
Jobs where liars excel - hhs
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190625-the-jobs-where-liars-excel
======
empath75
The only thing I routinely lie about at work is overestimating how long it
will take me to do things. It’s always nice to get something done sooner than
you said and nobody is ever upset about you being ahead of schedule.

I never lie on resumes or in job interviews. In this field you don’t need to
puff up your resume to get an interview, you just need to ignore job
“requirements” — those are almost always a pile of broken dreams and desperate
hopes.

~~~
cmurf
_Scotty: Oh, you didn’t tell him how long it would really take, did ya?_

 _Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Well, of course I did._

 _Scotty: Oh, laddie. You’ve got a lot to learn if you want people to think of
you as a miracle worker._

------
WalterBright
> you should be worried by the turbulence

Routine turbulence is about as dangerous as driving on a road that isn't quite
smooth. It's well within the design capability of the airliner.

Pilots, ATC, and weathermen work pretty hard to avoid turbulence bad enough to
be worrisome.

~~~
antonvs
You'd make a good pilot - I almost believed you!

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
FWIW, I don't recall any aviation disasters (certainly in recent years) that
were attributed to turbulence.

~~~
dboreham
People are seriously injured in turbulence incidents from time to time.

E.g.

[https://billingsgazette.com/news/local/flight-attendant-
rema...](https://billingsgazette.com/news/local/flight-attendant-remains-
hospitalized-passengers-recount-turbulent-trip-to-
billings/article_b54b5b07-5e47-5364-8b03-2ae6daead72d.html)

------
neilv
> _Hiring managers acknowledge that nearly all job applicants exaggerate their
> qualifications, for instance._

Is that an expectation now?

~~~
seqizz
For some people, yes. I once got some feedback that my CV is incomplete,
mostly because I didn't mention some stuff I consider I don't know good enough
to mention. Turns out people with less experience on that topic were putting
it on their CVs.

So.. Better safe than sorry?

~~~
agumonkey
It's sad fact of human societies. It's a game of seduction, not about
precision and truth (unless rare contexts).

I'm like you. Unless I have near complete over a subject, I don't list it. I'm
thus jobless.

I believe it all depends on how ~structured the industry is. For small gigs
for instance, you get direct view of the tasks and problems to fix. You can
rapidly tell the customer if you know or not. In highly layered places, you
get to talk to many HR that don't know what computing problem solving is, and
will react negatively if you're not inside a box.

I just passed some technical tests for a job. The questions were very basic.
Compared to this, I should list it as senior skills. Actually that's the only
reason I'm interviewing, to get a sense of what people want and how they grade
it.

ps: I also wonder how many people get angry at interviews due to that.

~~~
mgkimsal
I'm routinely seeing postings for "Senior XYZ developer" and generally list
"you must have at least 3 years of XYZ". I don't recall it being quite this
bad 20 years ago, but... the market was different. There's a few "stricter"
posts that I see that will list 5 or 7 or minimum 10 years of XYZ, but the
most I see (when time experience is listed) is 'minimum 3'.

Outside of something like nodejs, I'm not even sure 3 years will get you
through the experience of a version upgrade with some tech stacks, let alone
"senior" qualifications. But it will all come down to how you define "senior".

~~~
agumonkey
I also have a dilemma. Spending 3 years in a project using <tech> doesn't mean
much to me. Unless it's a serious gig with regular problem solving .. but if
it's mostly management hell, documentation, ... you might not know much more
than when you came in.

I know a lot of things I learned in python on my own wouldn't happen in a job
because you don't have time to play with everything in the language.

------
mothsonasloth
When I was a junior dev I used to lie and say the work was going fine, the
stories were well estimated and that it would be done on time.

Now as a senior I just say it how it is, maybe occasionally embelish a piece
of work if its not well described or estimated.

~~~
alexpetralia
This reminds me of one of the major causes of famine in Maoist China. A
pressure to conform with top-down expectations ("is it getting done?") at the
expense of reality ("yes it is"). Often we lie just to make others happy, but
then sometimes reality catches up

~~~
netsharc
There's an anecdote that it's possible Saddam believed he actually had WMDs,
because the penalty for his subordinates saying they haven't gotten the
R&D/production done was death.

------
cm2187
And they don’t mention journalism...

~~~
Cthulhu_
A lot of journalism is not straight lying, but er, creative interpretations of
events. If anything it's a skill to be able to take a neutral news event and
spin it towards a political goal or to sway public opinion in a certain
direction.

~~~
cm2187
Salespeople know the fine line between talking up and
misrepresentating/misselling too. Usually...

------
esotericn
The article here seems to miss the point a bit I think. I'd say most people
don't really consider the word 'lying' to mean the same thing within an
employment scenario.

If people, in general, did treat their jobs as being "real" and as a
reflection of their character, rather than as a sort of different 'mode' of
humanity, then the world would not quite look the way it does today.

~~~
benj111
I suppose you could replace 'liar' with amoral, or sociopathic. I don't think
it changes the substance. You want your vicar to be an upstanding member of
the community, and they are more successful that way. The salesman probably
wouldn't do too well with brutal honesty. And I could make a good case that a
lot of people a lot of the time actually want the salesmen lying to them. Who
doesn't want to be told that X they've just bought will make them a better
person?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I don't. I want X that I've just bought to do what I bought it for. Unless
that was explicitly to "make me a better person", I don't want X or anyone
selling X to go anywhere near that.

The culture of sales - which eventually shades into law and politics, because
they're all based on the same psychology - is incredibly toxic. It's also
noisy and expensive, culturally and ecologically.

I'd much rather have sales operate as customer solution generation - with
"Sorry we can't do that for you" as an option - than customer predation.

~~~
seem_2211
This is based on a faulty understanding of what sales is supposed to be (and
what it is, when it is done well) - at any level, sales is primarily a
discovery exercise (what does the customer want?) and working out if you can
mostly fulfill those needs. This is hampered by a few things namely 1:
commission structures, 2: customers not knowing what they want (regardless of
what they might tell you) and 3: customers not wanting to admit what they
want.

While there are some egregious examples, the rate at which a sales interaction
is based on outright fraud is thankfully very small.

As for focusing on customer solution generation, I would highly recommend you
spend more time working with customers before setting others up for that sort
of torture.

~~~
mrunkel
Is this your first year? Because this is completely contrary to my experience.

Salespeople are some very driven folks but honesty and a desire to help
customers solve needs is not a common trait.

~~~
seem_2211
No, but I should disclose that I am a recruiter (salesperson alert!) who works
to help salespeople get jobs. Not to say I've met some terrors in my time, but
I think the vast majority of salespeople are good people (just like the vast
majority of devs/engineers are also well intentioned people).

------
justinclift
> ... I lie. A lot.

Stopped reading there, as the author literally just explained how valid the
rest of the article likely is.

Also, all future articles from this author can be skipped as well. Bonus. :)

------
samwhiteUK
Is Christine here trying to tell us that we should be worried by turbulence?

~~~
mehrdadn
Yeah I don't get that either... by all accounts I've heard you really _shouldn
't_ worry about most turbulence.

~~~
cm2187
Well depends what we mean by turbulences. Seatbelts are there for a reason.
But there is a "winning the lottery" probability to encounter bad enough to be
dangerous turbulences on a flight.

~~~
mehrdadn
I don't think that epsilon probability was what the article was referring to
as worrying about turbulences in general?

------
Simulacra
I would add politics, but also nonprofits. The world of nonprofits is murky
and filled to the brim with con artists and people who basically lie for a
living.

------
jmpman
I remember being told about a study done by the air force to determine what
made a good leader. They studied school age children, and had them tell lies
to their peers. The ones which could most successfully convince their peers of
the lies were ultimately the best leaders.

------
RickJWagner
As a programmer, I have sometimes been called up to make the salesperson's lie
become true.

It's sort of a symbiotic relationship, the one between coders and sellers. We
each need the other.

------
je42
i guess you can blame on the interview process... i usually ask deep questions
on the first random items the interviewee puts in bold on his/her C.V. so
lying shouldn't help.

i.e. say when you don't know. if you say you know - we will likely check if it
is important to us.

------
growlist
Add to this: BBC 'Journalist'

