The nameless "they" and the Facebook / job interview trend that isn't a trend | Hacker News Reader

The nameless "they" and the Facebook / job interview trend that isn't a trend

petdance.com

109 pointspetdance42 comments

Walking out may feel good, as righteous indignation so often does, but it doesn’t help your situation. You give up any chance you had of getting the job. Lying is easily disproven, and. worst of all, requires you to lie. The best answer is to calmly and respectfully say “I believe it’s best for business to keep business and personal life separate. That’s why I keep my private life private.” You may not get the job, but at least you’ll have been turned down while keeping a strong sense of ethics about you… which is more than you can say for companies that would ask to snoop in your private life.

I guess this is the best course of action for most people. But us in the tech industry are in the perfect, and perfectly privileged, position to nip this right in the bud by walking out and explaining our rationale, if only because we can easily get another interview at a company which won't engage in this idiocy.

No reason to allow it to become widespread in the first place.

Choice #3:

Offer to log in for them and let them look around. Say, "After all, you wouldn't give me your password if I asked, would you?" You might even get bonus points if you have "Login Approvals" enabled (the six digit code sent by text message).

The point is that they have no business seeing it in the first place, not so much that they have your password (which is just the icing on the crap cake)

Not sure one could miss the point anymore than this.

The problem that I have is the climate of profound mistrust it creates.

Even if I refused and were offered the job anyway because of my excellent convictions, I wouldn't want to take it, because the culture is one that defaults to extreme mistrust. That's the same reason I did walk out of a job interview requiring a drug screen even though I don't do any drugs.

If I've got a drug or booze or facebook or gambling problem, it will impact my work in a visible way. If it doesn't impact my work in a visible way, then it isn't a problem, is it?

I agree and would take it even further to say that drawing a line in the sand based on personal convictions is almost always a good choice.

> Walking out may feel good, as righteous indignation so often does, but it doesn’t help your situation

I think that walking out of these situations is not so much a sign of giving in to righteous indignation but more of a way to abort a situation that has already become unsalvageable. In this case, the prospective employer making demands like these is in itself a glaring signal that you don't want to work at this place. Continuing to sit at their table after voicing your disagreement in the absolutely ridiculous "hope" of getting a job offer is not only a waste of time for both sides, it's a surefire way to be humiliated. Might as well leave while you still have the high ground.

Back in the day when I was occasionally interviewing people for positions I came across utterly incompatible applicants quite often, and sometimes those interviews were extremely uncomfortable for both parties. Actually, I wished more people walked out of my interviews when I myself could not.

Tell them they have failed the interview process and should not contact you again for a second attempt should the position to employ you come round again.

And then walk out.

The author's skepticism is pretty reasonable, but I feel that he misses an important part of the story. Here's the closest he gets to it:

"Is it plausible that this practice is widespread, and getting moreso? Sure, it’s plausible. Our privacy erodes every day, and millions of us do it through Facebook willingly. The story has the feel of truthiness. Doesn’t it just seem like the thing that Big Business would do to us? We already piss in cups to prove that we’re drug-free so that we can come in and shuffle paper."

I think that the reason that the Facebook issue blew up so well is that it touches on two major fears that people have, at least one of which is entirely reasonable. It's the fear that corporations control everything and aren't accountable to the law. As far as I'm concerned, that's a reasonable and well-founded fear. I grant the author's point that the issue at hand may be over-hyped, but I think that the fact that people are so worried that it's easy to press that particular button, should definitely tell us something about how much inappropriate power corporations have, and how little accountability.

I'd say that its not a constant fear to most people, it is more of a aggravation or annoyance. In my experience most people don't share too many personal details online even with their closest friend network.

I do have one question, why does the author use BOLD text in the article in such a haphazard manner?

> I do have one question, why does the author use BOLD text in the article in such a haphazard manner?

You could post a comment on the blog and ask. I'd have answered.

I bold the text for the key points that I want people to take away. I suspect that most people skim articles longer than a few paragraphs anyway, so I want to help them to the key points.

Some of the comments I'm seeing about the article only reinforce my conclusion that many readers never read beyond the headline or first paragraph.

I was at a local event last night that was ostensibly a panel discusion regarding campaign finance reform. The primary speaker was Senator Blumenthal (CT). In his intro he made it a point to indicate that he was going to support legislation that would make it illegal for employers to ask for access to applicants social networking accounts.

I mention this simply to illustrate how these 'trends' can easily be picked up by Washington politicians and turned into national issues. Blumenthal is actually quite famous/notorious (your choice) for latching on to 'trends' and milking them for as much publicity as he can.

In this case, Blumenthal is latching on to the right thing.

As much as I dislike Facebook, I think it's appaling that you are required to give up keys to employers. One step away from feudalism, where you have to prostrate yourself before your liege.

I agree it is inappropriate. I also think that it is self defeating. People won't want to work for these companies. There needs to be a lot more evidence of a systemic problem before I would advocate federal legislation for this sort of thing. Even with clear evidence of an actual problem, it sounds to me like something that states would be capable of addressing.

The desire to address every problem at the federal level is itself a problem.

I feel this same way about "brogrammers", do they even exist? I've never met one, and I'm a pretty social guy. I'm sure there are some douchy guys who happen to be programmers, but are there enough to even call it a trend? Or is it just this mythical "they" who we love to poke fun at and make nonsensical statements like "We can't serve alcohol at tech events because it will attract brogrammers."

I've never met one as well, and it always struck me as odd that a really good programmer could also be a brogrammer. Becoming a good programmer requires incredible patience, reasoning, self-learning, and solitude (among others). Those qualities seem to undermine the image of a brogrammer.

I work with several who are at a separate office from the one I work at. They're a royal pain in the ass because, for all their questionable engineering decisions (a system that crashes - stack-trace to the server console - because of a single bad field in the database), they are remarkably politically astute. Much of our leadership thinks that brogrammers are what top-notch software developers are like, which makes their brogrammer mentality all the more irritating.

I've never heard of these "brogrammers". Perhaps I'm not reading the right blogs so as to be whipped into a proper frenzy.

The "Business Week" story about brogrammers which sparked a lot of the recent conversation talks about brogrammers programming with one hand while doing pushups with the other.

That's just laughable.

This article is calling bullshit on the trend story of interviewers asking for Facebook creds. HN has credulously bandied this story about for the last week; here, it seems only to have retained the last graf of the story.

So: have any of you actually been asked for Facebook creds in an interview?

Exactly, why not out the companies who ask for this, preferably on Facebook. Then anyone who still wants to work for these companies can be prepared, or have a fake profile ready to go.

I tried going down the road of finding specifics that could be verified. Here's one claim:

"There are several companies that are now revising their HR policies so that providing your FB password on a steady basis is a requirement of your continuing employment. You've already been employed 5-10 years? Provide it now, or be fired tomorrow."

http://politicartoons.livejournal.com/3026559.html?thread=70...

The poster rattled off some company names, but when I pressed for specifics, like how she knew these things, she claimed that I was "in the pay of a corporation as part of a 'hit squad'."

HN discussion of this (non) story from a couple weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3747699

I'd love to see some actual data on this. But it just doesn't seem important enough or big enough to go out and collect it.

Don't you think people might not be collecting that data because it is nearly impossible to collect? What would people do? Look through newspaper classifieds, see whos hiring, call each company and ask if they look at facebook profiles and force people to give them their login? How many companies would admit to doing this over the phone? See where I'm going with this?

This is one example of statistical sloppiness in reporting, comprising: (a) sloppiness about the quantity or proportion being asserted (e.g. "many" rather than "at least 4000" or "10%" or "24"), and (b) sloppiness about the confidence interval.

I'd love to see a sidebar to articles asserting trends providing both a clear quantity estimate and the confidence interval around it. I'd even settle, in early articles on a supposed trend, for something like "We're asserting that this has happened more than N times." where N might be as small as 0.

I'm aware that my proposed standard could even be applied to this comment:), so I'm simply asserting that this sloppiness exists. Here's one exemplary takedown: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2010/03/27/did-the-...

I think the worst slop is that when faced with lack of hard data, the writers fall back on "more".

"More companies are asking job applicants for their social media passwords." More than what?

I put my facebook account on hold awhile back; but if I decide to reactivate it and if I'm ever job hunting again during that time, I'll probably either just make a fake facebook account or I'll have two separate accounts: one for inappropriate shenanigans/goofing off with friends... and another for serious business, completely devoid of anything that could possibly be deemed inappropriate.

Although, I kind of doubt it would ever get to that point as I prefer to be my own boss, but I'm curious as to what those of you on HN might have to say about this hack(;))/idea. I'm sure it isn't new.

I think the point is that people shouldn't have to do this. Making multiple facebook accounts to fool the moronic employer who thinks they need to look at your facebook account is just a string of fail where no one benefits at all.

Very good point. Sadly more people don't have the same outlook, so this invasion of privacy will probably continue for as long as it's allowed. I think talking about it like we're doing now is the best thing we can do - bring awareness to the issue. We'll reach a point where employers no longer snoop into our personal business (at least not so blatantly) when the vast majority say, "Nope, sorry."

I guess as new technologies develop that allow easier access to more and more information about our personal lives, it will take some time for the privacy issues and standards to smooth out.

This sounds like a very sober analysis of "the mob" and the inane-stream media whipping up a phony crisis.

While there is some overreaction, it has been documented that teachers and corrections officers have been asked to provide access to their Facebook account as a condition of employment.

No big deal, right? Well, I'd argue that it is --- I know at least a dozen teachers and a few policemen. If those acquaintances are my "friends", the person doing the background snooping will have access to things relating to me that I was intending to share only with friends.

> the inane-stream media whipping up a phony crisis.

But it's our own fault. There was one little AP story, and it got pushed everywhere, and what did we do? We clicked the link, and then we said "OMG LOOK AT THIS I HAVE TO POST THIS TO FACEBOOK" and the people with the websites said "ooh, look at those clicks."

The only reason this was whipped into a crisis is that we allowed it to be.

It's 2012, and we are the media.

His entire point is that this "doesn't happen". The VERY first commenter points out many instances where it does happen and the author makes up reasons for why those aren't relevant.

This feels like someone wanted to make an argument and instead of collecting supporting evidence, just made some stuff up and then got sour when someone proved them wrong. He also used "mute point" instead of "moot point", which, while I never wanna be the grammar nazi, is pretty lol. Why do articles like this get upvotes?

Corrections & police undergo more severe scrutiny, and therefore are not relevant data points. This is in the original article, and was not "made up".

The mute/moot mistake was made by a poster, not the author.

If only this was only about FB interviews. This is global. Even for whatever tech thing. Today it's trendy to trash, say, Firefox. Or to use XX library. Or to talk about feat. XX in SSH (the one that's been there for 10 years in the man page and isn't new, sensational or obscure at all, y'a know?).

It makes juicy headlines. And you know what? People fall for it. Smart engineers? Many, most? they fall for it too.

My take is that it's collateral damage from the Internet. The way people become information addict and can get so much of it. They like the juicy titles. They don't like to think. They enjoy the easiness of just following what remotely make sense (even if it actually makes no sense to the critical reader!).

They, you say? The "they" I'm using here is different from the burger story. By "they" I actually mean nearly everyone, me included. It's something difficult to fight against.

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I find it necessary to point something out: lack of evidence doesn't necessarily mean that something isn't a trend. For all we know, asking for a Facebook password could be the hottest trend that everyone is doing, but we'd probably never know about it because no one is collecting any data on the subject. The opposite argument could be made as well.

In other words, if someone is making an argument without any evidence, they're basically saying they know something when they really don't. On the other hand, you have to be careful not to fall into the opposite trap: claiming that they're wrong, when you have no more evidence to prove that than they do.

Spot on. Would it be accurate to refer to this as a case of mass hysteria or moral panic?

What's the harm? Even if it's a mass hysteria (a bit of a hyperbole), it's certainly not one of those destructive ones (TSA et al.). At worst people wrote some overly dramatic stuff on social media and wasted a small amount of our time here, at best it raised the alarms pre-emptively and (hopefully) prevented any company having such thoughts from doing so by raising social awareness.

Same harm as any other spewing of unlikely but plausible stories.

Same harm as repeating the story about not flashing your brights at another car lest they come kill you. Just wasted time and overly dramatic.

Same harm in telling about how Rod Stewart had to have his stomach pumped because there was a gallon of semen in it. Just wasted time and overly dramatic.

Same harm in parroting a story you heard about some virus that will make your computer blow up. Just wasted time and overly dramatic.

There's no direct harm, but we're gullible enough as a society already. Living in a Headline Nation is teaching us that we don't need to think for ourselves. When the only facts we have about a story is that "they" are doing something bad, then we'll believe most anything.

Interviewer: O.K., now we need your Facebook password so we can verify you're a good fit for this position.

Interviewee: I'm uncomfortable with that. How about you all give me your Facebook passwords first?

The problem with that approach is that its combative, which does you no good. That's why I suggest the following, from the article:

> The best answer is to calmly and respectfully say “I believe it’s best for business to keep business and personal life separate. That’s why I keep my private life private.”

Well given the way that many US companies seem to have got drug testing for jobs that do not in a million years need it by stealth - maybe kicking up a fuss early makes sense.

Whatever this article says I'm pretty sure it proves whatever it is I already think.

Don't be silly, you can never fit that many giraffes into a Buick.

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