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Comment by onesociety2022 | Hacker News Reader

onesociety2022

I assume you work at some small startup where you get to dictate who you will hire based on your interpretation of what a candidate’s past work history tells you about their morals/ethics. But that shit won’t fly if you are interviewing at other large companies. You can’t reject someone just because they have OpenAI on their resume. In fact I have never heard of any FAANG company ever blacklisting candidates from some other company. So you rejecting someone is not going to move the needle much. They can leave OpenAI whenever they want and Zuck will offer them 8-9 figure pay packages :)

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Oh, you absolutely can; maybe not as a matter of formal policy, but if you are a hiring manager or a member of an interview team, you have wide latitude to have concerns about nearly anything (legal) about a candidate. And also, even if you don't use that explicitly, it can affect your judgement of them when discussing them to an interview committee.

lol absolutely none of these things will fly on an interview feedback in any big company

> even if you don't use that explicitly, it can affect your judgement of them when discussing them to an interview committee

my friend that's literally unethical.

Bad news, Voltaire didn't actually say that thing about 'defending your speech to the death.'

i'm not defending anyone's speech - i'm saying just because other people are assholes doesn't mean i should become one.

Expressing qualms about hiring somebody who has voluntarily demonstrated a lack of ethics isn't 'being an asshole'. In fact, it's usually a good business decision and always an ethically-sound one.

Here's a sample question, feel free to use:

"If somebody offered you money to build the brains for fully-autonomous killbots PLUS mass domestic surveillance of the civilian population, would you accept the offer?"

"Yes" => They are unethical => No-hire.

"No" => They did do that, and thus are a liar, and thus are unethical => No-hire.

> absolutely none of these things will fly on an interview feedback in any big company

Sure, you never write "no hire because they worked at Palantir". You write "candidate didn't ask clarifying questions about {X} and jumped to answer {Y} which is not what I expect from a candidate of this level, no hire".

....this assumes that anyone at all reads your detailed notes if you submit an initial rating of "no hire", and I have very little evidence from my interviewing career across multiple companies to believe that's the case..

yea totally - in response to someone else's unethical choices i myself will choose to be unethical? because two wrongs make a right? correct?

> this assumes that anyone at all reads your detailed notes if you submit an initial rating of "no hire"

the director of my org (inside of FAANG) reads all of our interview feedback if we make an offer.

My experience at FAANG is that if you get a "no hire" vote, then unless several other reviewers are "strong hire" the candidate doesn't even make it to a committee and is already rejected - and this was before 2022.

that's not what i said - i said "if we hire, then he reads".

And my point is that if you write "no hire" than the candidate doesn't proceed and thus no one generally reads the feedback.

If you want to blatantly lie and hide your true reason for rejecting them by making up other stuff in the debrief notes, that would be possible. But at that point, you are the unethical person. You can technically do the same thing just because you wanted to discriminate based on race, sex, etc (that would be both illegal as well as violation of corporate HR policies).

well I'm just glad to find out nobody has been discriminating based on race or sex since that would be unethical

are y'all really repeating over and over "they did it so i can do it too"?

This thread is simultaneously horrifying and hilarious at the same time.

Hilarious because onesociety2022 seems so earnest. Someone who is shocked at the idea that job search isn’t a pure meritocracy.

Horrifying because kuang_eleven points out just how easy it is to pass a qualified candidate if you want to.

The truth is somewhere in the middle…

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