Lies Employers Use to Get You to Work with Them

This is just another instance of western societies devolving from a high-trust environment into a low-trust environment. In the short term, cheating in the prisoners dilemma of social trust is beneficial for the cheater, but in the long run it ends up resulting in lower economic growth, making everyone poorer.<p>Social trust is <i>the</i> key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.

I don&#x27;t want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me. Lying to someone about what their life would be like working at the company seems totally counterproductive to that goal.<p>I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is <i>exceedingly</i> rare - at least with engineers.<p>I&#x27;m lucky to be asked basic questions like what time people are expected into the office in the morning let alone someone asking for concrete examples of advancement.<p>Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult - just breaking down their defensive barriers so they&#x27;ll relax and give me candid answers can take half my time. Still, there is only so much I can do in a limited amount of time, so at the end I just try to lay out what an average work day looks like and my philosophy as their manager and hope that they will be able to make an informed decision.

If employers really want people to work with them, they will pay them more. Everything else is meaningless and unenforcable. Cash on the barrel is the only thing that counts.<p>For job seekers, it&#x27;s fair and reasonable to assume that any employer who makes promises against the future is lying, so for every promise you are made (&quot;You&#x27;ll eventually get to work on cool technology X!&quot;) you should increase your starting salary expectations, because you need to get a fair wage for being lied to.

The best defense is a good offense. In other words, you should not be locked into your relationship with your employer, especially as a new hire.<p>It&#x27;s always your option to quit if things aren&#x27;t as advertised, and not worth salvaging. This means managing your finances and attitudes to be more mobile, and not basing your security and contentedness on the good will of your employer.<p>Bad employers act a lot like political candidates. The hiring process is the campaign, and once the votes are tallied and the position is locked in, the worker is subjected to things not quite as described. You never know what things are going to be like for your personal situation regardless of how much you read up on company experiences, so keep a fallback plan open, sacrifice to maintain a financial buffer, and don&#x27;t get bogged down in your possessions and location.<p>This mindset is also useful even when your employer is great, in family emergencies and other life-upheaving events.

Great article!<p>I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I start I find out I&#x27;m working with a bunch of duds. How can I get a big picture view of (almost) all of the people I will be working with along with their skill levels?<p>I don&#x27;t expect everyone in the company to be all A team or B team tier, but I don&#x27;t want to be a part of an organization where 80% of the people are barley qualified to do their job.

Interesting read.<p>I&#x27;ve personally seen other &#x27;tactics&#x27; used, most notably a former company&#x27;s CFO told my Manager that I was being paid 20k more in Salary than I actually was.<p>This 20k was then subtracted from the IT Budget presumably on a yearly basis. Any other stories from readers?

Is it just me or does reading an article on LinkedIn about people lying at work feel like a recursive loop?

My new manager just admitted to me a couple weeks back that my old manager (who is his manager now) straight up lied to me to get me in the door. He lied about how quickly my salary would increase. They told me that every six months salary is generally increased. Now that six months has come, he tells me that it is very rare for an increase mid-year.

The article is more reasonable than the headline for me.<p>I don&#x27;t think most employers around me lie on purpose. It&#x27;s really that kind of situation were you try hard to be good to the other person, but in the end real life hits you in the face and you don&#x27;t come around to deliver as much as promised. I&#x27;d argue I fell in that trap a few times myself.

And then they wonder why good employees often leave with--usually at most--two weeks of warning...

1, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are weasel words. What is &quot;a lot&quot;; what is &quot;extensive&quot;; how often is &quot;on occasion&quot;? They&#x27;re not lies: they just mean nothing.<p>2 and 3 are firm statements: ask for them in writing. Even if they&#x27;re not in an official employment contract, an email stating same might give you enough ammo for a Fraudulent Inducement Of Employment case (if push came to shove).<p>Ask follow-up questions to get a quantitative answer <i>based on past performance</i>. Promises of future raises (or other future actions) are complete BS and should be treated as such.

You know a recruiter is a fresher when they say that they need to fill this job real fast because the last guy burned out.

Why don&#x27;t you ensure that all the promises simply written down in the employment agreement, so that in case that you are betrayed you have a lever (on the other hand: If the employer are not willing to write it into the employment agreement, there is a chance that he will try to cheat you sooner or later).

Hah, #1, #4, and #5 happened at my very first job. I was young and naive.

<i>Flat hierarchy</i> is a big one. Many startups use it to convince junior hires that they&#x27;ll be two hops from the CEO when, in fact, that CTO has 75 reports and the junior engineer is actually two <i>de facto</i> levels below where he was told he&#x27;d be in the offer letter.<p>Investor contact is another, related, one. When engineers accept 0.05% equity slices at the expense of hedge-fund jobs, they&#x27;re doing it because they&#x27;ve been told (and haven&#x27;t had the life experience to have doubts) that they&#x27;ll have investor contact within 6 months if they do a good job, and have the connections necessary to be founders inside of 18 months. It almost never happens that way.