Lies Employers Use to Get You to Work with Them
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Social trust is the key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.
Take the innocuous example of tipping. In one culture, waiters are tipped X%, in another, it's just in the food prices. Clearly, neither is absolutely right or wrong, yet in both directions, awkwardness ensures when the signals are crossed.
Signals can cross in much less innocuous ways.
It's one of the things I think the "melting pot" idea got right, and I tend to agree a lot of people who didn't really understand it did indeed jettison it too quickly and with too much excitement... layering on a minimal, high-level culture that defines things like the trust parameters, which are often not absolutely right or wrong like the tipping example above, while leaving religion, dress style, foods, cultural celebrations, all the really important elements of a culture vary beneath that umbrella was actually a really cool idea. (In practice, perhaps it was not quite minimal enough, but I think we'd have been better off addressing that directly rather than throwing out the whole idea.)
Which sounds really nice if you don't think about the details, but gets problematic when you start considering them. Again, even leaving aside the reality of widely differing moral/value judgments and sticking to things we can all be more-or-less be rational about like tipping parameters, some culture is going to have to "win" for this to work smoothly. So, you know, once you start thinking about it this way and start thinking about the concrete details of how people interact within cultures, it completely ceases to be surprising that cultures still physically/geographically self-segregate even within the beautiful tapestry of diversity... how could it be otherwise? It's very challenging to try to go out into the world and interact with the intersection of all possible cultural rules (that is, the things agreed upon by all cultures universally), because the intersection is really quite small when it comes to cultural protocols for trade and such. You could spend hours putting together lists of things that are mandatory in one culture, and verboten in another. For instance, this recently went by on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684152 Even if both you and the other person know all the possible protocols, how do you negotiate which you're going to use, when for most people these are really ingrained assumptions below the conscious perception? (And would not this metaprotocol have to come from somewhere and be some form of imposition?)
And to be clear, I mostly mean this post as food for thought, rather than a clear and confident claim of a specific opinion. (Yes, I did express a preference in my previous message, but I'm trying to go more food-for-thought here.) I've also carefully phrased this in terms of "cultures" and not "ethnicities", as in the context I'm discussing, there's only a correlation between the two, not direct causation, and adding in "ethnicities" can just end up clouding our thinking. You get these issues when interacting between countries and stuff too, which is why it's food for thought in general and not a specific attack. It's one of those things where even a smart person can initially think it's a set of very easy problems to solve if you think about it only at a high level, but when you start getting into the details quickly explodes in complexity. Humans are irreducibly interesting!
Compare to bilingual education.
I don't see China as being a tremendously high-trust social environment, for instance.
I contrast the west with, for example, Russia, which has a very intelligent work-force and extensive natural resources, but has been unable to break out of the corruption and lack of trust endemic to their culture. India is another example: there is no reason they shouldn't be a first world country looking only at their human and natural capital. The middle east is lousy with countries with incredibly intelligent peoples stuck in second-world (at best) conditions. And so on.
Don't know about China, but they do have an issue with colonialism going back centuries and centuries, even if the Han culture eventually "conquered" the invaders.
All the Americas were colonized, and most (but not all) are doing better than India. Indonesia is roughly twice as rich per capita. South Africa is even richer. And Malaysia even richer than it. Algeria, Libya. Korea and Taiwan were both colonized and much more exposed to WW2, and they're very well off.
The poorest countries in the world were mostly colonized, but that's because most of the world has been victims of colonialism. And the effects of colonialism reverberate to the present day. But it's not really powerful IMO as an explanatory variable for differences in human development in the non-European world.
The West of a previous time, presumably.
The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past.
I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.
China (afaik) is just an environment with low social trust.
That's an interesting counter-argument to OP's last assertion (with whom I agree) since China has +10% economic /year while having really poor social trust standards.
When you select for low-trust options in a previously high-trust environment, you also select for shorter timeframes of activity. Those shorter timeframes directly manifest as fewer options; there simply isn't enough time to let beneficial compounding effects ramp up and hence open up more options by supplying more per unit resources over time. The cognitive load to manage these shorter timeframe activities also goes up per unit returned equity/resources/margin versus a longer timeframe; I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up non-linearly in most cases. None of these effects are reported upon, tracked, or even detected in accounting systems today, except at terminal end stages. The current dominant business culture is yield chasing with this behavior, and that has historically ended poorly.
Obviously, trust has varying degrees and context. In Japan, you can leave your laptop at a cafe; in the U.S., you probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that we're "low trust" or trust-sparse. We might generally trust most people to be decent while aware of the ~0.05% (?) chance per person (that someone steals the computer.
What is changing is trust with regard to competence. People were never so foolish as to trust all others without limits, but there used to be an assumption of competence in the professional world. Institutions like universities are less trusted, and so are people in general when it comes to basic competence and readiness for autonomy. It would be unthinkable, 20 years ago, that CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.
Right now we are in an era of organizational decline. It's not necessarily catastrophic; it might not even be bad. What it does mean is that institutions (universities, professional organizations, corporations, and even unions) have lost their role as central brokers of trust. It raises interesting questions. Thus far, most of the successful startups have been beneficiaries of institutional decline (and, again, some of those institutions deserved to break down, so I'm not moralizing) and there doesn't seem to be any economic reward to build institutions (as opposed to mere corporations, smaller in scope) up... so it doesn't happen.
If that's been your experience with Agile, you've have the misfortune of seeing Agile done horribly wrong in a patholgically unhealthy workplace. You may also be romanticizing a bit about old school way of doing things (I have a co-worker who used to work at a major jet engine manufacturer. They were expected to be sitting at their desks when the bell (literally!) rang at 8:30 am. They were expected to wait for the bell to ring break time in before they went to the washroom. As a programmer! Scrum ceremonies aren't sounding so bad).
Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time, and it isn't supposed to be a vehicle for top-down micro-management. If it's either of these things for you, the problem is your organization, not your specific process.
In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team. It's a well defined point for people to raise general questions if they've run into ambiguity, or cast a wide net if they've run into impediment. To-do lists are de-emphasized; it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing.
I personally think a good team leader / project manager and an issue tracker + git annotations is better.
On my team, the throw-away todo listing usually goes very quickly. The value is in the discussion it frequently spawns. In my environment, stand-up spawns such discussion sooner and more reliably than CR/commits/etc.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! No. Stand-up is all about accounting for time:
* What did you do yesterday? (That's accounting for time)
* What are you working on today? (That's also accounting for time)
* What roadblocks/hurdles are you encountering (That's accounting for things that take unexpected amounts of time...ie also accounting for time)
And yet, in most places, it devolves into just that.
"In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team."
And how could this not be more easily done with bug trackers and status emails?
"it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing."
Most people don't pay attention to other's updates; especially updates that they know aren't relevant to what they're working on.
As far as I'm concerned, bug trackers and status emails are functionally equivalent to stand ups at a scrum board. I find email to be a terrible form of communication for open-ended discussion and would much rather do so face to face, but it's self-evidently a matter a personal preference.
> "Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time" > And yet, in most places, it devolves into just that.
The fact that some people do it wrong is a straw man.
> "it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing." > Most people don't pay attention to other's updates; especially updates that they know aren't relevant to what they're working on.
I've always found people are pretty good at picking up on the verbal cues when somebody's asking a question and answering it, even if they weren't paying particularly close attention.
The upper limit for senior people before they start to get pissed off is probably: the lowest of 10 minutes per week person, or 60 minutes for a weekly meeting, or 20 minutes for a daily meeting. So with a team of 8, you can either have a 60-minute meeting or daily 16-minute meetings. With a team of 4, you're limited to 40 minutes for a weekly meeting or 8 minutes of status reporting for a daily meeting.
Standups are good insofar as they allay toxic suspicion that <Person X> isn't contributing. They're like prisons: not innately good, but the aspect of human nature that they exist to control or mitigate is worse.
Of course, most seasoned people realize that the game of status reporting is like playing Scrabble. It's not about dropping the 100-point words. It's about not opening up the board (and getting nagged with follow-on questions).
Now, I believe you that most of these Agile methodologies were designed with better intentions. I absolutely agree. But they devolve. We've seen that, over and over and over. They don't fix things. They make tolerably broken things more intolerably broken. If you're in an environment where business runs the show and engineers just implement (i.e. business-driven engineering) then the right thing to do, often, is to become politically inert, silently learn new skills, and save your energy (slack) while opportunities are few so you can step up when the business-driven engineering regime goes away (or when you change companies). Scrotum gets in the way of that, and by putting such an emphasis on micro-estimates (numbers that will always turn into political tools) it generates politics.
I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
I'm lucky to be asked basic questions like what time people are expected into the office in the morning let alone someone asking for concrete examples of advancement.
Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult - just breaking down their defensive barriers so they'll relax and give me candid answers can take half my time. Still, there is only so much I can do in a limited amount of time, so at the end I just try to lay out what an average work day looks like and my philosophy as their manager and hope that they will be able to make an informed decision.
> I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me.
Then you're not going to hire anyone, your empire will stagnate or shrink, and you will not be promoted into senior management. At some point you will be kicked to the curb.
Lying enables you to hire people who might otherwise be unavailable or much more expensive. When the labor market is weak, this isn't very important, but in a strong labor market it can be the difference between growing your organization and losing it to attrition. Assuming you're not willing/able to pay more than your competition (no one is), lying to candidates is going to be among your top tactics. By the time they both know they've been lied to and are upset enough to want to do anything about it, they'll have kids and a mortgage, or there will be another recession, or some other circumstance will trap them. They're not happy, but you are: by growing your team, you've earned a promotion to director.
Sure, your hires are less productive than starry-eyed believers, but there aren't enough of the latter to staff a giant corporation (or even a medium-sized one), and senior management pay is based primarily on the size of one's empire. There's no point in a staffing policy that limits empire growth. A giant company, even a very inefficient one, pays senior managers far more in absolute terms than a smaller, more profitable one. Therefore it's in the interests of the senior managers to encourage hiring as many people as possible as long as they're cheap, regardless of whether they're happy or productive (and don't worry, if business is bad, they can be kicked to the curb). As a line manager, it's in your interest to go along with this no matter what it takes, because that's how you climb the ladder.
> I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
It's more that there's little point in asking because the assumption is that you will lie. At best, even honest answers have a very short shelf life; the experienced candidate assumes that conditions will change quickly and for the worse. Most importantly of all, the candidate knows he or she will have no recourse if conditions are not as advertized, regardless of the reason. That makes the answers non-actionable, and thus the questions a waste of time.
> Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult
We don't tell you because we know you don't care. People have been getting a lot smarter about the employer-employee relationship over the past decade or two. A corporation exists primarily for the benefit of senior managers: it gives them a place to compete with one another, engage in cutthroat politics, try out pet theories about business and management, and gives them the lion's share of the business's profits for little or no work. It does not exist for the benefit of the rank and file, customers, or shareholders. Few people are so foolish as to expect anything but misery and insecurity as a member of the rank and file. Why give you information you can use against us later? Put another way, what's in it for us?
And your question to Aloisius is excellent: what's in it for us?
I suppose though if you're worldview is that you're destined to be nothing but a cog in the meat grinder of humanity, then that must sound like a pipe dream. And frankly, it doesn't sound like it would be possible for one to ever be happy even in a good environment with that kind of deeply cynical worldview.
So, your argument essentially boils down to "tell me what I want to know or I'll make your work life a living hell."
Please tell me the name of your employer. I don't ever want to work at the same company as you (or, at the very least, I don't want to be on the same org chart as you).
I'm saying that unless you're honest during the interview about what you need out of a job, you'll end up joining companies that will make you miserable because they are fundamentally a bad fit for you.
It's rare because in our experience, this does nothing to help your chances of getting the job, and can do a lot to hurt them. And while they can help you root out places you don't want to work, many places will simply lie.
For job seekers, it's fair and reasonable to assume that any employer who makes promises against the future is lying, so for every promise you are made ("You'll eventually get to work on cool technology X!") you should increase your starting salary expectations, because you need to get a fair wage for being lied to.
It's always your option to quit if things aren't as advertised, and not worth salvaging. This means managing your finances and attitudes to be more mobile, and not basing your security and contentedness on the good will of your employer.
Bad employers act a lot like political candidates. The hiring process is the campaign, and once the votes are tallied and the position is locked in, the worker is subjected to things not quite as described. You never know what things are going to be like for your personal situation regardless of how much you read up on company experiences, so keep a fallback plan open, sacrifice to maintain a financial buffer, and don't get bogged down in your possessions and location.
This mindset is also useful even when your employer is great, in family emergencies and other life-upheaving events.
I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I start I find out I'm working with a bunch of duds. How can I get a big picture view of (almost) all of the people I will be working with along with their skill levels?
I don't expect everyone in the company to be all A team or B team tier, but I don't want to be a part of an organization where 80% of the people are barley qualified to do their job.
If you're not being interviewed by anybody who will be on your prospective team, that's already a red flag. You should be talking to your future coworkers (and maybe others, sure) and you should know which ones they are.
To be more precise: Let's say I will be working on a team of 5 people. They send the manager and the smartest guy and things look great, but how do I gauge the skill level of the people who aren't there along with the skill level of other teams. For example, maybe my team is great, but I'll be working with other teams (infra guys, networking guys, legacy systems guys, whatever) who are obstructive and unskilled.
How do you get outside the "interview box" to see more of the company?
This will hint at the bureaucracy behind the scenes if they answer honestly.
The only other way is to know people either on those teams or that have worked with those folks before and essentially do "reference checks" but in reverse on your prospective employer.
Haven't tried that, not sure how it would go over, but I feel pretty reluctant to go somewhere new without getting that chance.
Some combination of luck and observation, and/or good social skills, might elucidate how the team's interactions go with other teams.
As mentioned above, a refusal to do this is a huge red flag. Even for a company like Google, which routinely does this. There are a zillion horror stories resulting from their closed allocation policy, like the hardware guy who was given a job doing vaguely hardware related Python programming. Without the option of moving to another team for 18 months per Google's policy (de facto if not de jure), he had no choice but to quickly resign to avoid ruining his career.
And I should mention what happened in my last job, where I wasn't able to do that, and the boss I was assigned to, who had absolutely no buy in, he wasn't given a choice about my working for him, took an instant dislike to me. That did not end well.
Echoing the theme of this subthread, for my last N jobs, in all but one recruitment I was substantially lied to. The one before that said I'd get enough time to review the org's long abandoned legacy software before a very firm (government contract) commitment to how long it would take to make it viable again.
Before that, the manager didn't reveal she'd taken an offer to move to a subsidiary that was splitting off. She guilelessly told me that the previous attempt to hire someone in my position failed because she'd mentioned that. That job ended when
The company before that had a pattern of hiring a "second" techie only after the current one had given notice, without telling prospects they'd soon be responsible for it all.
Two before that I learned later that my boss didn't want to hire me, but I was the only one who passed his whiteboard programming test (which for me was so easy I hardly remembered it by that time) and the company would have otherwise died, and I was fired as soon as they convinced the guy they really wanted to move from SV back to the D.C. area.
Before that, I joined a company just as a couple of devil investors took it over with what we soon enough learned was the express intent of owning all the company; they deliberately sabotaged the launch just to have 100% of nothing (granted, this was investor betrayal, in the denouncement 13 of us simultaneously resigned).
Before that, no bad faith can remember, at least starting out, and those jobs and organizations were substantially more successful. If this sort of thing has indeed become a pattern, we shouldn't be surprised by general economic stagnation, whatever the other secular causes there might be.
I've personally seen other 'tactics' used, most notably a former company's CFO told my Manager that I was being paid 20k more in Salary than I actually was.
This 20k was then subtracted from the IT Budget presumably on a yearly basis. Any other stories from readers?
Heck, in writing doesn't count for much if it isn't part of a contract.
Worse still is the fact that the salary/performance review comes up in a few weeks and I started in January. Getting the job offer at all apparently counts as the performance review so to get a salary increase or title upgrade I effectively have to wait 1.5 years.
I don't think most employers around me lie on purpose. It's really that kind of situation were you try hard to be good to the other person, but in the end real life hits you in the face and you don't come around to deliver as much as promised. I'd argue I fell in that trap a few times myself.
2 and 3 are firm statements: ask for them in writing. Even if they're not in an official employment contract, an email stating same might give you enough ammo for a Fraudulent Inducement Of Employment case (if push came to shove).
Ask follow-up questions to get a quantitative answer based on past performance. Promises of future raises (or other future actions) are complete BS and should be treated as such.
Everything in the article's list is a basically gratuitous promise. Things change -- the economy, the financial performance of the company, management, etc. Any change can be justification to nullify one or more of those promises.
The easy way to see if the hiring company is lying? Ask them to put everything in the contract, and put --numbers-- where applicable (30 days of training at the company's expense per year, ability to work at home 2 out of 5 business days, budget to hire help if workload exceeds 50h/week, etc.).
It'll be pretty clear whether they're lying or telling the truth if they start balking at specifics.
Of course they won't.
In all fairness, I don't think anyone who has been around the block would be tricked by any of the items in the list, but I'm sure a lot of less experienced job hunters could be.
SO, if you are a person who weighs a decision on these gratuitous promises what is the best course of action to see if the prospective employer is lying?
Probably to ask for all that stuff spelled out in detail in the employment contract.
Sure, you may not get hired for the reasons you cited, but it'll become pretty clear that those promises were empty too, and you'll handle the next opportunity differently.
Immediate requirement to fill a newly opened position. Must be able to assume a project which had abrupt departures of project members. Must be able to work in a fast-paced environment. Travel required.
Investor contact is another, related, one. When engineers accept 0.05% equity slices at the expense of hedge-fund jobs, they're doing it because they've been told (and haven't had the life experience to have doubts) that they'll have investor contact within 6 months if they do a good job, and have the connections necessary to be founders inside of 18 months. It almost never happens that way.