Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisaycock | Hacker News Reader

One counterargument is that many employees in finance are required to disclose outside business activity. From FINRA's perspective, getting paid to do an interview would be covered since it is remuneration that could be a conflict of interest with the current employer.

I.e., the employee would have to let his employer know that he got paid to interview somewhere else! Failure to disclose would result in disciplinary action from regulators, possibly leading to a suspension from the industry.

View on HN

I thought the same thing. Even in a non-regulated industry, the moment you are paid, you're now consulting which can get tricky contract-wise.

Presumably it also means the "consultant" (interviewee) takes on liability?

Liability for what?

Showing up for the interview, participating in good faith, likely other employer-favouring bullshit.

And how do you actually show the interviewee failed to do any of those things?

I think the whole idea is idiotic, but this particular point doesn't seem like it would be the blocker. We already have employment contracts which state hours to be worked and similar mundane details, this wouldn't be any different. Such contract details would only be tested if someone tried to exploit a loophole, like showing up for a bunch of interviews to get money but with no intention of actually completing the tasks.

In a non-regulated industry you can just ignore it the same way most people ignore their noncompete clauses.

In a regulated industry you can argue it's not actually work, as your labor does not produce anything of value.

"....you can argue it's not actually work, as your labor does not produce anything of value"

I think if we follow that slippery slope, employers might as well not pay salaries if they felt you weren't terribly productive during a given pay period.

"you can just ignore it the same way most people ignore their noncompete clauses"

Again, I'd hate to find out that an employer has this attitude toward honoring contracts as you suggest workers do.

That is very clearly wage theft. Employee rights is not so clear cut, and when you really get down to it must be decided in favor of the employee. (Otherwise, e.g., an out of work engineer who can't take jobs due to a noncompete is put on unemployment, having the public socialize his previous employer's contract terms.)

"most people do x" -> "I do x"

Was just about to post this. While the day-to-day of my job is like at any tech company, because I work for a regulated employer, a company that says "We will pay you to interview for us" immediately makes me lose interest.

(Why don't I just decline the payment? Because nobody wants to pay me for one day of both answering and asking questions at the last step of the process, they want to pay me for a real actual coding task as part of initial screening. From the article: "Introducing a payment allowed us to ask for something challenging and lengthy, while also respecting the candidates’ time." If I'm not getting paid, I have no interest in spending that much time up front.)

It's really fascinating, great point.

I donate to a bunch of charities. I wonder if it would be ok to donate my payment to those charities on my behalf. I wouldn't get the tax credit I'm assuming but i would feel perfectly happy to stop that donation for the year. A downside for the company is that you could also see those donations broken out, which might indicate they were dealing with a lot of churn. :(

I do really like the idea of having a company pay for my time. It feels really important to ask them to take it seriously. I've been frustrated with various companies over the years who didn't have their hiring teams in order and it was a miserable experience.

Or you don't disclose anything, and the employer would have to find out and prove it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com