The context here is salting so it would likely be omitting prior employment or education/training. I personally think this is completely reasonable in all cases.
Non-salting example: over a decade ago I omitted an entire year of professional experience as a PHP developer when trying to get hired as a Python engineer, because I didn’t want to get pigeon-holed as “PHP dev who can maintain our crummy legacy PHP codebase nobody wants to touch”.
Anyway it would be extremely problematic if employers were entitled to full and complete honesty from applicants but had no equivalent obligations from their side. If businesses had the choice they’d pick the status quo over mutual transparency.
I lied about my potential value (by understating it) to an employer for (longer term) personal and professional gain.
Going back to Union Salting:
Often times the "salt" is a star employee; they're always on time, never say no to a job, pick up shifts nobody wants to take to ingratiate themselves both to management and their colleagues. They don't ask for raises and never complain to management. Their intention is to organize workers and so they want to be the sort of model employee a manager will keep around.
The reason why this practice is allowed is because its illegal for unions to walk into an establishment and talk directly with employees about organizing while they're "on the clock" and on premise.
The parent didn't think they were irrelevant at all, they thought it might signal to the company that it could extract more value by assigning them work they didn't want to do.
Well intentioned hiring managers and teams lie all the time. If they let the truth flow they wouldn't be able to do their jobs. These people don't even mean to lie.
Maybe it's specifically in the context of unions and nothing else?
If you lie about your work experience, it turns out you can't program Rust, then you can get fired for that.
But if you lie about never having been part of a union before, and it turns out you have been part of a union before, then you can't get fired for that.
> It’s not your fault for lying on the resume, it’s the hiring teams fault for not catching it
Anyone who ever complains about how ridiculous hiring interviews in software development have gotten should be referred to this comment. This is exactly why these absurd practices exist. Because people think they're entitled to lie, and it's your fault if you don't catch them.
I've interviewed a lot of people over my career. I'm not sure "entitlement" is why the people who lie do so.
Most of what I see people lie about isn't the companies they've worked at, it's the kind of work they do. For instance, when I was looking for a senior engineer I'd get people who said they did all this product architecture work, leading teams in the weeds of building products internal and external. A lot of those people turned out to be actually working on projects by themselves or they didn't actually do any technical work. The latter is pretty easy to identify because if you start asking them nitty gritty standards questions about what they built they'll be completely lost. One woman that stood out like this was part of a ton of professional organizations, and was even being granted some really big title in one of them so I was pretty bullish that I'd found my senior. The last major project she led a team on was an internal REST service, so I figured it'd appropriate for us to workshop a REST API design. Pretty easy stuff to iteratively improve through a conversation especially if you've done it a thousand times. She didn't understand the grammar of REST much less how APIs are grouped. By that point I was starting to realize her role was likely more administrative than technical as a lot of roles at her level at non-tech businesses become. Discovering engineers who say they've led teams who haven't is also pretty easy. Frankly, not many engineers have actually led teams - it's an actual rarity. Of all the things engineers are asked to do day to day, leading other engineers is generally not party to them. I'd generally ask something about how they implement "trust but verify" aka delegating work. Engineers who have worked primarily solo will not know how to break down work so that others can consume it and align to the actual idea. It's something that takes a lot of practice and the answer generally involves a pretext of what certain people's strengths and weaknesses were.
I have no doubt both of these folks genuinely wanted to do what they were applying for. I don't think they'd ever really been given the chance, or worked at the wrong kind of companies for what they wanted to do.
To call it the "fault of the team" is easy, but in reality we have a very disjointed industry with no standard practice for building software, much less as a group.
Well… everyone is entitled to lie, including employers.
That’s the crux of the issue.
Software has wild practices because there’s no agreed upon certification and there’s this myth of 10x developers and managers only want those mythical 10x-ers
You're using the word "entitled" in a very strange way.
Entitled isn't a statement of practicalities or realpolitik; it's a statement of ideals. "Entitlement" as a concept doesn't make sense outside of the context of morality and ethics (or laws). It's not about the way the world is, but about the way the world ought to be.
If I'm an employer trying to spend the limited resources I have to get the right people on my team, barring exceptions I'll get into below, I have a right to be told the truth. You don't have to tell me everything, and if I ask a question you're entitled to say "None of your business". But if I say, "What experience do you have leading a team" and you lie to inflate your experience, and based upon that I hire you, then you have harmed me, you have harmed your future colleagues, you have harmed the other person I might have hired if you'd told the truth, and you have harmed yourself by putting yourself in a situation where you can't perform and can't trust or be trusted. A symmetric set of harms can be sketched out for employers. So no, you absolutely are not entitled to lie to me as a potential employer, and neither are companies entitled to lie to you as a potential employee.
The one exception I'd carve out is if you had the expectation that I'd misuse the truth. If I ask, "Are you pregnant", or "Have you ever been a union organizer", then "yes" could be misused to refuse to hire me (which is against the law), and "none of your business" might be construed as "yes". (Similarly to why, in WWII, I'd answer "No" if Nazis came to me door and asked me I were hiding Jews.)
But if I'm hiring you to lead a team, what I would do with an honest answer to "What is your experience leading a team" is legitimate, not misuse; and you have neither a moral, ethical, nor legal right to lie to me in your response.
Perhaps you really meant that practically speaking, below a certain level, there's no way to police minor "misrepresentations" from one side to the other. But just because it's possible to do it and get away with it doesn't make it right; and the fact that lots of people are causing harm to others by misrepresenting themselves doesn't negate the harm that you're causing when you do it too.
