Leaving the ethical questions aside and compulsive lying aside, we are talking about miscomunication as a means to achieve concrete goals.
And, given that you need a lot more skills to successfully manipulate someone with misscomunication than just to communicate, and "we" devs often barely manage to get people to understand anything AT ALL, honesty may be the best policy by virtue of beeing the only policy available to us.
Imho, it's often even the other way around: people can be tricked to answer dishonestly ("everything is OK") to avoid conflict, only to have the answer later used against them.
Even in "white lie" situations, honesty is often not as catastrophic as it seems.
E.g.: "are you actively looking for another gig/job?!" - if they ask, they probably already assume you are, so a "if so, why would you be surprised?" is not as catastrophic as it may seem.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, i have seldom encountered a situation in which dishonesty was the clearly superior tactic.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Leaving the ethical questions aside and compulsive lying aside, we are talking about miscomunication as a means to achieve concrete goals.
And, given that you need a lot more skills to successfully manipulate someone with misscomunication than just to communicate, and "we" devs often barely manage to get people to understand anything AT ALL, honesty may be the best policy by virtue of beeing the only policy available to us.
Imho, it's often even the other way around: people can be tricked to answer dishonestly ("everything is OK") to avoid conflict, only to have the answer later used against them.
Even in "white lie" situations, honesty is often not as catastrophic as it seems.
E.g.: "are you actively looking for another gig/job?!" - if they ask, they probably already assume you are, so a "if so, why would you be surprised?" is not as catastrophic as it may seem.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, i have seldom encountered a situation in which dishonesty was the clearly superior tactic.