountability.

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