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Comment by pletsch | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced that Gen-Z is going to blow all of this out of the water. That the world will eventually hit a point where there isn't anyone without something online that can come back to haunt them. And I think companies are starting to see it too.

A little anecdotal but when I was applying for jobs last summer there was a video that was brought up twice during interviews with different organizations. Both times I was told after the fact that it was just to see how I would react, all I did was tell them what happened, not that I was sorry because I wasn't, I told them I stood behind what my actions were and there was nothing I could do about it now (it hit 100k views on Instagram, not a situation where I can contain it). Both companies offered me a job.

I rewrote this a few times and I'm still not sure I got my point across, but I agree with the argument in the The Transparent Society, and I already see it shifting towards that.

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> A little anecdotal but when I was applying for jobs last summer there was a video that was brought up twice during interviews with different organizations.

I find it interesting that a company would do this instead of silently reject you…

The one I took, the interviewer ended up being my boss. He told me that the reason they overlooked it was because:

1. If there were videos of everything stupid he did, there would be no way he would ever get hired.

2. It wasn't anything illegal or violent, so he didn't see it as a character issue.

3. I was honest about it.

My Machiavellian side says that they have dirt on you now and know they can use it at any time. If anything, more dirt is then better, as it creates more leverage for them in the long run.

Still, Hanlon's Razor applies, and you boss is more than likely just telling the truth.

Your Machiavellian side is completely missing the point then - this is(was) a public event (as evidenced by GP's reference to 100k views on IG), thus there is no leverage.

You'd have leverage if there were a reasonable likelihood that you were the only hiring manager to have this information, but if everyone is on a level playing field, the leverage disappears.

Not only is an easily discovered public event poor leverage, it becomes much worse leverage if it comes up in an interview.

When companies (or governments) try to manipulate employees, they frequently rely on some kind of willful ignorance. Wells Fargo is a great example: they set impossible performance targets and turned a blind eye to fraud, then fired and blacklisted whistleblowers - ostensibly for knowing about that same fraud!

If a shady employer wants leverage, even public events can suffice as long as they can claim ignorance. For example, most stock option grants are immediately lost if you're fired, but even at-will employment can't be terminated specifically to deprive someone of their options. So an employer might give a generous options package, then "discover" the IG video and use it for dismissal at just the right time to prevent a profitable exercise. But if that video comes up during hiring, it's no longer a plausible reason for later dismissal, at least without committing perjury regarding the interview.

I can't even work out a scenario where "lots of people know about this including us" is an effective way to manipulate someone.

In any real going business, cost of hiring and training someone of a type who is eligible for compensation with stock options and the subsequent morale dip if discovered doing such manipulation would by far outweigh the benefits of doing this. So this is largely a tin foil hat scenario

For any business with decent size, absolutely. There are a thousand ways to claw back options, and the reason they don't get used is that doing it even once would make hiring practically impossible.

For a small enough company? It falls in the same category as "diluting out of one guy's shares" - bad morals and bad business, but it still happens.

I'm pretty sure that those that DID consider the clip a problem for hiring the OP didn't share any of that with them. But I'm happy to see that others were more rational about it.

Very possible. I didn't apply to many places, I got interviews at 3/5, two mentioned it, could have been that the other two saw it and decided I wasn't worth their time.

Precisely what were you doing in the video? Depends on the content, young me did a lot of stupid stuff which would have got me into a lot of hot water now. Benign stuff can be misconstrued and abused as well. So, sorry, I don't trust your argument for a transparent society.

Transparent Society is still the best book on the subject and I agree with you whole-heartedly about the societal ground shifting.

Now I’m wondering what the context of the video was, and why they felt it was relevant to ask about.

It was a video of me in my university dorms, it wasn't anything illegal or violent. I'm not sure why they felt the need to ask, I wonder if they were just curious for context.

That's infuriating. I'm sorry you had to go through with that.

I kinda lucked out and learned my lesson about this stuff early on

I was trash-talking one group of internet people with another group, and the trash talk ended up getting indexed by Lycos or AltaVista. They called me out for being a dick, and I realized that I need to be really careful about what ends up attached to me online. (Also not to trash talk people behind their back..)

What kind of clip was it without getting too specific?

What videos?

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