Comment by futureshock

Exactly this. You can either work really hard and likely get minimal benefit and cause yourself a lot of pain, or you can work considerably less hard, and largely end up in the same place.

Rarely, you can do all that extra work and get meaningful improvement that justified all the effort. It does happen. Sometimes it presents itself in the form of a severance package.

And even then, there are appropriate and inappropriate times to bring up certain pieces of information.

For example, I’m not embarrassed about the fact that my mom died when I was young. But it would be deeply weird to open a job interview by saying, “Hi, I’m [name] and my mom died when I was young.”

I’m not hiding that information from employers. But maybe we should know one another a little better before I bring it up.

> a couple of white lies

Don't ever approach it this way. You never need to lie, and preparing for an interview with "lies" in your mind is going to backfire on you.

You can use the technique of "mental reservation". There is always something positive or complimentary that can be said about every bad situation, every horrible supervisor. It is simply a matter for you to examine it dispassionately, extract the good, and frame that nicely without introducing insults or the real negativity and pain that you felt in the moment.

If your supervisor overworked you and you were induced to come in for 70-hour weeks and you ultimately burned out with no vacation or weekends, you could say that the management "was quite dedicated to the company's goals and productivity". If you considered your coworkers to be slackers and they never seemed to work, "the company accommodated a wide range of talents, skills and abilities." If you never saw your supervisor and had nearly no guidance on projects or tasks, "the management believed in me and trusted me to do the right thing in nearly every respect."

These are not lies and you should not lie, because if you go counterfactual, that will be found out. If, on the other hand, they know you had a difficult time and you still found ways to compliment those bastards, then perhaps you will do the same favor for them one day.

As someone who did a lot of hiring in my last job, I would push back against the narrative here that it's about lying or behavior policing. Although there is plenty of truth that there's an unfair bias against negativity, I do think there's a very valid reason for hiring managers to care about whether or not an applicant can remain positive or at least objectively neutral in an interview, and be diplomatic about negative experiences.

Invariably, at any company, even if they are a fantastic workplace, you are going to disagree with your lead or coworkers at some point. You will be asked to do work you aren't excited about or don't see value in, and you will be asked to work with people you don't particularly like.

If you aren't able to maintain a fairly positive attitude for a one hour interview, it makes sense that a hiring manager might worry about how well you'll be able to be a team player when things get rough. I used to think it was bullshit, and I learned the hard way. I hired someone who was fairly unpleasant during his interview, because he was the most competent applicant, and it seemed wrong to me to look at anything other than job skills. He was an excellent programmer, but he sucked so much time and energy out from the rest of the team with complaints and arguments. Of course I don't think that's always going to be the case, sometimes people have gone through genuinely negative past work experiences or just have brusque personalities, but I was certainly wary after that of people who couldn't put on a positive attitude for an interview.

This was very much taught in some of the business school electives I took. Some of the projects are quite literally to give a realistic pitch for products or businesses that you never intend to actually build. It might be only be taken as subtextual in the most charitable view, but being able to bullshit like that is definitely taught.

This is part of maturing into the real world. Politics (for lack of a better word) is part of any group of people who spend a lot of time together. We try and try to distill politics out of the workplace as engineers, which, ironically, is precisely why interviews are so positive-biased that they feel slightly fake for some. We don't like those dirty unquantifiable "feelings". Popping up all the time.

This isn't from business schools, this is just basic understanding of politics and how status and other things work amongst groups of humans.

Ignoring this key aspect of humanity isn't virtuous

Bullshitting is a skill. For some, it is their only skill, and they are very, very good at it.

learning how to play to win on the job