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The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs — Ludicity
The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs — Ludicity

Claude summary: Key takeaway Lying on job applications is pervasive in the tech industry due to systemic issues, but it creates an "Infinite Lie Vortex" that erodes integrity and job satisfaction. While honesty may limit short-term opportunities, it's crucial for long-term career fulfillment and ethical work environments.

Summary

  • The author responds to Nat Bennett's article against lying in job interviews, acknowledging its validity while exploring the nuances of the issue.
  • Most people in the tech industry are already lying or misrepresenting themselves on their CVs and in interviews, often through "technically true" statements.
  • The job market is flooded with candidates who are "cosplaying" at engineering, making it difficult for honest, competent individuals to compete.
  • Many employers and interviewers are not seriously engaged in engineering and overlook actual competence in favor of congratulatory conversation and superficial criteria
  • Most tech projects are "default dead," making it challenging for honest candidates to present impressive achievements without embellishment.
  • The author suggests that escaping the "Infinite Lie Vortex" requires building financial security, maintaining low expenses, and cultivating relationships with like-minded professionals.
  • Honesty in job applications may limit short-term opportunities but leads to more fulfilling and ethical work environments in the long run.
  • The author shares personal experiences of navigating the tech job market, including instances of misrepresentation and the challenges of maintaining integrity.
  • The piece concludes with a satirical, honest version of the author's CV, highlighting the absurdity of common resume claims and the value of authenticity.
  • Throughout the article, the author maintains a cynical, humorous tone while addressing serious issues in the tech industry's hiring practices and work culture.
  • The author emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, continuous learning, and valuing personal integrity over financial gain or status.
If your model is "it's okay to lie if I've been lied to" then we're all knee deep in bullshit forever and can never escape Transaction Cost Hell.
Do I agree that entering The Infinite Lie Vortex is wise or good for you spiritually? No, not at all, just look at what it's called.
it is very common practice on the job market to have a CV that obfuscates the reality of your contribution at previous workplaces. Putting aside whether you're a professional web developer because you got paid $20 by your uncle to fix some HTML, the issue with lying lies in the intent behind it. If you have a good idea of what impression you are leaving your interlocutor with, and you are crafting statements such that the image in their head does not map to reality, then you are lying.
Unfortunately thanks to our dear leader's masterful consummation of toxicity and incompetence, the truth of the matter is that: They left their previous job due to burnout related to extensive bullying, which future employers would like to know because they would prefer to blacklist everyone involved to minimize their chances of getting the bad actor. Everyone involved thinks that they were the victim, and an employer does not have access to my direct observations, so this is not even an unreasonable strategy All their projects were failures through no fault of their own, in a market where everyone has "successfully designed and implemented" their data governance initiatives, as indicated previously
What I am trying to say is that I currently believe that there are not enough employers who will appreciate honesty and competence for a strategy of honesty to reliably pay your rent. My concern, with regards to Nat's original article, is that the industry is so primed with nonsense that we effectively have two industries. We have a real engineering market, where people are fairly serious and gather in small conclaves (only two of which I have seen, and one of those was through a blog reader's introduction), and then a gigantic field of people that are cosplaying at engineering. The real market is large in absolute terms, but tiny relative to the number of candidates and companies out there. The fake market is all people that haven't cultivated the discipline to engineer but nonetheless want software engineering salaries and clout.
There are some companies where your interviewer is going to be a reasonable person, and there you can be totally honest. For example, it is a good thing to admit that the last project didn't go that well, because the kind of person that sees the industry for what it is, and who doesn't endorse bullshit, and who works on themselves diligently - that person is going to hear your honesty, and is probably reasonably good at detecting when candidates are revealing just enough fake problems to fake honesty, and then they will hire you. You will both put down your weapons and embrace. This is very rare. A strategy that is based on assuming this happens if you keep repeatedly engaging with random companies on the market is overwhelmingly going to result in a long, long search. For the most part, you will be engaged in a twisted, adversarial game with actors who will relentlessly try to do things like make you say a number first in case you say one that's too low.
Suffice it to say that, if you grin in just the right way and keep a straight face, there is a large class of person that will hear you say "Hah, you know, I'm just reflecting on how nice it is to be in a room full of people who are asking the right questions after all my other terrible interviews." and then they will shake your hand even as they shatter the other one patting themselves on the back at Mach 10. I know, I know, it sounds like that doesn't work but it absolutely does.
Neil Gaiman On Lying People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I'd worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honour to have written something for each of the magazines I'd listed to get that first job, so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been chronologically challenged... You get work however you get work.
Nat Bennett, of Start Of This Article fame, writes: If you want to be the kind of person who walks away from your job when you're asked to do something that doesn't fit your values, you need to save money. You need to maintain low fixed expenses. Acting with integrity – or whatever it is that you value – mostly isn't about making the right decision in the moment. It's mostly about the decisions that you make leading up to that moment, that prepare you to be able to make the decision that you feel is right.
As a rough rule, if I've let my relationship with a job deteriorate to the point that I must leave, I have already waited way too long, and will be forced to move to another place that is similarly upsetting.
And that is, of course, what had gradually happened. I very painfully navigated the immigration process, trimmed my expenses, found a position that is frequently silly but tolerable for extended periods of time, and started looking for work before the new gig, mostly the same as the last gig, became unbearable. Everything other than the immigration process was burnout induced, so I can't claim that it was a clever strategy, but the net effect is that I kept sacrificing things at the altar of Being Okay With Less, and now I am in an apartment so small that I think I almost fractured my little toe banging it on the side of my bed frame, but I have the luxury of not lying.
If I had to write down what a potential exit pathway looks like, it might be: Find a job even if you must navigate the Vortex, and it doesn't matter if it's bad because there's a grace period where your brain is not soaking up the local brand of madness, i.e, when you don't even understand the local politics yet Meet good programmers that appreciate things like mindfulness in your local area - you're going to have to figure out how to do this one Repeat Step 1 and Step 2 on a loop, building yourself up as a person, engineer, and friend, until someone who knows you for you hires you based on your personality and values, rather than "I have seven years doing bullshit in React that clearly should have been ten raw HTML pages served off one Django server"
A CEO here told me that he asks people to self-evaluate their skill on a scale of 1 to 10, but he actually has solid measures. You're at 10 at Python if you're a core maintainer. 9 if you speak at major international conferences, etc. On that scale, I'm a 4, or maybe a 5 on my best day ever, and that's the sad truth. We'll get there one day.
I will always hate writing code that moves the overall product further from Quality. I'll write a basic feature and take shortcuts, but not the kind that we are going to build on top of, which is unattractive to employers because sacrificing the long-term health of a product is a big part of status laundering.
The only piece of software I've written that is unambiguously helpful is this dumb hack that I used to cut up episodes of the Glass Cannon Podcast into one minute segments so that my skip track button on my underwater headphones is now a janky fast forward one minute button. It took me like ten minutes to write, and is my greatest pride.
Have I actually worked with Google? My CV says so, but guess what, not quite! I worked on one project where the money came from Google, but we really had one call with one guy who said we were probably on track, which we definitely were not!
Did I salvage a A$1.2M project? Technically yes, but only because I forced the previous developer to actually give us his code before he quit! This is not replicable, and then the whole engineering team quit over a mandatory return to office, so the application never shipped!
Did I save a half million dollars in Snowflake expenses? CV says yes, reality says I can only repeat that trick if someone decided to set another pile of money on fire and hand me the fire extinguisher! Did I really receive departmental recognition for this? Yes, but only in that they gave me A$30 and a pat on the head and told me that a raise wasn't on the table.
Was I the most highly paid senior engineer at that company? Yes, but only because I had insider information that four people quit in the same week, and used that to negotiate a 20% raise over the next highest salary - the decision was based around executive KPIs, not my competence!
#jobs#hiring#tech#work/productivity#work-life#bureaucracy#bullshit#culture#interviews#ethics#careers#business
·ludic.mataroa.blog·
The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs — Ludicity
The Free-Time Gender Gap - Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI)
The Free-Time Gender Gap - Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI)
Women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on childcare and household work. All groups experience a free-time gender gap, with women having 13% less free time than men, on average. Mothers spend 2.3X as much time as fathers on the essential and unpaid work of taking care of home and family Young women (18-24) experience one of the largest free-time gender gaps, having 20% less free time than men their age Working women spend 2X as many hours per week as working men on childcare and household work combined Mothers who work part-time spend 3.8X as much time on childcare and household work as fathers who work part-time Married women without children spend 2.3X as much time as their male counterparts on household work Among Latinos, mothers spend more than 3.6X as much time as fathers taking care of children and doing household work
The unequal division of unpaid work in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping for food and clothing, is a powerful testament to the tenacity of old gender norms. Women do significantly more of this work than men do, even when there are no children living in the home. This holds true for women regardless of their marital status, their employment status, or their level of education.
Among all adults without children, women do twice as much household work as men, dedicating 12.3 hours per week to these tasks, on average, compared to 6 hours for men. Similarly, among all single people without children, women do nearly twice as much household work as men, spending 10.6 hours per week on household tasks compared to 5.7 hours for men.
getting married seems to exacerbate the burden of household work on women. Married women do substantially more household work than their single women peers, while married men spend just a few minutes a day more than their single peers. Married women without children do 2.3 times as much household work as their male counterparts (14.3 hours per week versus 6.2 hours).
Working women spend significantly more time than working men on unpaid work in the home. This is the case whether they work full-time or part-time. It is the case whether they have children or not. Take household work like cooking, laundry, and the like. Women who work full-time do 1.8 times as much as men who work full-time; they spend 9.7 hours per week on it compared to 5.4 hours for men. Women who work part-time do 2.5 times as much household work as men who work part-time.
Across every group studied, men spend more time than women socializing, watching sports or playing video games, or doing similar activities to relax or have fun. Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to one-quarter less free time than men.
Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to nearly one-quarter less free time than men.
there is a wide gulf between our ideals and our realities, as we have seen in this report on how Americans divide the work of taking care of home and family. One reason for the persistence of these gender disparities is that the U.S. has failed to modernize its public policies to fit 21st century economic realities. Even though 78% of American women are in the labor force, the nation’s social infrastructure is still largely premised on the assumption that mothers will be at home with children.
Every high-income nation in the world provides for paid leave for new parents—except the United States. Most provide ample financial and institutional support for childcare and preschool. Our peers devote a substantial share of public spending to family benefits, but the U.S. invests only minimally in supporting families. For instance, family benefits account for 2.4% of GDP in Germany compared to 0.6% in the United States.
Even when young children enter school, typical American school hours are grossly misaligned with the workday, forcing families to either spend money on after school care or reduce their work hours.
Public policy alone will not entirely eliminate these deeply rooted gender disparities. Cultural change is needed too. But smart policy can nudge along positive behavioral change that ultimately advances equity and equality. For example, several countries include mechanisms in their family policy to encourage fathers to take paid parent leave. Many Nordic nations have a ‘use it or lose it’ provision for fathers. Other countries, like Canada, provide extra paid weeks of leave to families if both parents use the time.
The unequal division of care work, particularly, affects women’s opportunity and well-being in ways that cannot be measured solely in dollars and cents.
One way Americans deal with the housing affordability crisis is to move to distant suburbs and exurbs, where housing is cheaper than it is in central cities and job hubs. The tradeoff, however, is typically a long commute to and from work. But for women who are caring for children or elderly relatives, long commutes are often not feasible. Children and elderly parents get sick and need to get to doctors in the middle of a workday. School hours begin too late and end too early to accommodate a commute to a 9-to-5 job.
when schools close due to climate-driven events, mothers might have to take unpaid time off of work or pay for childcare. As Americans experience more dangerous heat waves, wildfires, and floods driven by climate change, the caregiving demands on women can increase, as they are more likely to be the ones responsible for helping children and elderly adults stay out of harm’s way.
#stats#domestic-work#work-life#identities/gender#study#social#culture#lifestyle#ethics#parenting#identities#childcare
·thegepi.org·
The Free-Time Gender Gap - Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI)
What Makes Women Clean
What Makes Women Clean
Earlier this month, the Gender Equity Policy Institute released a new analysis of the 2022 Time Use Survey, administered by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Time Use Survey is not perfect or granular, but it’s widely understood as the best and broadest data set of how Americans allocate their time. The survey asks respondents where and how they worked, how much time they allocated to childcare and/or domestic tasks, and how many hours were dedicated to “leisure.” You can take a closer look at the survey methodology and results here — and while they do breakdown results by race, age, income, education level, marital status, occupation, and number of children in the household, they do not distinguish between heterosexual and queer relationships (and also divide gender as male or female)….which means this analysis does not account for how queer relationships, in so many meanings of the word, fit into this larger analysis. With that said — the findings are stunning.
women spend more than twice as much time allocated to household work than men, even when they are single or do not have children. And getting married doesn’t split the load for women, as it theoretically would, but increases it: married women without children still do 2.3 times as much housework labor as their husbands.
men just had to hunt, but women back at the cave had to tend fires and care for kids and tan animal hides blah blah blah etc etc etc. These narratives make the nonsensical make sense: how else would you explain dramatically different approaches to cleanliness that seem to be fairly neatly divided by gender? It has to be biological, otherwise, well, women have just been caring about things that ultimately matter very little for centuries.
this particular argument falls apart when you consider women who aren’t “naturally” good at cleaning, or multi-tasking, or even caregiving — or just don’t like it. (Hello, all the ADHDers in my DMs also responding to these stats). Within this framework, the only way to conceive of these women is as faulty specimens: people who would be weeded out by natural selection. And yet somehow these people are still here, being women!
“Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective — what’s the power angle on this — often explains things,” neuroscientist Lise Eliot tells Darcy Lockman in All the Rage. “It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hard-wired.”
cleaning can be pleasurable the same way that popping a zit is pleasurable. It’s gross but oddly cathartic to erase abjection and mess, or to create order out of chaos. But you cannot separate the pleasures of degreasing the stove top from the pleasures of successfully meeting the demands of proper performance of womanhood. It’s like people who say they “just like being thin.” So much of why you like it is because it grants you societal power.
men can clean! I know men who are good at it, who take pleasure in it, who are also excellent noticers and multitaskers — and almost all of them were either 1) raised by single mothers or 2) spent time in the military. They were socialized, over an extended period, to understand cleanliness and multi-tasking as essential — with personal and social consequences if they did not.
“When people come over and our house is a mess, I feel this reflects badly on me as a person, adult, wife, and mother. My husband doesn't feel that at all,” a reader named Leah told me. “My father-in-law once told my husband he wished our house was cleaner when he comes to visit (don’t get me started). So now I scour the place top to bottom. My husband just shrugs and says: whatever, my dad can deal with it. The same applies to our kid. My husband can send him to school in ripped, dirty, or too-small clothes and not worry what people will think of him and his parenting skills. Me? I’m worried they are about to call CPS on us.”
if you’re “safe” being bad at womanhood — you can blow off societal repercussions. But a messy or dirty domestic space intersects with so many other stereotypes of class, race, education level, body size, and marital status. “My grandma grew up extremely poor in the South and I’ve always felt there was a strong class element to her standard of cleanliness,” a woman named Aimee told me. “Like even if you had no money, get a broom and a rag because you at least need a clean house.”
Or: a single woman can have a dirty apartment if she’s a hot, dirty mess; take away the hot thinness and she’s just a slovenly cat lady spinster.
I don’t think most people believe this! Yet these understandings endure, asking women to feel like failures or oddities, setting up shop in our relationships and slowly festering.
It is tremendously hard to divest from a way of understanding your own value in the world — and, by extension, others.
Men are socialized to see their spaces as utilitarian, spaces that serve them. Women, we serve our spaces.”
We can attempt, as a society, to socialize boys and men to be more clean, to notice more, to multitask more, to spend more time on domestic tasks and to allocate less time to leisure. We can teach men that their value (and their morality) is also rooted in their capacity to maintain a clean home: that they should also serve their spaces.
some of this work has happened: men in their 30s and 40s today do more domestic labor than their grandparents or great-grandparents did. But the gender discrepancy in domestic labor closed and closed and then….got stuck at a 65/35 split, and hasn’t budged in years.
The math just doesn’t math when it comes to domestic labor. When dads start allocating more time to parenting, it doesn’t subtract from the time moms spent parenting. When women leave the home to work for pay, the number of hours they allocate to domestic tasks doesn’t decrease, as one might assume, but goes up. If men do more, women still…..do more.
If you feel bound by these expectations: what would it take to free you? Because when I survey the hundreds of responses that arrived in my DMS when I posted the stats above, what I felt most was fatigue. Just look in the fucking drawer, is that where the bras go??? one woman wrote. God I’m so tired.
I’m always suspicious of arguments that ask anyone who’s subjugated, in some way, to do more. But in this case, the work is difficult, particularly for bourgeois women, because the work feels like something we’re so rarely asked to do: less.
At my grandmother's funeral, literally every single speaker talked about how much she loved her...house. How much care she put into it, how it was the joy of her life and source of her identity. When I was a kid, there was "clean" and there was "grandma clean". And after my mother died and I was rocked by grief, my grandmother attempted to console me by suggesting it wasn't that big of a loss because my mom (her daughter-in-law) wasn't a good housekeeper. (My mom was working full time, had four kids at home, and was literally dying.) I was so angry with my grandmother I barely every spoke to her again, and then at her funeral listening to everyone talk about her love of her house (!!) drove home what a waste of a life that was. She could have been kind. She could have been kind to my mom, who'd lost her own mother and was struggling. She could have been kind to me, her grand-daughter who was grieving. She could have had a life that meant something, but instead she focused on her house, which she saw as an extension of herself, and serviced her own pride and vanity. What a WASTE.
I feel like I am constantly drowning in a sea of paperwork/phone calls/emails - fighting with our health and dental insurance, calling contractors/plumbers/etc to do things for our house, filling out new tax paperwork. Not to mention fielding the barrage of spam emails/calls. I feel like this kind of stuff has expanded exponentially and I can’t tell if it’s just me, but it feels like every single one of these is a fight - someone sent the wrong paperwork to us, so I have to fill it out again; the insurance company makes a mistake on the claim and I have to file an appeal and follow up on it; contractor says they’re going to do something, doesn’t do it completely, and I have to fight to get them to come finish the job they agreed to. I get that we are all stretched so thin & distracted, but I am exhausted by trying to keep up with the apparently “essential” stuff of modern American adulthood
#culture#identities/femininity#gender#domestic-work#ethics#stats#trends#identities/masculinity#homes#social#essays
·annehelen.substack.com·
What Makes Women Clean
Our Humanity Depends on the Things We Don’t Sell
Our Humanity Depends on the Things We Don’t Sell
In his 1954 lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ Martin Heidegger argued that when we organize life under the rubric of technology, the world ceases to have a presence in its own right and is ordered instead as ‘standing-reserve’—that is, as resources to be instrumentalized. Coal and iron ore, the products of technology themselves, and even human sexual desire then come to be seen as part of the standing-reserve. It becomes increasingly difficult to see reasons why there should exist any limits on extracting such resources.
#capitalism#tech#philosophy#culture#ethics
·palladiummag.com·
Our Humanity Depends on the Things We Don’t Sell
‘Silicon Values’
‘Silicon Values’
York points to a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marsh v. Alabama, which held that private entities can become sufficiently large and public to require them to be subject to the same Constitutional constraints as government entities. Though York says this ruling has “not as of this writing been applied to the quasi-public spaces of the internet”
even if YouTube were treated as an extension of government due to its size and required to retain every non-criminal video uploaded to its service, it would make as much of a political statement elsewhere, if not more. In France and Germany, it — like any other company — must comply with laws that require the removal of hate speech, laws which in the U.S. would be unconstitutional
Several European countries have banned Google Analytics because it is impossible for their citizens to be protected against surveillance by American intelligence agencies.
TikTok has downplayed the seriousness of its platform by framing it as an entertainment venue. As with other platforms, disinformation on TikTok spreads and multiplies. These factors may have an effect on how people vote. But the sudden alarm over yet-unproved allegations of algorithmic meddling in TikTok to boost Chinese interests is laughable to those of us who have been at the mercy of American-created algorithms despite living elsewhere. American state actors have also taken advantage of the popularity of social networks in ways not dissimilar from political adversaries.
what York notes is how aligned platforms are with the biases of upper-class white Americans; not coincidentally, the boards and executive teams of these companies are dominated by people matching that description.
It should not be so easy to point to similarities in egregious behaviour; corruption of legal processes should not be so common. I worry that regulators in China and the U.S. will spend so much time negotiating which of them gets to treat the internet as their domain while the rest of us get steamrolled by policies that maximize their self-preferencing.
to ensure a clear set of values projected into the world. One way to achieve that is to prefer protocols over platforms.
This links up with Ben Thompson’s idea about splitting twitter into a protocol company and a social media company
Yes, the country’s light touch approach to regulation and generous support of its tech industry has brought the world many of its most popular products and services. But it should not be assumed that we must rely on these companies built in the context of middle- and upper-class America.
#internet#culture#ethics#misinfo#platforms#trends#politics#international
·pxlnv.com·
‘Silicon Values’
Words are polluted. Plots are polluted.
Words are polluted. Plots are polluted.
I care about people more than I care about positions or beliefs, which I tend to consider a subservient class of psychological phenomena. That is to say: I think people wear beliefs like clothes; they wear what they have grown to consider sensible or attractive; they wear what they feel flatters them; they wear what keeps them dry and warm in inclement winter. They believe their opinions, tastes, philosophies are who they are, but they are mistaken. (Aging is largely learning what one is not, it seems to me).
Criticism must serve some function to justify the pain it causes: it must, say, avert a disastrous course of action being deliberated by a group, or help thwart the rise of a barbarous politician. But this rarely occurs. Most criticism, even of the most erudite sort, is, as we all know, wasted breath: preached to one’s own choir, comically or indignantly cruel to those one doesn’t respect, unlikely to change the behavior of anyone not already in agreement.On the other hand! There persists the idea that culture arises out of the scrum of colliding perspectives, and that it is therefore a moral duty to remonstrate against stupidity, performative emoting, deceitful art, destructively banal fiction, and so on. If one doesn’t speak up, one cannot lament the triumph of moral and imaginative vacuity.
One must believe, of course, that there are abstractions worth protecting, and therefore abstractions worth hurting others for, in order to criticize; and the endless repetitiveness of cultural history seems to devalue such abstractions as surely as bad art and cliche devalue words.
#culture#ideology#identities#philosophy#academic#ethics#people/david foster wallace
·metaismurder.com·
Words are polluted. Plots are polluted.