3by9

Sometimes lies take over a year to surface

lie
–noun
1. a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.

I started with a definition to make sure we are on the same page. Note the definition: deliberate intent to deceive. If the statement is deliberate the person is making a conscious choice to lie, to try to deceive the person(s) they are interacting with. In my experience, lies come to the surface because keeping up the facade of the lie is too much trouble.

Of course sometimes the lie is told to bide time and that’s the lie I’m talking about today. The whopper that Microsoft told to delay their employees from knowing Valentine had one foot out the door when Vista was complete.

The contract called for him to start on September 11. Valentine surely told his bosses of this fact. And yet Microsoft did not announce his departure until September 5, less than a week before he started.

So why would Microsoft lie about Valentine’s employment status? In July and August, Microsoft’s programmers were on a death march to complete Windows Vista.

What was the lie? That Valentine was taking a new job within the company after shipping Vista. Unfortunately, the contract with Amazon was signed in June, the lie was told in August. Microsoft lying isn’t that big of a deal, almost expected some would say. Let’s not forget that Valentine went along with the lie. He looked his team in the face every day with the knowledge he was jumping ship. This is not one lie, it’s a string of lies maintained for months. I would imagine quite a few people were in on this lie. He worked for Microsoft for 19 years, seven of those on Windows. The lie shows how fragile things were for his team during that time, if they were unable to handle the truth. He was paid handsomely for his deceit:

The deal called for him to get a $1.7 million signing bonus, a $150,000 salary, another $500,000 bonus, and 400,000 shares of Amazon.com (now worth almost $30 million).

Makes one wonder how much he was making at Microsoft. That’s a lot of money and I bet you’re saying you’d figure it out for that kind of money, right? Well, if he could lie to people for months what stops him from doing the same thing to Amazon? Valentine wasn’t in the strongest position transferring because Vista has always been plagued with problems, even in beta.

That’s my point: a liar doesn’t make exceptions. Eventually a liar will lie to anyone to benefit his/herself. It’s only a matter of time.

I’m glad the truth finally came to light. I thought it was kind of odd that Valentine was being re-assigned at that time. It didn’t feel right….because it wasn’t. I suppose this would make a good Quofda question: in the same situation would you lie to everyone?