When Your Boss Expects You to Lie

I've had a couple of lay-offs where being honest probably played at least some role. In the first, the pressure was to use the wrong reliability model for hard drive components (didn't fit the data), and the end of the story was that three months after the RIF, the company got hammered by that same failure mode, even worse than I'd predicted. In a second, I was let go in the aftermath of the company deciding they could unilaterally ignore certain product specifications if the company thought the customer didn't "need" that spec to be met. Neither company survived, FWIW.

In both cases, I think I dodged a bullet. Imagine my lack of employability if my name were attached to a willfully "optimistic" reliability estimate or deliberate deception for this--and the second company did a lot of military sales as well. It could have gotten ugly. Even if the deception wasn't caught--and the odds are pretty good that it would be--I could have been the last sailor on a sinking ship, which isn't terribly good for one's career, either.

From the perspective of evangelism, it's worth noting that in the first case, when my boss at the first company told me that I was being let go, he noted that in the end, you're left with your character. He understood fully what I'd done and why. (it was a few levels up that wanted to cut corners....)

Moral of the stories, I guess, is to do your best to have a "get lost fund" so that when your management tells you you've got to violate Exodus 20:16 as a condition of employment, you can say no without letting your kids starve. It can be a powerful witness.

Bert Perry wrote: From the perspective of evangelism, it’s worth noting that in the first case, when my boss at the first company told me that I was being let go, he noted that in the end, you’re left with your character. He understood fully what I’d done and why. (it was a few levels up that wanted to cut corners….)

I think I wasn’t that clear in my own situation. One of my first summer jobs after high school was an in-homes direct sales “opportunity.” The training included a playbook of absurd exaggerations. I figured that since I’d do the spiel alone, I could fix that. But then they told us one day we were all going to go to a mall an illegally bestow fliers on all the car windshield wipers. Well, maybe not illegally. It was mall policy.

Ditched that job. I’ve always been pretty ‘marketing averse’ ever since. I couldn’t sell a product I thought was overpriced and that most people I’d try to sell it to really couldn’t afford. I wanted to say, “This is not for you” to almost everyone. Some jobs are incompatible with truth telling.