Comments on: Emerging dating paranoia

By: Ravi Babu

Ravi Babu — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:58:18 +0000

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By: Iang (CISSPs in hiring)

Iang (CISSPs in hiring) — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 08:43:13 +0000

@Chandler: this one. I don't know whether the CISSP has continued its race to the bottom or not ... opinions always welcome, how do we redeem such a thing?

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:47:32 +0000

Chandler,
Thanks for your comment, and sorry, but we hit 99+% tb spam long ago, and so have turned the durned things off. What anyone was doing designing them like that after 2000 or so is beyond me.

By: Chandler Howell

Chandler Howell — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:00:53 +0000

Since Adam accidentally flagged one of my trackbacks as spam a couple of years ago, I have to manually note that I’ve added my own thoughts as a former dating industry insider over at Not Bad for a Cubicle.
@Iang
You’re describing a problem with signaling mechanisms in general. I think we discussed this a year or so ago in comments over at fc in the specific context of the value of certifications such as the CISSP in the security hiring process.

By: albatross

albatross — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 09:52:20 +0000

How long until we start getting stories of people who can’t get a date, because of that nasty identity theft that happened to them five years ago?
Anecdotally, I can think of one woman I know who married a guy she met in grad school, and then went through a sequence of unpleasant surprising disclosures (“Ah, you lost that job. Oh, that was when you went bankrupt. I see, so it was because of the drug habit. Around the same time you went to jail for drugs.”) spread out over several months, up until the time he went (back) to jail and she divorced him. Perhaps she would have been happier if she’d done the background check.

By: Iang (Lies, Uncertainty and Job Interviews)

Iang (Lies, Uncertainty and Job Interviews) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 06:54:10 +0000

You could say the same things about any “new introduction” pattern, which is I guess why Adam thought your post appropriate for a security blog.
There is a big problem with our field (and maybe elsewhere) in that self-marketing forces us to lie.
Consider employment. Why is it so hard for employers to get a feel for the potential employee? Why is it that they have to do background checks? Why can’t they trust an interview? Why do some places conduct a separate interview with each and every team member you might be talking to, and only accept you if you impress everyone?
An aggressive marketing culture eventually ends up drifting to one where the message is meaningless, which then means there is no way to actually do due diligence of integrity based on the person’s own representations. Background checks then might be one of the tools that fill in, but the wise employer has to look further, as background checks aren’t that reliable.
As time goes on, this pattern becomes more embedded in our internal code, to the point where we lie about more things than just self-marketing, and we can neither recognise the lies nor where they are useful or appropriate.
Hence dating. If you feel like dating is becoming like a job interview, it may be because there is an underlying factor that has caused both to respond.