Cheating is the act to subvert rules in order to obtain an unfair advantage. Having ‘honest cheaters’ in a team is one way to improve your systems, find holes in rules, and deliver a better product to clients.

Having cheaters in your work force who cheat in order to improve their own personal goals is not a positive most if not all of the time. The cheaters that are a positive are the so called ‘honest cheaters’ who find the holes in the rules in internal operations so that they can be identified and addressed. Honest cheaters could also be checking if an external product has any flaws that could result in client harm (e.g., data theft), checking if there are rules that the company has in place that could be exploited by others, or finding a method that internal employees could be using to steal company money.

No one like to be called a cheater. However, these roles in companies are surprisingly common. A ‘Penetration tester’ is an IT role that looks to attempt to hack into their own client’s servers to identify holes in the security. This is a very high paying job with an annual salary of $100,000-160,000.

Whilst Navigatus Consulting does not hire any penetration testers, we do hire data scientists to assist with risk management work, such as Joshua Mills: https://www.navigatusconsulting.com/our-people/joshua-mills/ and David Spencer: https://www.navigatusconsulting.com/our-people/david-spencer/, who often are tasked with attempting to find holes in programs, errors in websites, or possible weak points in arguments. By regularly putting our work through this test we can identify any gaps, errors, or weak points in our products to provide the best possible solutions to our clients.

Image: Education Central, “NCEA Exam Model Answers May Be Trimmed to Stop Cheating.”