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AdmiralAsshat

The author says they did not ultimately take the job, so, does that mean they had to sign an NDA just to interview?

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Signing an NDA before the interviews is a very common practice (unfortunately)

maybe in UK, never heard of in US.

I have signed multiple NDAs for interviews in the states.

I’ve never done this in the states. It seems borderline unethical to require someone to sign a contract without any compensation.

That’s ok, thousands of other people will.

Seems weird to let leak “secrets “ during an interview that require a NDA though. Just be vague and tell them the secrets later.

And scrub whiteboards etc. every time you want to show around (or even just to the interview room) an interviewee?

...yes? If your secrets are worth an NDA, they're worth a little opsec.

I was responding to a suggestion not to use an NDA, and to 'just share secrets later'. Just pointing out that that's more involved than simply not breaking down (explicitly, in the actual interview) exactly how your middle-out compression algorithm works or whatever.

If they have secrets, yes! Don't give candidates access to secrets.

Yes, again, I was replying to the suggestion that 'oh it's easy no need for NDA, just share the secrets later if they get the job'. Point was it's not just deliberate sharing of secrets you need to avoid in that case. When candidates are asked to sign an NDA, it's probably not because they're going to be explicitly told anything sensitive.

Many years ago I interviewed at a military contractor. Every time we walked through a work area someone went ahead and announced I was coming through to ensure nobody had something that would require a clearance to see.

My current Australian client asked me to sign an NDA before doing the interview as they were busy applying for a patent.

I've done it in the US once, for a well-known tech company too. It's a bad practice but certainly present.

Google has you sign an NDA to interview. I wonder if I've just broken it.

I've never seen this (though also not interviewed a ton). What are they afraid is going to leak from an interview? Presumably you're not diving into trade secrets with someone you're merely deciding whether you're going to work with?

> What are they afraid is going to leak from an interview?

Well, in this case, probably exactly what is in this article?

As long as we're signing things before an interview, maybe we should be adding clauses like "I'm in this interview solely for the purpose of applying for this job" and "I have no other commercial interest in this interview."

Or, to put it another way, this is not a large-scale sustainable enterprise for a startup; even if it "succeeded", the business environment will adapt to eliminate it. Interviews are too expensive to let companies be screwing around getting paid to pitch crap at you in an "interview".

My favorite is when you've finished interviewing or whatever and then they ask you to sign an NDA. Haha, no.

The author does say that he was doing a consultation for a DevRel programme. That sounds to me like it was either paid consultation, or essentially a sales process by the author to generate consultancy work. NDAs are common in both of those scenarios.

Signing an NDA before taking a job is indeed very atypical in the UK.

I have exclusively signed NDAs for jobs before final interview stages in the UK. And now in Finland come to think of it. I don’t really see it as particularly controversial- obviously I can’t expect to walk into an office and tell the world about what I saw and the projects and clients a company had, and yet I’d quite like to know about them before committing to work full time there.

It's not uncommon to have to sign an NDA just to visit an office (you never know what you might see on a whiteboard in a public space).

Makes coding meetups a bit awkward at those places tho.

Yes, some companies still do this. In fact, the oneNO CARRIER

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