Jobs where liars excel

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190625-the-jobs-where-liars-excel

by hhs • 7 years ago

63 63 7 years ago

esotericn2• 7 years ago

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.

benj1117• 7 years ago

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?

TheOtherHobbes2• 7 years ago

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.

interfixus• 7 years ago

You want your vicar to be an upstanding member of the community

Part of a vicar's job description is "claiming something to be true for which he has no evidence", a.k.a. lying.

esotericn2• 7 years ago

I suppose what I'm saying is that when an individual human, in a social capacity, tells you they saw X at the bar yesterday (when actually they didn't at all), that's lying, there's an intention to deceive, it's an abnormal interaction; out of the ordinary.

What salesmen do is not really lying in the same sense. It's more of an eternal waffle, the words required of them fall out of their mouth in smoothly flowing paragraphs, a distortion field where truth and falsehood blend together.

They'll say what you want to hear, which can be both better or worse than lying, but it's quite a different thing.

People talk about this in the context of politicians quite a lot. It's quite rare for them to outright lie, it's more about the waffle.

cm21873• 7 years ago

And they don’t mention journalism...

danieltillett• 7 years ago

Well it is a list about jobs where liars excel, not just congregate in large numbers.

Cthulhu_2• 7 years ago

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.

cm21873• 7 years ago

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

samwhiteUK• 7 years ago

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

mehrdadn2• 7 years ago

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

cm21873• 7 years ago

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.

qrybam• 7 years ago

I’ve been a passenger on a plane coming in to land from a long haul flight, in heavy crosswinds. The pilot aborted the landing just before touch down on the first attempt. You could see the plane rolling back and forth if you looked out of the window. The plane went up into a holding pattern before attempting and aborting a second time.

We were told there was some mild turbulence. I wouldn’t say it was mild, it felt pretty dicey the first time around. With the plane safely on the ground, I asked the crew and they confirmed as much.

WalterBright• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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

SmellyGeekBoy• 7 years ago

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

mothsonasloth• 7 years ago

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.

sametmax• 7 years ago

Because you have credibility, while a junior want to reassure.

2T1Qka0rEiPr• 7 years ago

This is a very good point, though I'd advise any junior developer to start to say "I don't know" as quickly as you're able to. From my experience under promising and over delivering has been a far, far better modus operandi than the opposite.

alexpetralia• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

Cthulhu_2• 7 years ago

But since you've established and proven your place in the workspace, you can get away with it; if you're a freshly hired junior that has to admit they're running behind (in their own estimation), they could risk their job or a bad review in a less mature work environment (that is, one where people are replaceable resources).

notacoward3• 7 years ago

As a very senior developer by some measures, I always put a strong emphasis on what's not going well. What's broken can be fixed, as long as it's known. I also believe that it's better to undercommit than overcommit. The delta between committing to and then achieving X+Y vs. committing to and then achieving X alone is fairly small compared to the other alternatives. Commit to X and achieve X+Y? Big positive reaction. Commit to X+Y and achieve only X? Even bigger negative reaction. Why put yourself in a neutral/negative space when you can put yourself in a neutral/positive one? It kind of feels like sandbagging, but I've seen it work well for all concerned too many times to do otherwise.

neilv• 7 years ago

Hiring managers acknowledge that nearly all job applicants exaggerate their qualifications, for instance.

Is that an expectation now?

seqizz• 7 years ago

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?

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

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.

notacoward3• 7 years ago

That's so close to classic Prisoner's Dilemma that it makes me sad. When the majority of others "defect" (lie, exaggerate, or embellish in this case) your individually-rational best choice is to defect as well. So you get the job, which is (usually) better than not getting the job. And you're surrounded by other defectors, which is worse than being surrounded by cooperators.

From game theory, the "solution" is to favor cooperation anyway, but not absolutely. So you might miss out on some jobs, but the one you get will be better. Then again, there's a reason it's called game theory. ;)

Double_a_92• 7 years ago

Most of the time you actually know more than you would assume. Even if you barely touched something, if you know about it you at least know what it is, what it can be used for, were to start learning... That's already much more than what average people can quickly pick up.

Bombthecat2• 7 years ago

The sister of my wife looked for a new job. Started to talk to friends, colleagues etc. All of them lie! Not a single one didn't lie on there cv. So she lied too, to get a job..

In that regard, from what I hear on forums and now live from the sister of my wife, us became a low trust society for job applications..

rightbyte• 7 years ago

What do you mean with lying? Like writing 3y exp. with x instead of the accurate 1y or even zero? Writing that you have a cert when you really dont? Doesn't the employer check the facts?

mrunkel2• 7 years ago

Let me put it this way, in a previous job, I held the title of Director of IT. That company disappeared after the first dotcom boom. Now, on linkedin, there are no less than four people that claim to hold the title of Director of IT at that company even though I was the only one to actually have that job. The others are former co-workers who have taken the opportunity to inflate their job titles by appropriating mine.

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

It’s part of “hustling”. If you lie and win, you are a “hustler”. If you don’t win you are just a liar.

notacoward3• 7 years ago

Sadly, yes. Just a couple of days ago I saw some explicit advice to take credit for things even if you're not sure you contributed enough to deserve it. This was in the context of reviews rather than hiring, but I think it's about equally common. I consider it a form of exaggeration and I'm uncomfortable with it. On the other hand, there's a difference between taking primary credit and taking credit for contribution. Sometimes it's not a zero-sum game, and taking credit for contributing in no way harms the person who gets and deserves primary credit. In those cases it can still be deceptive, but how much that matters depends a lot on how much exaggeration the interviewer expects and adjusts for.

bliblah• 7 years ago

I think that is the point of interviews. Sure I may not have worked X years on a project but I can answer any question my potential supervisor ask then who cares? I would say my CV is 90% accurate and 10% lies, enough to get some glances from hiring managers, but not enough to blow an interview due to sheer ignorance if they ask me about i.

empath75• 7 years ago

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.

Topgamer7• 7 years ago

Not a lie, still an estimate, estimates are not contracts.

cmurf• 7 years ago

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.

growlist• 7 years ago

Add to this: BBC 'Journalist'

je42• 7 years ago

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.

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

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.

justinclift• 7 years ago

... 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. :)

Simulacra• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

Jobs where liars excel

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