Hacker News Reader

Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

The former is valid, the latter I disagree with strongly. Specifically...

  Too bad.

There are costs and risks in employment and employees are exposed to lots of risks that can result in health issues, sudden termination (layoff) and a myriad of other problems, the slight risk an employer accepts when hiring new employees and investing in training absolutely can be offset by insurance (employers can get targeted insurance against key personnel departures and against sudden wave departures). So... too bad. Violating this layer of privacy yields nearly no business benefit and costs sanity.

View on HN

Well, I'm all for saying it should be none of your business (in the general case) after considering that there are reasons that contribute to the case that it might be, and dismissing them. But insurance is a weak argument. Ultimately that means people fit for employment pay for others' incompetence and malfeasance.

I mean, this is a thing that happens. The malfeasance is pretty indefensible, but if you start talking about the employ-ability (or lack thereof) of people judged "incompetent" then we're going to start walking down a really dark path. It'd be nice if everyone was the perfect employee but some people have short tempers and some people are a bit less efficient than others - should these people (if they enjoy and are trained in software development) be unable to find employment because they fall short of a standard?

If so, how should they support themselves? Is it right and just to relegate everyone you judge incompetent (due to training or innate ability) as ineligible to work? There are obviously extremes here that we, as a society, accept - but if we raise that bar and make it more precise with big data some really scary social effects will come out of the woodwork.

Personally, I'm in the camp that we need to shift the morality and realism of working so that everyone has the safety net of a UBI to fallback on in desperate times because I am reading the tea leaves and fewer and fewer people have more and more control of the economy.

It is right that people judged incompetent are free to work for anybody that wants to pay them or judge them differently. They might just want to get their gambling debts in order before being CFO or holding the keys to Gmail.

Edit: Also, the more you know about candidates, the less risky it is to hire them. This generally makes it easier for people to get jobs.

Is it typically free to invoke that insurance? Typically my driving insurance goes up if I make a claim. (Assuming someone stealing from you is not your fault)

To the contrary, commercial insurance is often written to explicitly factor in the amount of claims that occur during the policy term, e.g. using retrospective rating[0]. Additionally, commercial underwriters typically have much more legal latitude in what they can consider when deciding whether—and for how much—to offer a policy contract: all states in the US have very strict rules about which sorts of claims can be considered when determining home and auto insurance rates for individuals (e.g. not-at-fault accidents and certain classes of weather damage are typically excluded)[1].

That being said, the brunt of the risk associated with a hiring decision lies with the employee in most situations (certainly in all the ones I’ve encountered personally working in retail and as a white-collar professional) in the US, and I would have to see some pretty startling numbers for an implied increase in insurance premiums to get anywhere near tipping that balance.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospectively_rated_insura... [1] NB I’m only familiar with US insurance regulation, so perhaps things work differently in other countries.

I can't answer this with confidence, I suspect it would go up if you made a claim similar to other insurances. Though car insurance is a weird racket so business interruption insurances may not be able to get away with it.

> Though car insurance is a weird racket

Ha, I don't think I agree with you on the topic at hand, but this is something I'll get behind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com