Weird Paperwork Asked for Hire | Hacker News Reader

Weird Paperwork Asked for Hire

7 pointsbumpyliquor14 comments

I'm to start with a new company in EU and they asked for high school diploma amongst other paperwork.

The position is Senior SW Dev so this seems pretty ridiculous to me. Question is whether this is a red flag for the place altogether. I keep thinking what kind of place asks a senior dev for such a paper? This feels like a no substance place where senseless bureaucracy is running a tech org. Not a good sign...

What do you think?

PS: throw away acct

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I think it’s funny that they think adults are still in possession of such documents. But it sounds like a red flag. Here’s the test: just tell them no, you’re not going to provide that. The response will decide for you whether you should work there. (In other words, if they say it’s really a requirement, and you can’t work here without producing the document, then walk. If they say, haha, we don’t really need it, well OK.)

I fully agree that asking about it is step one. But if they say it is required, just deal with it. Not being willing to jump through a couple hoops of red tape to get onboarded to a job is a red flag on the candidate. It may be silly/stupid, but bureaucracy is real. Is it really so much work to call your school, ask for a copy, and send it along that you would decline a job over it?

The submitter was concerned that the requirement was telling him something about the company, and, presumably, wondering if it means he’d be happier not working there. I proposed a test to help him/her answer that question. To turn your (reasonable) question around: is the HS diploma really so important that a company would pass up the chance to hire me if I declined to jump through the hoops to provide it? Are my individual qualities really that unimportant to them? Do they see me as an interchangeable cog in their machine? One reason we are beset by so many layers of irrational bureaucracy is our obedience to it.

I did not suggest asking. I suggested telling them “no”.

> Is it really so much work to call your school, ask for a copy, and send it along

Depending on the country of residence, it really can be a lot of work. For example, I live in one such country where frequent demands for arcane documents coexist with high levels of negligence and shoddiness in preparing those documents. A document of a local routine event that happened 25 years ago can be very difficult to obtain here.

I hope most recruiters who are ready to recruit across borders are not making reductionist assumptions about other bureaucracies.

I think it’s common. A large and well managed company usually doesn’t want to pay someone a lot more than someone else without any reason, so they have internal rules.

For example they will pay more someone with a master degree than someone with a bachelor degree. And they want proofs of your degrees because sometimes people lie.

The rules may be stupid and you may think they are unnecessary, but it’s not a red flag IMHO.

> For example they will pay more someone with a master degree than someone with a bachelor degree.

This is ridiculous! There are lots of examples in the tech world where people with less education have performed very well than those with higher degrees. I have worked with few of them who went on to create a very profitable new revenue stream in gaming for a very well-known company.

Higher degree != better candidate.

It was an example and you can indeed find a few exceptions.

I'm not familiar with [location redacted], but in Poland you need to prove your work history and education to calculate how much time off you get (e.g. if you have a degree and 2 years of work history, you get 26 days of PTO a year, otherwise you get 20 days).

It seems like such a minor thing that you could get it clarified by calling them instead of posting on HN.

I want to work in Poland now

I think you're correct re the signalling. Any org with this on the books is going to be rife with bureaucracy. For better or worse you'll have to decide how much you care.

I was asked, not only for all my paper work from school to university, but also human reference from each school and university with whom they could talk :) And this was by one of the world leaders in the tech field. And then they spent the next one month doing background check using an "agency".

This is getting worse and worse. I have been asked my full SSN, passport number, graduate and postgraduate diplomas and the funniest of them all - COVID vaccination card, for a remote job. lol.

8 times out of 10, saying no to these ridiculous demands gets accepted. But I have had cases where the recruiter would simply say they cannot proceed without getting everything they asked for.

I think it depends on your situation. Do you really need that job? If you're confident of finding another job, then it would make sense to tell them to get lost. I used to give them everything they asked for, I don't do that anymore. These shitty behavior can only be stopped if more people say no. What are they gonna do with a 20-25 year old high school diploma? Makes no sense, it is just some kind of power trip...

Well said. There is power in saying “no”, and it seems sometimes that we’ve forgotten that that’s an option. We are constantly on the receiving end of demands by entities that assume they have the authority to expect a cooperative response: “What is your race? What is your SS number? What are your pronouns? What is your phone number? Rate us on a scale of 1 to 5.” In most cases, “no” is the most polite response that you should consider supplying.

I know that this response, the only dignified response, is unusual, and that troubles me. I know because of the reaction I receive when the cashier at the supermarket asks me for my zip code and I refuse to supply it, for just one out of many examples.

I applied to a mega company on their careers website. In the first 24 hours, I got request for two surveys about their “hiring process”. The process hasn’t even started yet, other than the automated confirmation email that they got my application.

Another recruiter asked for my address (I had already given them my zip) to “send laptop”. I asked them why they need it before even the interview, they had no answer.

And on and on and on. If this is how people getting six figures in a hot industry get treated, how about the unfortunate people working for much less?

Humanity can be very depressing sometimes

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