Lying is NOT withholding information that people aren’t entitled to. You’re trying to win an argument by changing what the words mean. If somebody confides in me with a secret, am I a liar if I don’t immediately rush off and tell it to all concerned parties? No, I’m not. You’re trying to confuse honesty with openness, and specifically in this case, as an obligation to disclose privileged information.

I think your definition of lieing allows for an unlimited amount of misdirection based on a literal interpretation of lieing.

If you are a manager, you heard the CEO say they are going to lay off the bottom 20% of the engineers next month, you know you rated employee A as your worst employee during evaluations, and you then assign Employee A to a new project that's estimated to be 8 months of work, you have not lied by your definition because your CEO didn't say explicitly that they were firing employee A.

If you were a manager and a bank called to confirm an employee worked there so that they could be approved for a home loan, which you know they check to make sure that the employee has a salary that will pay the loan for the near future, you are going to fire the employee next week, and you just tell the bank, "yes he is employeed here" you have not lied by your definition because they didn't explicitly ask if the employee was going to be employed for the duration of that loan.

If you put out a job posting for a set of skills + salary that you know no one will ever take, and then apply for an h1b slot because you couldn't get any candidates, you haven't lied by your definition.

You've made the point that I am trying to win an argument by changing the definition of what words mean, but from my view point that is what you are doing. Human communication is not run through a compiler. There are explicit definitions, implicit definitions, connotations, and even social expectations that all add meaning to our communications, and by saying that you never lied because you are following the exact definition of the words you are being disingenuous

You're constructing a fantasy reality for yourself where words mean whatever you want them to, and where I personally did a series of things that you literally just made up.

The real process for how something like happened is that the management spend some time assessing the viability of a project > decide it's not worth continuing > make a plan for how to shut it down > inform staff and help them find new roles inside or outside the company. Now, until the plan had been finalised and approved, there is no news to tell anybody, we (intentionally) didn't have any new major pieces of work kicking off during the review period. At no time in this process did anybody lie to anybody else, by omission or otherwise. If my superiors had asked me to help them do this in a way that was morally questionable or dishonest, I would have refused.

Your argument that everybody must lie by omission simply because there are always things that you can't tell certain people is complete nonsense. A lie by omission is to construct the information you present to somebody intentionally in such as way as to misrepresent the facts and mislead them. By itself, not revealing confidential or private information to somebody is not lying by omission.

I'm not going to reply to any more of your comments, because your entire argument is predicated on reinventing the meaning of words, and creating fantasy straw-man scenarios to apply them to.

None of my arguments were strawmen. The three examples I gave were things I personally saw go down at companies I worked at by people with your same viewpoint. I have not worked with anyone who stated that they never lied who did not act like they were a genie from a fairy tale and anything but a lawyer drafted contract to them was means to manipulate someone as far as possible.

I apologize if it came off as me saying that you had done these things. I am on the east coast and not in a tech hub for most of my career, and many of the stories coming from the west coast tech hubs sound like utopian fantasies compared to the way I have seen employers treat employees here.

At this point we are looking at the same painting but you see blue and I see red, so perhaps it is best to end the discussion

The line does get blurry at times. In the past I've been told to remove someone's account right away because they are being terminated and then afterwards been told "nevermind, we're firing them next week. Undo everything and make sure that you convince them it was just some computer issue". To add to it they didn't tell me about it until the user had already noticed they couldn't log into their account.

I agree with what you're saying about withholding information being different than lying but there are circumstances where you will need to flat out lie and fabricate a story to effectively withhold that information. In my case I had to pretend that it must have been a stuck key or something while I quickly reverted the changes and walked them through turning off the computer and pressing all of the keys a lot to "fix" it.

It's one thing to not tell anyone what a meeting between management is about but if you're telling people that you're in a meeting about "Regulatory compliance auditing" while planning a layoff that's not just withholding information. I'm not saying it isn't justified but a lie is still a lie.

>If people told literally no lies our society would fall apart.

Concur. Imagine if we could all read each other's minds: things would go downhill in a New York zeptosecond.