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!