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Comment by EricBurnett | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, how is that evil? If questions are known they can't be used anymore, and often confidential information can come up in interviews, so it seems only sensible. I don't remember hearing of it ever being used against someone, so it's really just a precaution against someone finding out and then disclosing something really important. I suppose I could have said that not discussing people's questions is only polite, for all the weight it carries.

*EDIT: added last sentence.

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I understand Google has reasons why they might want to NDA their process, but from the perspective of a potential employee, being asked to sign an NDA for the interview is only a liability. Interviews can be unreasonable (and sometimes even abusive) environments, and I want to know about that before walking into that. Barring that, I want to warn people about bad interview experiences.

If people cannot talk about their interview experiences, there's no opportunity for employers to receive censure for bad interview practices.

Besides, an interview is not the SATs. If this really is the logic for the interview process, then Google interviews are even more broken than I thought.

An NDA would not and could not cover abuse, and I highly doubt it covers your impressions either (e.g. "it was terrible and the interviewers were all rude!"), so I don't really agree with your first point. For your second I can see where you're coming from, although at least in this case I don't see droves of people interviewing and then saying the process was terrible. But there should be (and perhaps is?) an easy way to complain about bad interview practices companies have without running afoul of their NDAs.

For your third point, I don't understand what you're getting at. What logic are you referring to that is broken?

Buy me a beer and I'll tell you the story of my worst interview ever. I'm nice enough to the founder of that company not to name them here, but it was incredibly bad.

In fact, it was so bad I later got a written apology for what happened.

What went wrong?

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