I don't think it's a huge deal and wouldn't personally let it negatively affect a hiring decision provided you made the right noises about how it was dumb in retrospect and you were young, etc, but your comment here is pretty much the opposite of that. Who could possibly employ someone with your attitude? Even a gas station wouldn't want to hire a cashier who steals money from the register when they can get away with it just because the petroleum industry is destroying the environment, or whatever.
The social contract includes not just what's written or implied, it's also what people do in practice, what is acceptable. If cheating is acceptable and required to get a tech job, then I can do that, in fact I can do it better than most. That says very little about my profound sense of ethics.
To counter your analogy: what if you are indicted of a crime you did not commit in North Korea? You surely accepted their rules when entering the country, but would you trust their judicial system to do the right thing? Would you bribe your way out if you were given the chance? Would you ask your country to put diplomatic pressure on your behalf, a clearly unethical advantage no Korean has? Would you consider escaping from prison if wrongfully convicted?
In a narrow definition of ethics as "whatever the current rules are" (typical, I would say, for somebody living their whole life in a state with strong rule of law), the only ethical behavior is to subject yourself to whatever abuse NK decides for you.
Also, I'm not convinced that growing up in the former Soviet bloc necessarily means that honesty isn't the best policy. If everyone around you is corrupt, being the one dependable person around is a differentiator. Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems like that reputation could have some real world value to you.
By the way, it doesn't matter what your classmates are doing. Comparing myself to the average was horribly destructive to my college education. It turns out, everyone around me putting in average amounts of studying and getting average grades ended up getting average jobs with average pay! The one or two people in class that always aced everything, about whom I thought "well I don't have to be as good as them" - those were the ones who ended up having a real shot at grad school or dat $100k Facebook new-grad signing bonus. It's just like when you move from high school to college and suddenly you're not the smartest person in the universe anymore. Your cheating classmates are bozos - stomp them with harder work and keep moving up. Don't sink to their level.
If you do not sign such a document, does it make a difference? Of course not. Getting massive advantage by extraordinary cheating is still unacceptable. However, cheating a little when stakes are very high, or cheating for 'greater good' may be acceptable. Cheating is a personal decision and whether it is acceptable depends on the situation the cheating person is in, and the person doing the judgement.
I have noticed that the worse the comment, the harder it is to reply to decently/politely/etc; maybe it was impossible for me to reply to this one, or say what I thought without arguably breaking the guidelines, so OK, point taken, better not to reply in such cases. "Someone is wrong on the internet!" is real. I really did try to stay on-point, not hard enough apparently. I mean, I really do think it was the most condescending, deluded thing I'd read in years, definitely while on here. (I guess you've read much worse!) Again, not sure if that's the part you're objecting to. Apologies if you've read 10,000 replies just like this one. Kind of surprised (and depressed) I'm the problem here though.
ps I only saw your comment by chance, it's pages back in my comment history. Is there a way of getting alerts for replies on here?
The main thing to realize is that even if another comment is bad/uncivil, you still need to refrain from replying in kind. Believe me, I understand how hard that is! But our community depends on it.
Sometimes I think that HN threads are a big experiment in all of us learning how not to get triggered. If you give better than you "get" (by reading someone's comment), you'll be on the right track.
So while I agree with you in the abstract, I believe it's hard for people in the western system to relate and make moral judgements about the experiences of a student in post-communist Eastern Europe, where the rules were often gray. Fellow students were cheating on a grand scale, and up to that point, I had the same principled attitude towards cheating as yourself. Part of the reasons for creating "the system" was my revolt towards what I saw around me - the tacit acceptance that those with good cheating skills, which I lacked and did not develop early in my academic career, should be allowed to cheat their way to a degree, while I was supposed to memorize garbage.
Sure, my "rebellion" was unethical and compounded the social problem around me. But what could I realistically do, could I have changed anything? At least I saved me from myself, because otherwise I would have dropped-out. In the grand scheme of things, impeccable ethics is often a luxury and could have the exact opposite effect, letting only those with no ethics whatsoever to graduate.