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Comment by sekasi | Hacker News Reader

I work in Australia, not in the US. I don't know the intrinsic legal differences here, but I do know a few things about my local market.

I feel really strongly about trying to help people improve, and it's really challenging to do that if you can't bring up the reasons for rejection. If you're being dicky about it "You're not good enough in memory management", that instantly makes people defensive.

If you're trying to help them forward and give them useful tips for improving their portfolio and skillset, the conversation is almost exclusively positive and 9/10 times I get a thank you very much in the end.

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>If you're trying to help them forward and give them useful tips for improving their portfolio and skillset, the conversation is almost exclusively positive and 9/10 times I get a thank you very much in the end.

No doubt, and I know a lot of US recruiters wish very strongly that they could have these kind of interactions with potential hires.

However, the difficulty of friendly, open interviewer-interviewee discussions like this is one of those unintentional side effects of otherwise well-intentioned anti-discrimination laws. It's a good example of why trying to legislate a problem away can sometimes make other problems pop up in its place.

It's a better example of people rationalizing away humanity under the guise of "preventing liability" regarding things that, in practice, will never happen.

Bill S. Preston told you everything you need to know. People are not out to get you. Acting as if they are is toxic and inhumane.

A person is not out to get you. People collectively are. That is, that one person who sues you out of a literal thousand candidates will on their own still create enough of a stink that you'll do what you can to never have it happen again. There's no way to avoid this and retain the capability for lawsuits to cause actual damage, either. You can't have it all every way which around.

If you prioritize, or allow to be prioritized for you, the health of a fictitious entity such as a corporation over the nine hundred and ninety nine people who just want to know how to be better equipped to get a job so they can survive, I don't really think your fictitious entity deserves its survival.

Do what's right, not what's safe.

There is nothing fictitious about the capital, and means of making a living, lost from a lawsuit that a corporation loses. Legal abstractions like corporations represent people's property.

>regarding things that, in practice, will never happen.

It can and does happen. People sue over hiring decisions all the time.

It's unfortunate, but the way I figure, if you try to make laws that dictate morality (a la anti-discrimination laws), people are less likely to have and follow their own moral code in that area. "Why do I need to decide what's right or reasonable when the law does it for me?"

Also, most people are nice, but the small minority of people who are assholes can cause huge damage, amplified by the legal system. It's those people whom lawyers are (reasonably) worried about.

> It can and does happen. People sue over hiring decisions all the time.

It happens often enough that the conventional wisdom (and "conventional" generally means "wrong", so excuse my skepticism) is that people sue all the time, and so liability-paranoid corporate entities concoct policies that institutionalize fear of the people who could go work for them. To go along with the fear of the people who do work for them.

But I have yet to see data that suggests that it's on the top thousand things any corporation big enough to hire people should worry about.

> It's those people whom lawyers are (reasonably) worried about.

Fight them. I have long ago decided that I will quit if my job interferes with doing right by people.

It hasn't happened yet, but I'm careful about my employer.

This is why a general assessment should be separate from hiring.

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