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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

> Making this "illegal" does not solve the problem at all.

Sure it does. You send an email politely reminding them they need to write out a basic reason, and then you get the reason. If they're crazy stubborn and absolutely refuse, small claims court is probably next.

I'm pretty skeptical about the idea of making this a law, but a law could solve the problem.

> I assume you'd also make it illegal for a person to turn down a company without a reason, right?

There's a huge power imbalance here, but okay sure why not? Not many people are turning down job offers after interviewing, but if they do they can spend two minutes writing why.

> How about we make that 6 months in prison.

This strawman is a good way to indicate you didn't spend a single second thinking through the actual implications.

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> I'm pretty skeptical about the idea of making this a law, but a law could solve the problem.

We need more labor laws in general, but this one should be more of a good ol' fashioned social shaming situation. make it painful to try and outright ignore people you started talking to.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this, actually. If this silly idea became law, companies would find some lawyer-approved boilerplate that would satisfy the silly law and accomplish nothing. Nothing would change. I guess you would say the candidate could sue because the company didn't provide warm fuzzy custom-tailored apologies about why they didn't fall in love? Or a specific "reason"? Is a judge going to adjudicate that "reason"?

It's not a strawman. It's either jail time or a fine, right? Have you thought about the implications?

Listing six months in jail and acting like full punishment would have to be the first resort is a clear strawman.

Fines are all we need. But even if we ignored fines entirely, one day of jail would be plenty.

Your original comment makes it sound like there's no reasonable way to enforce the law. There is. You send reminders and warnings and escalate to a fine after a certain point.

Also I think you could figure out a big list of boilerplate answers and make everyone roughly satisfied.

But come on, surely there exist laws where reasons have to be given and they're not corrupted into doing nothing.

Again, what is the benefit exactly? Avoiding hurt feelings? Are people's skins that thin?

You cannot enforce this one way and not the other. Interviewing and hiring and managing a company takes a lot of time. What if a candidate "ghosts" me? Can I sue him for hurting my feelings?

I seriously have to think this is a parody or joke. Nobody with a real job can think this way haha.

> Again, what is the benefit exactly? Avoiding hurt feelings? Are people's skins that thin?

Knowing what you did wrong.

Wouldn't a reason for rejection potentially increase hurt feelings, and that's why there's so much ghosting? I don't understand this objection, I thought I was the one annoyed at thin skins in the interview scenario.

> What if a candidate "ghosts" me? Can I sue him for hurting my feelings?

The reason you think this is a parody or joke is because you keep jumping to ridiculous scenarios that have nothing to do with the actual request. The actual request is to spend one or two minutes on an email, which is barely anything compared to the entire interview you already did with them.

If this rule applied, they would just have to say why they ghosted you. That's it.

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