Hacker News Reader

Comment by danjoredd | Hacker News Reader

This is what terrifies me about leaving. My current job almost called the place I was working at to verify my employment, but I requested them to wait until the interviews were over, because my last boss was the kind of guy to fire people arbitrarily.

Once he fired a guy for not working on his house...that employee was hired as help desk. Thankfully I passed all my interviews and they called him right after I was almost guaranteed to get the position. Took a few insults from the guy, but haven't heard anything from him since I left thankfully.

View on HN

What stops your boss from lying to the company: danjoredd? Never heard of this guy. Never worked here and if he did, he would have done a lousy job. Glad I could help!

The fact that it’s a slam dunk lawsuit for the plaintiff.

https://www.justia.com/employment/defamation/

Except you have to be willing to take someone to court over that.

Exactly, and you have to be willing to bear the time and expense of suing a corporation with more money and attorneys than you.

Every time someone has a casual "Well, you can just sue them" answer to being wronged, they forget that the court system (at least in the US) is inaccessible unless you're rich and richer than your opponent. If my employer does something wrong to me, like wage theft, fraud, harassment, discrimination, it doesn't matter that I can sue them in theory. In practice, it's me and my $5,000 in life savings vs. 100 corporate attorneys working at a $N billion company who will inundate you with paperwork and motions and procedural tricks. Not to mention, if you sue them, they will fire you in retaliation (which is also probably illegal) and may even go so far as informally blacklisting you in your industry. So you're giving up your time, your life savings, likely going into debt, and giving up your future employability, just to pit your one already over-worked attorney vs. their army. Good luck.

Thats why, even if I hate the company I work for, I always do my best to keep a good relationship with them. Thats not always possible of course, but having former coworkers being able to say good things about you helps take a lot of worry off my back.

The extent varies, but courts do see in a very bad light companies applying too many resources against people they clearly harmed. When those people are employees, the view gets worse.

That doesn't mean that suing is easy or cheap, but only that things are way more balanced than your comment makes it look like.

I'd at least speak to a lawyer to see how "easy" a case is.

One attorney may be all you need if the evidence is grossly in your favor. No point denying yourself the opportunity, especially if you can afford the consultation fees.

If its a difficult case, then a good lawyer will tell you ahead of time that they don't think they can win and that you probably shouldn't pursue the case. If its borderline, they'll probably accept the case but you gotta pay them.

If its ridiculously easy, they'll take the case for free on their dime / contingency (because they're so confident they're gonna win).

In slam dunk cases, either because you're being sued frivolously or suing someone for a well-documented violation of a clear-cut law, then the legal work can be cut down dramatically by filing a motion for summary judgment. If you're not relying on disputed material facts for your argument, i.e., "I'm being sued by my former employer for violating my non-compete clause. This is the non-compete clause. It is not enforceable because it violates California labor law", it' definitely the way to go.

>If you're not relying on disputed material facts for your argument

Vis a vi the original question,

"I never said that. Do you have a recording?"

I feel like the jury is more likely to believe the unwilling subpoenaed witness from HR from the company that turned you down who says: “we turned the candidate down, because when we checked their references, Bob at XYZ corp said that the candidate never worked at XYZ corp” over Bob (who has every motive and reason to lie).

Especially when you get the follow up questions, and find out HR left contemporaneous notes in their HRIS tool, which corroborate the story.

Remember that the standard for a civil suit is not “beyond a reasonable doubt”, but “more likely than not”. I really don’t think you’d need a recording to win that case.

Sure, but now that you're talking about a jury you're in court and you don't have a summary judgement.

Ah, yes, of course. I missed the point about handling the case on summary judgement.

> the court system (at least in the US) is inaccessible unless you're rich and richer than your opponent.

Employees with grievances sue companies all the time, because it works for them.

Companies may have lots of money, but that doesn't mean they want to burn it. They'll often settle even frivolous lawsuits because it is cheaper than litigating.

Except, you don't sue the individual. You sue the company since the individual was acting as a representative of the company. The company has much deeper pockets than the individual.

On "slam dunk" cases, some lawyers will work for small retainer and large cut of settlement. You no longer have to spend time chasing. You just supply lawyer with info when requested.

You just have to make someone believe you’d be willing to take it to court. In reality, very few civil disputes make it to a court room.

In a case like this, your lawyer would send their lawyer a letter, their lawyer would tell them they’re going to lose, and you’d negotiate a settlement.

Gotta prove it and go through the not-so-easy process of suing someone in the US.

It's really, really easy to sue somebody in the US. Even easier when you have an attorney who will take something like that to court on contingency since it's such an easy payout.

Maybe so. But I think a lot of people feel like me in that they find the entire process daunting. I’ve got young kids, a full-time job, I’m pretty much slammed all the time. Just the theoretical idea of adding “lawsuit” to my to-do list is already exhausting.

Fortunately enough people have sued where the official policy of any company larger than like, 1 employee, is to confirm dates of employment and say nothing else.

>But I think a lot of people feel like me in that they find the entire process daunting.

Consider that is exactly what bigCorp wants to you to feel. With that in mind, your feeling of daunt is doing exactly what the bigCorp? So do something for yourself and not in bigCorp's favor, and get over it and do what's right.

Not sure why you’re coming at me for expressing apprehension. Ease off the throttle, please.

If you read that as an attack, then I apologize as I worded it poorly. On a re-read, yes, it could have been worded better. Meant to been more of encouragement as "just swallow the fear and get over it" vs "don't be a wuss and just get over it."

All good, definitely felt like the latter and I’m glad to see it was just miscommunication.

Trust me I do what I can where I can!

> It's really, really easy to sue somebody in the US.

Small claims, yes. District court and above, not always. Winning the case? Even harder. Trying to a get any lawyer on contingency against deeper pockets is not practical 99% of the time.

You have it turned around. If you get sued by a major corporation, you’re fucked. They can outspend you and even if you win, it’s a Pyrrhic victory.

Suing a major corp with cause though? They’re going to spend $10,000 just to respond. If you have any basis for your suit whatsoever, they’re going to settle. See: almost every patent lawsuit. A corporation’s in-house counsel is there to avoid getting sued. Once you sue them, they need to get outside counsel involved and the costs mount very, very quickly. It’s just not worth it.

> You have it turned around.

I would talk to a lawyer before assuming this kind of thing. In my experience (having tried), I do not.

> Once you sue them, they need to get outside counsel involved and the costs mount very, very quickly.

The retainers are already paid for or insurance covers that. The sentiments (eg inefficacy of David vs Goliath) are built up over common experiences, not simple misunderstandings of how a case is likely to proceed.

Lawyers will only sign on to a contingency deal against a big pocketed entity (government or large corp)

Perhaps one of the upsides to working for big companies. It's probably not going to be your boss they call, it'll be the HR department. And they probably won't say anything more than "yes, this person worked here." Both because they don't know you, and because the legal department has carefully educated them on what they can and cannot say.

I had other forms of proof that I worked there like paystubs. He could have lied, but it would not have worked. Now my performance? He could def lie about that. Thankfully my other past jobs could verify my hard work because I left with good relations, so if he lied it would have been an outlier.

Reputation is important! It can be the difference between one company having complete control over your future, and being able to choose to do what you want.

If he did lie about your performance, and if there were not documented examples of your performance to back up every single thing he said, that would also be grounds for an easy lawsuit. Tortious interference with employment. That's why most companies ask (beg) executives not to give any type of employment reference. They have a department or outside company who handles that by giving factual information only. Employed, yes or no, and dates. That's it. Even if you think you are giving a positive or "balanced" reference, something you say could spook the potential employer, and you could be sued for it.

I work around people who are reluctant to give an honest appraisal because of the fear of legal repercussions by asking:

"Would you hire this person again?" We get a 99% answer rate on that question.

To be honest, I'm surprised that question works. It's close enough to a real opinion that eventually someone will lose a defamation case on it and then legal will tell HR to stop answering it.

It's a simple statement of fact, so it's pretty safe in most cases. Employment dates and "would we rehire" (simple yes/no, not getting into any reasons why) have always been the only questions we answer.

In that case, you could just say "So-and-so worked here since X date, and they were fired on Y date" and answer the real question. The value to "would you re-hire" is that it is vague, there could be other perfectly good justifications than "they were fired." But now we see people using the latter question as a 1-for-1 replacement for the former. So I expect eventually HR will decide it's too risky to let a civil jury decide if wink-wink is good enough.

‘Would we’ is subjective too. Different hiring managers would give different answers.

The actual answer HR will give you, the magic words are ‘are they eligible for rehire’.

Yes, that's correct. HR, not managers, provide these answers. The answer to the rehire question is not an opinion, and it's not subjective. It's a checkbox on the personnel record. It doesn't mean they were fired, either. The reason for or nature of their termination would not be discussed.

> I work around people who are reluctant to give an honest appraisal because of the fear of legal repercussions by asking: "Would you hire this person again?" We get a 99% answer rate on that question.

"Trick managers into exposing the company to lawsuits with this one sentence! In-house counsel HATES it!"

In seriousness, answering this question with "no" would quite likely still constitute tortious interference.

One previous employer said (to the reference/background checker) "our corporate policy is to never rehire anyone, no matter what". This quote was typed into the background check.

Another said "all our records are in a storage shed in another state, so we have no records of anybody". This stopped the background check dead. Until I called that employer "but I still have money in the 401k system!" HR_drone says "why yes you certainly do, have them call me back". The results of which also appeared typed into the background check results.

Why would he need to lie? Couldn't he just tell the caller to stop wasting his time and hang up?

This is effed up. In my book, the company that you're interviewing with should never call your current employer. Call my ex-employers and references I provide all you want. But if you call my current employer, I will not work for you and I will deny ever having spoken to said other company if my boss asked me. It'd be a surefire way to make me stay at my current company (and keep interviewing in other places, because I probably do want to leave).

Heck I don't even update my LinkedIn until a year or more after I move companies. I do update it way before I might want to jump ship again, just like the "Looking for work" flag. My current employer's HR department will get no direct signal that I'm actually looking if I can avoid it. I'd go as far as not using LinkedIn functionality to apply to something. For all I know LinkedIn provides a paid for service to my current employer that notifies them, that I'm interviewing.

That's why I don't even use LinkedIn at all.

Can't they just look at your company's Github and see you belong to their org + your commits to their repos?

Doesn't apply to most companies

Reply on news.ycombinator.com