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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

> Some workers don’t want to rock the boat for fear they might get blacklisted, McCarthy said.

Has anyone here ever heard of someone getting blacklisted? I could imagine someone who does something really shitty in an interview at SomeCorp being put on a do-not-hire list at SomeCorp, and the same for being fired there, but blacklist to me implies preventing employment across multiple companies.

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I don’t think an explicit blacklist exists, but I figure employers will google you, so they will know if you did anything that got you on the news or if you wrote an article attacking your employer’s politics. If this search isn’t done by someone in the company, it’s probably done by a background check company they hire.

Also, there is the concept of a back-channel reference, where someone from the hiring company will reach out to contacts at the candidate’s current and/or former employer and ask for opinions.

> Has anyone here ever heard of someone getting blacklisted?

Not at Facebook, but James Damore never recovered.

They had an anti-poach between companies. Shared Blacklist isnt that far from that.

https://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/

Certainly if you get involved in any sort of litigation or whistleblowing, or anything that is public record, then a blacklist would be redundant.

Michael O. Church is a controversial figure around here, but he's claimed this has happened to him.

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