> and all of his career progress can be traced back to lying on his resume about a NASA internship he never got, which he conveniently purged later from everywhere
I don't like when people get ahead by lying either, but nobody cares about your internship at the executive level. That one lie helped with the first job, but it doesn't explain all of the person's success.
> There’s no reason to feel guilty about it.
Even if we ignore guilt, there's a subtle problem that happens when you tell a lie to get a job: You have to forever hope that nobody checks it, that no contradictory evidence accidentally shows up, and that it never becomes a point of contention.
I've participated in a lot of interviews where candidates never expected us to check claims they made. It's interesting to see the entire hiring panel's view of a candidate change when someone discovers they lied about something. Everything else comes into question.