Hacker News Reader

Comment by bojo | Hacker News Reader

While it's nice to know these laws exist, what would you really do with it? The company proved it has a terrible culture. Doesn't seem worth it to fight for a job with them.

View on HN

Assuming sufficient evidence, one could have an employment attorney pursue the claim and let the attorney keep any damages awarded beyond their contingency fee. Negative stimuli may not improve the culture, but it may improve the discriminatory HR behavior. And even if the behavior isn’t improved, there is then a mostly immutable public record of said discriminatory behavior (which is arguably more valuable than whatever scuttlebutt is on Blind or similar platforms).

It might even be demonstrably securities fraud.

https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2022/06/22/can-sec...

This would be a deeply important change you'd provoke.

Much greater incentive to absolutely silent rejection. You know nothing you can't sue.

Possibly, in which case someone on the inside would have to be incentivized to be a whistleblower, either due to moral or financial considerations if silent rejections were covering up the illegal activity. With that said, people are lazy, they slip up or they become demoralized, disgruntled, and comfortable with spilling the beans. More so in a volatile macro with layoffs compressing more work amongst less staff.

TLDR Have your paper trail in order if you suspect illegal behavior, everything else is then logistics with counsel and/or regulators.

(not an attorney, not your attorney)

Whistheblowing is a red flag, and you can be sure this is a matter of public enough record for them to know

for the nyc one, you can claim remedy yourself in civil court.

walk them right into small claims for 25k

New tech job challenge: find 20 companies a year whose HR departments are populated by dirtbags, make Google money.

I like to think that it’s not always a direct individual outcome that helps. With enough soft complaints the regulator might write a reminder letter to the given HR dept which could go over relevant law and warn about repercussions of breaking it. And that might be enough to straighten out some practices.

This feels much too light to me. I'm not sure I can think of a worse thing to do to someone while interviewing them than discriminate against them based on a protected status, outside of proper criminal things.

Discrimination (including "unemployment discrimination") during interviewing should be an automatic, hefty fine, with a significant portion going to the target of the discrimination (assuming the claim is found to be valid). Just riffing, maybe set the fine to something like the equivalent of total yearly compensation package for the average employee in the position being sought. That would be penalty enough to encourage putting it right in the front of any training for anyone making offers, particularly HR.

If you have financial obligations, sometimes you have to take the job that's available.

"While it's nice to know these laws exist, what would you really do with it?"

This is exactly how I feel about tenant laws in the US. It's great they exist, but who's going to get a lawyer to stay somewhere they aren't wanted. All these laws that protect the vulnerable still require a lawyer to enforce them. Lawyers aren't accessible to most.

For what it's worth, Washington, DC, has an Office of the Tenant Advocate.

It does seem worth to sue them and get a settlement

Reply on news.ycombinator.com