How do you identify liars who are technically skilled at lying? It seems like an intractable problem.

The best option I can see is to refuse to hire "obvious" dishonest people, aka unintelligent dishonest people. But intelligent dishonest people are able to pass without us knowing they are dishonest, and cannot be identified until their low performance becomes apparent. And we wouldn't hire unintelligent people to begin with.

And, evaluating performance in software is notoriously difficult, dare I say impossible? A skilled and intelligent dishonest person can come up with many plausible-sounding excuses for why things are taking so long.

So do you just fire anyone that takes longer than normal? In that case, you scare the actual good engineers, they will just go somewhere safer.

In the end, I don't think there's a way to evaluate honesty, without ruining your business. So I think bad actors are always rewarded.