Hacker News Reader

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.

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).

So you could frame that commenter's activity as providing interviewing practice to the company's employees...for free!

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.