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Comment by appleiigs | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, I declined a job interview when a company wanted to do the interview process via HireVue. Has the Orwellian telescreen feel. The process includes candidate recording interview responses and uploading them for AI to evaluate. HR must not realize that as part of the interview, candidates are also evaluating whether the company is a good place to work at.

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> HR must not realize that as part of the interview, candidates are also evaluating whether the company is a good place to work at.

In many fields outside software people with no healthcare, student debt, a mortgage and car payments are screwed. As long as the system keeps the people down, they won't have a choice but to take that job, no matter the Orwellian nature

> outside software

Hell, inside it, too. I always figured that, although I morally oppose this sort of demeaning treatment, my education and experience in software would at least protect me from it. I thought that right up until my company shut down without warning a couple of years ago and I was out of work. I was a little shocked by how poorly job candidates were treated: hirevue, mandatory contract-to-hire “trial periods”, background checks (the background check I did for the job I have now demanded references for jobs all the way back to 1998!). I can’t even imagine what it’s like for the people who aren’t “in demand”.

It's so easy to stay out of this. Keep up your health and don't take on debt. Gives you a lot of freedom.

https://sivers.org/richand

Yes, lucky people have more flexibility. The problem is that very few people avoid getting sick or hurt[1], having kids, needing loans, getting laid off, etc. and a healthy society should work for more than 10% of the population.

1. “Keep your health” up is obviously naive to start with but also ask how many people are, say, hurt in car crashes or on the job every year and how cruel your advice would sound to them.

Do 80% of people get into car crashes or hurt on the job every year?

No? Then my advice can apply to 80% of the people.

A very high percentage choose to buy a house or car, or have children as part of their life planning when things look fairly stable. When you grow up and have adult responsibilities, the youthful feeling of invulnerability starts to fade.

Your advice would be good if there were a way of knowing upfront whether you were in the 80%.

Assuming that you are lucky is an extremely poor planning strategy that, yes, much of the time will result in better outcomes than not.

That said, it will also result in some highly negative outcomes in other situations.

Insurance has value.

Try repeating this assertion after getting into a car crash yourself

I've been in one, had a finger chopped off and been in a coma :-)

To be clear, it sucked for a bit but I came back just fine.

The only thing you lost was your humanity?

Oh, HR does and laughs at the thought. But we live in a political system where corporations have seemingly unalienable rights above their workers. “Want to afford things? Then succumb to the dictates of corporate America or else.” All the while, these same corporations benefit from unprecedented federal deficit spending at the cost of the individual citizens.

As long as there are other places to work, we can and should avail ourselves of them.

It's fine and dandy for people in tech but if you're a single parent with a narrow set of skills who's struggling and been applying for jobs for over a month then you're going to take the offer. And then you're not going to have much time to continue job searching.

There are entire industries insulated enough for illegal HR practices to prevail. “Other places to work” line of reasoning is tone deaf and functionally abusive.

I’m not sure how privately holding the opinion “anyone who can choose non-abusive employers should choose them over abusive ones” is itself “functionally abusive”.

Freedom of association is a powerful tool.

It’s abusive when it’s used as it was here to imply that it’s the worker’s fault for accepting bad working conditions, as if there aren’t many well documented reasons why that’s hard for most people.

https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/

I made no such implication. You appear to be reading something I simply did not say.

Then what was the point of replying to a comment about bad working conditions to say people should switch jobs? The entire discussion was about how it’s getting harder to avoid certain practices. Do you really think most people with bad working environments haven’t considered the option?

The problem is that it gets advocated as "anyone can choose non-abusive employers over abusive ones", which is simply false.

I've also laughed at companies trying to pull this thing, but I also realize that this is a huge privilege. There is really only in tech that the tables are somewhat flipped, and applicants can afford to give HR bullies the middle finger.

The US has record low unemployment. There are many fields outside tech where workers can be picky about jobs.

Those numbers aren’t really telling you the full story: unemployment is relatively low but pay scales have lagged far behind — someone whose corporation gets rid of them after they turn 50[1] and ends up working as an Uber driver is technically still employed but in reality they have very limited ability to negotiate pay or working conditions.

1. I was recently talking with an older relative who had multiple friends experience things like being reassigned to offices which required much longer commutes when they were starting to approach retirement age, despite no change in their work or at the business at the location they’d worked for the previous 2-3 decades. Said relative was very happy to have a union which prevents abuse like that.

Yes, and millions of people working multiple jobs are considered to be living below the poverty line. America is the only developed country that has the class of "working class poor"

More crap jobs is not a good thing, and nobody should want that.

> America is the only developed country that has the class of "working class poor"

I'd be interested in seeing a source on this, if you have it

https://qz.com/879092/the-us-doesnt-look-like-a-developed-co...

https://eand.co/why-america-is-the-worlds-first-poor-rich-co...

https://eand.co/half-of-americans-are-effectively-poor-now-w...

Germany has the same

> applicants can afford to give HR bullies the middle finger.

Probably depends a lot on your location though unless you are aiming for companies that allow remote. Midwest Ohio vs. San Francisco. I feel like since the job market is so much larger, SF would be much more flexible when being picky about jobs than other places.

Then we should wherever appropriate.

> only in tech

Wait until you hit 40. You’ll start to discover how unskilled workers feel applying for jobs.

I have met more than a few HR and Exec;s with the attitude of "they should be lucky they even have a job"

I wonder if we already have products where the AI does the entire first-stage candidate selection based on detailed data profiles on those who've applied, and HR only receives the CV's of people that passed the AI filter.

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