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Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

It's probably a bit extreme to say he's "bitching".

This sort of thing is quite useful to those of us who have an involvement in hiring, but don't have a lot of experience.

I've been involved in hiring a couple of people, though the process I go through usually involves:

a) Read a code sample, if available. b) Face-to-face interview (telephone if face-to-face is difficult). c) Hire/No-Hire

The interview usually involves talking about our company and the interviewee talking about their previous experience. The hiring decision is usually based on "I like the feel of this guy", with some weighing up of their skill set, the job role, and also how interested they would be in working for us.

I've found this works for the company I work for. We don't hire large numbers of people, so I don't think this approach could scale - as an example, the largest block of CVs for a position that I've seen is about 10. I don't know how it would work if we got 100 CVs.

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He's saying negative things about former employees. So much for symmetry. Interesting that employees cannot prudently make negative remarks about former employers even in general terms, but employers can make negative remarks about former employees. If a negative remark would lead a prospective employer to wonder if a candidate would eventually say the same things about him, why wouldn't a prospective employee think that a prospective employer who made remarks about bad hires would not eventually say the same things about him?

I think it depends when and where you discuss a negative experience. Sure, not a good idea in an interview.

But what about doing a personal reflection, say a blog post or something on your own time about the observations and lessons learned with regards to things like culture or development philosophy directly related to that company? As long as you do it in a way that doesn't break any non-disclosure agreements why should you be punished for it and do you really want to work for someone who would look negatively on you for expressing what you have learned from a bad experience? Even more important - perhaps the employer doen't know how bad the culture is inside or worse they do know and rely on you not ever saying anything to continue recruiting others similar to you?

Then, during the interview you can find a way to bring a summary of the negative experience into the conversation without it looking like you want to trash or burn your former employer or manager. There are many opportunities for this, a common question one gets asked is to describe what you have learned from mistakes on the job. This is open and general and one could easily work programming specific or soft skill lessons learned into the discussion that do not paint your former employer in a positive light. And if your former employer has not earned the right to a positive reference you should not be required to give it to them just because you want to continue working.

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