If you view every minute an interviewer is doing actual work as harmful to the world, then wasting said interviewers time would be even more of an ethical good would it not?
I know this wasn’t your point, but I’d like to call out the common assumption that interviewing isn’t “actual work”. It is. Recruiting, interviewing, mentoring, all of that is just as important as shipping code.
So you could frame that commenter's activity as providing interviewing practice to the company's employees...for free!
I don’t think that was the assumption here. They were saying that interviewing someone who doesn’t want the job isn’t actual (useful) work in the sense it can’t produce the goal (a good hire).
This also assumes that the interviewee has the "right" ethics. From their perspective, yes wasting time in an interview is ethically good to them.
But outsiders may agree with the interviewers ethics, and would see wasting their time as unethical.
This is a very interesting take on activism.
That only holds if you assume that "good" ethics must include being nice to everyone all the time.
The interviewer uses work time to interview, so they still get paid for their time. It wastes the company's resources, but not the interviewer's.
… and I’m sure all the programmers on dead end projects out there feel great too!
"Stern, if this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I'll be very unhappy."
Depends on your perspective. Making an unethical company less productive isn't necessarily unethical in itself.
Sometimes you just have to play the game of capitalism.