341–350 of 662 posts
You just never know who might turn up from your past... 1999: I was a sysadmin at an ISP in Austin. One day we had a tour come through, people looking to see if they wanted to colo in our datacenter. In walks in the former CEO and most of the technical staff from the Oklahoma City-based ISP I'd started my career at and left in '96. We laughed, shook hands.. and they headhunted me away a couple months later with a 200…
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"Some amount of dishonesty is required if you want to avoid being an awkward social pariah." Actually that's not true. It is possible to be completely sincere, yet tactful. And you can do it in a way that doesn't come off as self-righteous. I will grant you that it is definitely more rare than it should be, but that doesn't make the opposite a requirement.
>Actually that's not true. It is possible to be completely sincere, yet tactful I completely and utterly disagree with this. There are too many social interactions centered around a shared expectation of dishonesty. If your partner's grandmother asks you how the food was, if you answer with anything less than "great", regardless of how tactfully you do so, there will be negative social consequences. Even in the rare…
If my wife's grandmother had asked me how the food was (assuming the food was awful), I might say "it was very much appreciated" -- and I could say that with 100% honesty, because she would have put a lot of effort into it, and even if she failed, I appreciate that she tried.
Or let's say she didn't try very hard (which would have been unlikely for either of my wife's grandmothers), I could answer with "thank you for making it", or something else like that, and my response could be 100% sincere.
I think the fundamental argument being had in this portion of this thread is that if you don't say everything you think about something then you are being dishonest. I and many others in the thread totally disagree with that assesment.
Your statements can be 100% truthful, and yet not reveal all of your thoughts about a subject or situation. Having a filter doesn't make you dishonest. Some of your thoughts are unkind, some can be even downright evil at times. The fact that you don't reveal these things is often a sign of self control. Words have power, and they affect others around you. There's a reason everyone can't hear every thought you have.
Again, the fact that I don't reveal everything I think does not make me dishonest. If that's your definition of "honesty", then I'm glad I don't live in a world where everyone is "honest" -- it would be a miserable experience.
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It sounds like you are arguing with a concept you believe I'm representing rather than what I actually wrote.
You're responding to me. And no, I don't think you've established that normal social etiquette is "dishonest" in any meaningful sense.
>There's a weird fundamentalist notion of "honesty" that implies that anything short of continuously broadcasting all of your thoughts to everyone around you is "dishonest". Perhaps that's just innocent literalism, but I think a lot of that is, itself, a dishonest attempt to establish false equivalencies between submitting a completely fictitious resume on the one hand, and restraining yourself from barging into your boss's office to tell him he's a complete idiot every time you feel cheesed off"
Here is what I wrote that you were responding to.
>Politely laughing at an unfunny joke, and telling someone that their food is "interesting", fall well within the realm of socially acceptable polite dishonesty. But skipping work to see a ballgame by inventing a fake funeral is considered lying by many (most?) people.
>Like most things in life there is a gray area along that spectrum.
How does your response follow from my comment? There is no false equivalence on my part--there's no attempt at equivalence at all. I would place a completely fictitious resume clearly on the opposite the spectrum from polite social lie.
Again this your response was to a comment where I agreed with this previous comment of yours.
>That's not lying; that's just normal social etiquette
I even stated that this is the argument I'm making. Normal social etiquette isn't lying.
Where we seem to disagree is on what is normal social etiquette.
I think that politely laughing at an unfunny joke falls well within normal social etiquette. I think that telling your partner's grandmother that you like her food is well within normal social etiquette. I also think that telling a polite lie about your opinion of someone is within normal social etiquette.
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So you lie to your coworkers and customers, because someone else lied to you at some point? I'm not sure I quite follow...
It is all a game in which everyone pretends to be honest, but walks a fine line of acceptable lies. I'm only reacting to the "feel good" line that everyone is honest. This is not the way it works and we should not be duped to believe that.
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Similarly, rule #4: Google candidate. What happens if candidate doesn't have Google presence? Or if there are other people with the same name as the candidate who have weird websites or videos posted somewhere. Give me a break, let's not get paranoid about hiring. You can always let someone go.
There's a guy with my name, roughly the same age as me, from the same hometown who's a recently paroled pedophile. All the top results when you search my name are about him. So yeah, I'm not enthusiastic about Googling every candidate.
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I think what you are really saying is that you will fire people for lies bigger than a specific "threshold", which I understand and agree with. What I'm saying is that in the social work environment everyone lies to some level and it is actually widely accepted so. I googled exactly for 5 seconds and found this article to give you a couple examples: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11652018/10-que...
That’s not really what I’m saying at all. Every lie you tell jeopardises the trust you have amongst others. You might not get caught, and if you do, you may not damage the trust irreparably depending on the magnitude of the lie. I’m also saying that a workplace cannot be functional without trust, and that a workplace that tolerates dishonesty will invariably erode it. So unless you want to exist in such a workplace,…
> However, I am glad that I caught it early before we hired him. If we had hired him, tough to say what could have happened. Maybe he would have been great and our best performing AE. Maybe he wouldn’t have even known how to log into Salesforce. When you make it to the top by lying, you're considered a winner: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-goldman-gary-cohn-got-to-... > "I lied to him all the way to the airport,…
Everyone lies, because the interviewing process itself is a fucking joke, ESPECIALLY in the Bay Area. If the person can answer all my questions and they have a good attitude, I honestly don't give a shit what got them to that point. If someone doesn't work out, you can fire them. Yes it's "exhausting", maybe if it's so difficult to manage or run a business you should find a different role for yourself. I really enjoy…
If he had passed all the interviews and when time came said he lied because he knew he can do it but without lying he wouldn't be able to get through the door, he would have probably gotten the job, at least on a probationary basis.
But doing what he did means he's completely untrustworthy. That's not something you'd want in an employee.
I wouldn't trust social profile hunting as a real gauge for anyone's abilities. I know plenty of good coders that don't have github accounts because they aren't involved in open source at all. There are plenty of recruiters that don't know linkedin because they have other sources that fill their pipelines. There are people that build out their profiles specifically for job searches. There are others that won't build out a profile at all.
As far as back-channel references go, I'm not a fan. I expect references to be minimal because giving a reference is odd territory. A bad reference can result in a lawsuit, so why would anyone ever give a bad one? A TMI good reference can result in a lawsuit. People should stick to the basics.
The danger territory as far as I'm concerned is hiring someone at the tail end of a long group of rejects. You peel back your instincts in order to get to the finish line.
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>Actually that's not true. It is possible to be completely sincere, yet tactful I completely and utterly disagree with this. There are too many social interactions centered around a shared expectation of dishonesty. If your partner's grandmother asks you how the food was, if you answer with anything less than "great", regardless of how tactfully you do so, there will be negative social consequences. Even in the rare…
Avoiding answering a question directly does not make you dishonest. If my wife's grandmother had asked me how the food was (assuming the food was awful), I might say "it was very much appreciated" -- and I could say that with 100% honesty, because she would have put a lot of effort into it, and even if she failed, I appreciate that she tried. Or let's say she didn't try very hard (which would have been unlikely for e…
Absolutely 100% true.
>I could answer with "thank you for making it"
You are carefully crafting a response to the question to make everyone believe that you liked the food without directly stating that. I believe this is completely morally equivalent to leading everyone to believe you liked the food by directly stating it.
I believe that neither one of these things is immoral in any way in the particular case.
Let's say she doesn't accept your dancing around the question? Are you going to keep crafting answers that are technically correct in attempt to make everyone think you liked the food?
I don't think it's wrong if you do so, but I do think that the effect is completely the same as if you'd just said it was great.
You just never know who might turn up from your past... 1999: I was a sysadmin at an ISP in Austin. One day we had a tour come through, people looking to see if they wanted to colo in our datacenter. In walks in the former CEO and most of the technical staff from the Oklahoma City-based ISP I'd started my career at and left in '96. We laughed, shook hands.. and they headhunted me away a couple months later with a 200…
Question: What is freemasonry about and why did you join it? I read up on them quite a bit but I just didn't find any good examples of actual goals and activities they are pursuing. Do Masons have a hacker mentality?
I probably wouldn’t care about an American candidate, but I would never consider hiring someone who turns out to be a European Freemason any more than I would hire a neo-nazi.